1. Introduction: A Forgotten Regional Moment

The conventional narrative about the political, legal and diplomatic path leading from the First World War to the Palestine Mandate is often told from the hindsight of ensuing and ongoing national conflicts in the region. According to that narrative, during the war Britain made conflicting assurances regarding the region's future and thus created expectations for independence that informed the violent conflicts that followed. In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence (14 July 1915 to 30 January 1916) it promised an independent Arab state to be established in the vast area that consists of today's Syria, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement (16 May 1916) it pledged to divide the influence over this same vast area with France. In the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917) it promised to facilitate a Jewish home in Palestine, a territory which at the time was understood to consist of an important part of the same vast area. The Palestine Mandate legalised the latter commitment but, while the British Empire was torn between commitments to the national aspirations of both groups, it actually frustrated both, creating opportunities for the escalation of a violent conflict right up to its decision to end the Mandate in 1947, and well into the new regional geopolitics of independent sovereign states characterised by wars and displacement.Footnote ³

This legacy of the politics of empire, according to the narrative, is responsible for the poor geopolitical state of the region that we recognise today.Footnote ⁴ The Middle East is widely seen as the paradigmatic example of the failure of regional cooperation and integration. While other regions have developed institutional tools for the enhancement of economic and security coordination, the Middle East is dangerously lagging behind.Footnote ⁵ Middle Eastern states, with their troubled history of colonial meddling, have been until now deeply engulfed in crises of political legitimacy, and can hardly be expected to respond effectively to ‘new regional threats’.Footnote ⁶

In this article I claim that this historical narrative is too captivated by the bleak and pressing realities of post-mandatory Middle East conflicts and instabilities. In the period that led to the establishment of the mandate system, while different actors negotiated their visions for a new world order, the Middle East was understood to be a very different territorial and political entity from how we understand it today. In fact, the regional structure that we are so used to, consisting of independent states, jurisdictionally divided, each with its own government, laws and institutions, was not even a remote fantasy in the minds of the officials, politicians and commentators who, between 1915 and 1922, were deeply engaged in negotiating such ideas as world peace, Arab independence, British–French influence, or a Jewish national home. What is for us a basic descriptive and explanatory structure for understanding the Middle East's past, its worrying present and its future possibilities – that it is made out of sovereign jurisdictions – was for them not even an abstract aspiration. What then for these actors were the concrete spatial structures by which they imagined and negotiated a new world order in this area?

To be sure, the epistemological context for answering this question is that of empire.Footnote ⁷ At that point in time, all the actors that had anything to do with negotiating the future of the region were necessarily talking in the language of imperial rule. Whether they were Arab leaders and former functionaries in the Ottoman Empire or nationalist revolutionaries and subjects of that empire, whether they were Zionist leaders discussing the prospects of a Jewish national home with British officials over large maps in a London office, and of course if they were British policy makers and administrators directly dealing with the management of imperial desiderata or international diplomats attempting to constrain imperial power – everybody understood the language of empire, and had to converse in it in order to be intelligible.

However, ‘states’ and national ‘jurisdictions’ beyond the confines of (mainly western) Europe were not a part of the language of empire. Outside Europe imperial agents saw vast areas, domains and dominions, colonies and protectorates, and geographical spheres of influence. They saw territories and populations, not independent jurisdictions and not even nations. Surely, this will soon change, but at the period we are considering, when a 400-year-old empire was shaken to the ground, and the victorious powers were to plan what will come in its place, it was large and penetrable geographical areas that they envisioned, and certainly not sovereign territorial states. All new ideas that they had to confront, the principle of self-determination of nations, the idea of no annexation, and the prospect of world peace had to be considered within this broad and open spatial framework.

This study is an attempt to track the details of a proactive and powerful regional image, trespassing state and sovereign boundaries, that was very much alive in the minds of the different actors involved in legally ordering the post-war world. It uses legal and diplomatic texts to uncover a regional moment of international law in the Middle East, a moment in which ‘the region’ was not yet divided into separate jurisdictions behaving according to the prediction of a realist theory of international law.Footnote ⁸ Instead, it was being constructed by the expression of different layers of landscapes, ‘mental maps’Footnote ⁹ of possibilities for the reconstruction of vast, non-territorial areas.

In the following pages I re-read a set of well-known and well-studied documents that influenced the diplomatic and legal politics on the road to the Palestine Mandate – using them as textual maps that express different images of concrete regional significance. In these documents – the McMahon-Hussein correspondence (June 1915 to January 1916),Footnote ¹⁰ the Sykes-Picot Agreement (May 1916),Footnote ¹¹ the Balfour Declaration (November 1917),Footnote ¹² Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (April 1919),Footnote ¹³ and the Mandate for Palestine (July 1922)Footnote ¹⁴ – a vast territory is being opened, in the minds of their creators and negotiators, for a wide-ranging regional politics: for new ways of rule and for opportunities of influence, for enhanced economic development, for the solution of globalised European problems such as the Jewish question, and for the promise of a legalised jurisdictional order. Within and between these layers of images the framers of the documents endeavour to reinvent a region in their shape and to ascribe to it normative meaning. The article concludes by suggesting that the regional image projected in the Palestine Mandate, the image of legalised separated jurisdictions, served to close up the vast regional space that was being virtually opened in the confused regional politics that preceded it.Footnote ¹⁵

A number of definitional and methodological interventions are immediately required.

First, what is it that I mean by the term ‘region’? The concept is tremendously vague and elastic. Is it a territorial term relating to a geographical area and delineated by geographers? Is it a legal or political term?Footnote ¹⁶ I do not believe that a general definition will be of particular use for this study; regions are or may become institutional facts, but they are first and foremost ideas, constructions and images that shape the spatial reality of our political and economic life. Abstract definitions of regions are of limited value when in fact what makes regions concrete and real is the content of commitments expressed towards them, and the discursive activities constructing and reconstructing them.Footnote ¹⁷

Another contested term that I use in this article, when referring generally to ‘the region’, is the ‘Middle East’. The invention and subsequent use of the term ‘Middle East’ was not rooted in historical considerations but corresponded with the strategic needs of western geopolitics.Footnote ¹⁸ Backed by military power, institutions, and economic incentives, the concept, however, became a reality imposed upon and sometimes accepted by the region's political actors.Footnote ¹⁹ In the period under consideration in this article, however, the term ‘Middle East’ had not yet evolved to its current use, as a geopolitical concept that influences how governments approach the region in terms of their foreign policy, foreign aid, and military assistance or intervention. Many other terms were used more or less interchangeably, with no clear boundaries, depending on the function of the speech, its tone and the speaker's affiliation: the ‘Near East’, ‘Asiatic Turkey’, ‘Asia Minor’, ‘Arabia’, the ‘Fertile Crescent’, the ‘Orient’ are only some of them.Footnote ²⁰ In that sense the ‘Middle East’ is an anachronistic concept which I use for convenience rather than accuracy, while fully aware that it is a complicated and changing term with conflicting definitions. However, as the term becomes more and more of regular usage, conflated with Islamic extremism on the one hand and the Arab Spring on the other, it is even less clear today where exactly the ‘Middle East’ is located, if it is a valid way to conceptualise and understand this region, and what are the impacts and consequences of this abstract category and its use.

Methodologically this article conforms, at least partially, to a constructivist approach which asks how agents and the structures of their activities and their narratives are involved in processes of creation and reproduction – that is, how structure, broadly defined, shapes the nature of ideas and of actors’ capacities, how their interaction is constrained by that structure and, at the same time, serves either to reproduce or transform that structure.Footnote ²¹ The spatial, geographic narratives that are expressed in the documents analysed here are structures that shape the interaction between the agents involved in negotiating a new world order during and towards the end of the war. In turn, their interaction transforms these structures, ultimately reproducing a rather stable construction in the Palestine Mandate. The diverse and layered regional images are expressed here as horizons of political possibility for regional reconstruction. The subsequent construction expressed in the Palestine Mandate, however, of a region legally divided into separate jurisdictions, effectively replaced these layers to such an extent that we are today unaware of there ever existing other regional imaginations and over-pessimistic as to the possibilities of regional cooperation in the Middle East.Footnote ²²

The Middle East was reconstructed in the years leading to the Palestine Mandate, and especially in the years that followed, as a region of nations awaiting independence. At the same time, the regional images that existed before the new world order faded away in the turmoil, violence, hope and distress that this new order initiated; waned and faded away until very little was left of them and ‘the region’ was and still is imagined as a failure of trade and coordination. It is, in that sense, still waiting to be reconstructed in ways more viable and more beneficial for its own population.

2. The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence – A Vast Territory Opening Up for Rule

The McMahon-Hussein correspondence (July 1915–March 1916) consists of a number of letters exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, and Sharif Hussein, the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Very early on, the correspondence became the subject of conflicting interpretations and for more than half a century it ‘haunted Anglo-Arab relations’.Footnote ²³ The correspondence became part of the Palestine dispute, as Arab leaders, commentators and delegates to the Palestine conferences of 1938–39 claimed that in it McMahon promised Palestine to the Sharif.Footnote ²⁴

When McMahon and Hussein were secretly writing to one another between 1915 and 1916, the Balfour Declaration had not yet been written; there was no mandate in Palestine and no dispute between British, Zionists and Arabs over the control of Palestine. The letters were a part of a different story of Arab-British wartime diplomacy. The correspondence therefore cannot be properly understood as the first step in the dispute over the future of Palestine. It is, however, a part of broader regional politics that was overshadowed by the later conflict. In the following I claim that the intense debates over the wording of the documents, lawyerly in their essence,Footnote ²⁵ conceal in their focus on the later national controversy an important aspect of pre-Mandate diplomacy: the broad perspectives that the authors rather naturally held with regard to the ‘region’.

The first letter, dated 14 July, was written by Abdullah, the second son of the Sharif and addressed to Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary at the British residency in Cairo. In it the British were asked to acknowledge: (i) Arab independence in an extensive territory; (ii) Britain's responsibility for the defence of this independent realm; and (iii) British approval of a proclamation of an ‘Arab Kalifate of Islam’.Footnote ²⁶ The area that was announced by Abdullah engulfed the Levant, Mesopotamia and Arabia, a fantastically large portion of territory. The Sharif demandedFootnote ²⁷ that:

After another short exchange in which McMahon attempted to delay the recognition of these boundariesFootnote ²⁸ and Hussain strongly protested,Footnote ²⁹ finally, on 24 October, McMahon wrote back, approving with some specific limitations, the territorial horizon asked for:Footnote ³⁰

Here, the British recognise Arab independence, guarantee the inviolability of the holy places, give the Arabs advice and assist them in ‘what may appear to be the most suitable forms of government in those various territories’; they also require the Arabs to seek advice from Britain only and recognise its interests and its position in Baghdad and Basra where it envisions British administration.Footnote ³¹

Thus unrolls the first regional image in our story: a vast continental territory designated for Arab independence, to which the British reluctantly adhere, specifying limited exceptions informed by specific commitments that they hold, towards the French and Arab Chiefs.Footnote ³²

What was the basis for such a broad territorial demand? How could the Emir of Mecca, a rather ambitious Ottoman-nominated administrator (guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), demand in the name of ‘the Arab nation’ a protected rein over a massive span of territory and its, arguably, homogeneous population? A further inquiry into the spatial, territorial perceptions that the British and the Arabs conveyed in the pre-correspondence negotiations may clarify that.

In September 1914, the intelligence department of the Egyptian war office in Cairo produced a paper titled ‘Appreciation of Situation in Arabia’. The paper stressed the Turkish government's declining authority and its difficulty in keeping the country quiet:Footnote ³³

The paper warned that the Ottoman government:

This paper was designed to sound an alarm over Ottoman activities in Arabia and to push British policy towards greater involvement therein.

This warning was already lurking in the imagination of British policy makers on 31 October 1914 – the day of the formal declaration of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. That day, Lord Kitchener drafted a message (approved by Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey) to Abdullah, attempting to persuade him, as a representative of the Arab Nation, to assist England in the war:Footnote ³⁴

This message already contains a very wide, far-reaching perception of the Mecca caliphate to include the Arabs, or the ‘Arab nation’. That the image of an Arab caliphate is brought up by Kitchener, unsolicited by the Sharif, shows that the war unlocked in the mind of the British a wide range of regional threats and possibilities.

The letter that transmitted this message (dated 1 November 1914) went even further. Apart from a promise to guarantee independence from external aggression, in particular the Ottoman and wishes for a ‘true Arab race’ caliphate, the letter also promises to replace Turkey with the Arab nation in religious recognition:Footnote ³⁵

The stress in this letter is on a wide and general Arab movement of which the Sharif was the head. It is read as an unqualified expression of support for an already existing movement and an Arab caliphate, led by the Emir Hussein, to replace the Ottoman Empire – in return for Arab support in the English war. In the reply to the letter, Hussein asserted openly that the Ottoman caliphate no longer existedFootnote ³⁶ and, in a letter to Storrs, Abdullah advised that he is taking the letter of 1 November as a basis for action and ‘a reference for the present and the future’.Footnote ³⁷

On 4 December 1914, another British letter, in the form of a proclamation, was authored in London:

If the Arabs were to get rid of the Turks ‘and take the reins of the Government of their country into their hands, we will give up those places for them, at once’. Great Britain, the proclamation added, ‘had always defended the caliphate, even if it was a caliphate of conquest and necessity, as the Turkish Kaliphate’. The Arabs, the proclamation went on, ‘are more powerful than the Turks in the administration of the government and are better prepared to uphold the elements of progress and civilization’…Footnote ³⁸

Not only does this proclamation imagine a unified Arab nation in its ‘vast countries’, it also, independently of any requests by the Husseins, suggests the boundaries that would soon figure in the correspondence. British propaganda addresses its proclamations not simply to the Arab nation, not to the natives of Hijaz, but to those occupying the vast landscape that is soon to be opened up for a new type of rule: Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, the borderless territories stretching out across the open landscapes that lie between the Red Sea, Bahr El Arab, the Persian Gulf, the frontiers of Persia and Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea. So, the British, imagining the threat of unified Arab chiefs roaming the Ottoman territory in support of the Turks, reframe that same territory in an attempt to promise them independent and religious rule, a real caliphate of truth to replace the caliphate of necessity, and a new empire to replace the old.Footnote ³⁹

In these grand promises the British did not earnestly recognise a concrete Arab sovereign state to be independent in its broad acknowledged territory. They used, sometimes carelessly and often intentionally, broad and vague concepts to lure their interlocutors to favour British promises over those of Turkey and Germany. Storrs, for example, was very clear in a telegram, commenting on an Arabic leaflet (probably from 14 May 1915), when he explained that the grand concepts were not serious indications of British commitments:Footnote ⁴⁰

However, there were many in the government who were less light-hearted about these commitments. ‘I doubt if the Foreign Office quite realizes wherein the caliphate consists and what it implies’, commented Sir Thomas Holderness of the India Office. ‘Unlike the Papacy it must, if it is to be more than an empty claim, have extensive temporal empire’. The Secretary of State, Lord Crew, observed: ‘It is dangerous to mix up the Kalifate and the Sharifate or to suppose that the latter can be easily transformed into the former’.Footnote ⁴¹ In fact, even the eagerness to lure the Arabs was not consistent as during this period the British policy was shaky at best. On 16 December 1915, Grey minuted in his reaction to a French Embassy report on the Arab revolt and the proclamation of an Arab Caliphate (which he approved): ‘We must not stir the dangerous question of the caliphate’.Footnote ⁴²

To be sure, the claim in this section was not that the British envisioned an independent Arab territory exercising state-like sovereignty in a defined jurisdiction; their promises were vague and they quite consciously moved between different visions of rule that was to occupy the vast terrain (kingship, suzerainty, caliphate, empire, were just a few of them). Instead, I claim that they were negotiating, as were their Arab counterparts, under the assumption that Turkish Asia, a large and vague territory, was going to open up for new types of rule.

3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement: A Region Opening Up for Development

On 16 May 1916, Great Britain and France concluded a secret agreement, commonly and unofficially, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.Footnote ⁴³ The Agreement divided Ottoman territory into British and French spheres of influence. Key provisions included the partition of the entire Fertile Crescent into several zones, which influenced directly the eventual delineation of most of the other areas of former Ottoman Arab lands.Footnote ⁴⁴ Neither the British–French agreement nor the rather arbitrary delineations on maps affixed to the document were known to the Arabs when the Arab Revolt began, with the military and financial support of Great Britain, on 10 June 1916. The agreement was kept secret because the role Britain and France hoped to reserve for themselves would have angered the Arabs and jeopardised their collaboration, but Tsarist Russia had been kept informed. When the Bolsheviks came to power they published the document, and on 26 November 1917 it was printed in the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ⁴⁵

The publication of the secret agreement startled Arab leaders and many in the western world, and is still considered a classic mark of imperial dishonesty and betrayal. It had, no doubt, an immense impact on the British need to reassert legitimacy, vis-à-vis the Arabs and through its implementation of the mandate system, on eventual jurisdictional boundaries in the Middle East.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, these dramatic implications obscure another aspect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that its secrecy made possible. Since it was not intended for publication, the drafters of the Agreement were quite free to express through this document their true imperial sentiment. By that I do not necessarily mean their greed and exploitation, accompanied by disregard for native aspirations; these are obviously expressed in the document and are manifested in its commonplace interpretations. Instead, I mean to refer to a powerful imperial image of a region that is opening up for innumerable future possibilities for development.

France and Britain opened the region's map and drew lines. They not only surveyed the territory as a vast and open space available for division among them, of course, but also for many other types of productive activity. What, in the minds of its imperial architects, was this massive territory capable of? What could it contain? The list of the activities that the agreement superimposes on the map is long and ambitious. Among others, the region is being opened to the protection of independent indigenous rule,Footnote ⁴⁷ enterprise and local loans,Footnote ⁴⁸ the supply of expertise,Footnote ⁴⁹ the establishment of direct and indirect administration or control,Footnote ⁵⁰ and the conduct of internationalFootnote ⁵¹ and regionalFootnote ⁵² relations.

However, this broad territorial space can also accommodate much more detailed, administrative and governmental constructions: the expansion and emancipation of ports,Footnote ⁵³ the establishment of trade and transportation norms and their harmonisation over the territory,Footnote ⁵⁴ the transfer of water,Footnote ⁵⁵ negotiation with allies over neighbouring territories,Footnote ⁵⁶ the establishment of railroads and control over their path,Footnote ⁵⁷ the monopolisation of rail routes and their distribution according to economic needs,Footnote ⁵⁸ transportation of troops,Footnote ⁵⁹ control over rates of customs and tariff,Footnote ⁶⁰ the regulation of customs barriers between the different zones and into the area,Footnote ⁶¹ and arms control.Footnote ⁶²

This is a startling example of imperial regionalism. In secret, when the Empire is able to speak freely, it sees the world as divided into regions, to be opened up for influence, for a variety of activities of protection, control, development, political and administrative creation, and for detailed engineering of space and populations. In fact, when we read the Sykes-Picot Agreement as an expression of imperial sentiment for regional development, it may be easier to understand why the British did not see an explicit contradiction between their promises to the Arabs and their commitments to the French. Indigenous self-rule is just one developmental goal that they commit to as part of their regional strategy. An agreement with the French on its terms and boundaries is necessary in order to manage the political landscape that will enable it.Footnote ⁶³

4. The Balfour Declaration (November 1917) – A New Home for a European Issue

On the face of it, the Balfour Declaration – stating in November 1917 that the British government ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’ – is devoid of any concrete regional vision.Footnote ⁶⁴ From the viewpoint of almost 100 years of national conflict that it arguably initiated, it is seen to express a strictly territorial politics with no regional significance: the Jews wish to establish a national home within the limited jurisdictional boundaries of Palestine, and the British Empire will help them to achieve that purpose while protecting the rights of local communities. The vast landscape that we saw in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence and in the Sykes-Picot Agreement seem to vanish as the focus moves to the much more constrained (and modest) map of ‘Palestine’.Footnote ⁶⁵

A closer look at the political context of the Declaration may nonetheless uncover here too a distinct and broad regional image that is active in the document but obscured by its traditional place in the historiography of the conflict. Here, a new and promising geographical space was being opened for the resolution of the Jewish question, an urgent and painful European problem that was at the same time being globalised.

******

The idea that a territorial space within the framework of empire could be an effective solution to Europe's Jewish question had already animated Zionist leaders in the early days of the movement. In his 1876 programme, The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl made a direct plea to the European empires: ‘Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The sovereignty that he calls for seems like a stage of emancipation – only not in Europe, but in the European territories or in those territories under their influence. He suggests a way for the European governments to rid themselves of their Jewish question by exporting it to the colonies while, at the same time, promoting their development objectives in those territories. The benefit is described on a large scale – a solution to a European problem, advancement of European interests in the territories, local and regional development with the assurance that the neighbouring countries will also enjoy its added value:Footnote ⁶⁷

Herzl draws a grandeur image of the role of the Jews in the region. They are not coming there to occupy a small land and live discretely; they are coming with ‘marvelous potency’ to manage, in the interest of the European powers and the possessors of the land, vast issues. They will regulate the whole finances of the Turks. They will form a European fortification of Europe ‘against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’.Footnote ⁶⁸ They will remain in contact with Europe and live under its guaranteed protection. They will be a sanctuary of Christendom with an extraterritorial status. They will develop the country and the region.Footnote ⁶⁹ As the Zionist movement developed, the idea of a colonial solution to the Jewish question continued to arouse the imagination of its leaders. The Jewish question is described as a universal problem that needs to be resolved on a universal platform – it makes sense that the colonised territories would also be incorporated in the solution; as Dov Ber Borochov, one of the founders of the Zionist labour movement, explained in 1906: ‘The Jewish problem migrates with the Jews. Thus a universal Jewish problem is created which involves not only Jewish philanthropists but also the political powers of the civilized nations’.Footnote ⁷⁰

When the war with Turkey was declared, Zionist leaders saw an opportunity to realise their aspirations. Chaim Weizmann, then a prominent Zionist leader and soon after President of the English Zionist Federation, recalled that in December 1914, when he met Lloyd George (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Herbert Samuel (then MP and President of the Local Government Board), the latter said that he was preparing a memorandum for the Prime Minister (Asquith) on the subject of a Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote ⁷¹

However, the Balfour Declaration, almost two years later, was the immediate outcome that was less of the Zionist propaganda that Samuel echoes in his memoranda, and more of British wartime propaganda. 1917 was a critical year for the Allies. The Russian Revolution weakened the struggle against Germany in the east and German troops were about to transfer from Russia to the Western front.Footnote ⁷² On 13 June 1917, Ronald Graham, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, submitted in a memorandum to Lord Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that:Footnote ⁷³

Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary for Lloyd George's wartime administration, minuted on the document: ‘I have asked Ld Rothschild and Professor Weizmann to submit a formula’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Curiously, the quick process that followed and culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 had nothing to do with an actual British policy plan for the post-war future of Palestine. In fact, in those critical war months of the second part of 1917, the British had no such plans.Footnote ⁷⁵

The principal aim of the Declaration was to win the allegiance of world Jewry for the Allied cause, especially in the United States and in Russia, under the false assumption that the Jews were predominantly Zionists and that they wielded great influence in American society and politics and among the Russian revolutionary circles.Footnote ⁷⁶ If the Jews could be persuaded that the entante was committed to securing their interests, then the British government would win a powerful pro-war ally wherever Jews were to be found.Footnote ⁷⁷ The belief that Jews were both Zionist and powerful stemmed not only from anti-Semitic myths but also from a trend in the British Foreign Office circles of viewing ethnic groups as powerful races focused on the goal of self-determination.Footnote ⁷⁸ This trend resulted in a series of nationalist propaganda policies during the war that were designed to win over racial power in the US and Russia predominantly. A Jewish Section in the Department of Information was set up in December 1917 with a far-reaching propaganda operation using press, pamphlets, books and films.Footnote ⁷⁹ The aim of these operations was not to actually develop the national movement but to win ‘the imagined global war asset of Jewish power’;Footnote ⁸⁰ there was no discussion of whether support for Zionism will secure British interests in Palestine, because there were no definite plans for British control over Palestine; nor was there a clear policy for the future of the Middle East as a whole.Footnote ⁸¹

Corresponding with the principal aim of the Declaration – to impress world Jewry, rather than to implicate British post-war interest in the region – Zionist leaders were asked to draft it themselves.

In this context the outward silence of the Zionist regional image in the Declaration can be understood. In their imagination and, to a great degree, in the imagination of their British and generally European interlocutors, the region was becoming meaningful, and indeed a powerful wartime asset as a key to the solution to European problems. In the Balfour Declaration, the region opens up for occupation as a European territory, designed to create a pragmatic and just solution to the pains of European society. In fact, the whole world suffers because the Jews are away from their old territory. That is why it seemed useful to declare in 1917 that Britain will back Zionist aspirations in the region – because a geographically remote solution to the European Jewish question is potentially a valuable idea in European politics. A national home for the Jewish people in a new and open space means a home in which Europe can finally rest its Jewish question.

But how would a Jewish home elsewhere work as a solution to a European minority problem? Is it not the problem that Jews seek equality of rights in their own home countries? This question was strongly adhered to by non-Zionist Jews and others opposed to the Declaration. On 4 October Lord Balfour took up the case before the War Cabinet. He saw:Footnote ⁸²

The Jewish question will be evened up when Jews become a nation like any other in their own territory. Objections to the Declaration took the shape of claims that a Jewish home would only worsen the position of the Jews in their countries of origin:Footnote ⁸³

The Jewish question was not – claimed the anti-Zionist minister – to be resolved in any other territory but in the European home. A new draft was suggested as a response to such objections, a draft which emphasises the pressing racial question involved:Footnote ⁸⁴

This draft was submitted with confidentiality to the leaders of the Zionist movement and to anti-Zionist Anglo-Jewry. Replies were received during October. Many of the replies were strongly affirmative of the safeguards provided, both internal (for Jews all over the world), and external (for non-Jewish inhabitants of the land). Rejections were framed in the language of concern that the Jewish question cannot effectively be resolved in a new territory:Footnote ⁸⁵

Strongly stressing the issue of a Jewish home and Jewish homelessness in Europe, Leonard Cohen, the Chairman of the Jewish Board of Guardians warned:Footnote ⁸⁶

The Jewish opposition to the Declaration responded directly to its attempt to resolve the European Jewish question in a new home territory. The real solution must be in Europe – in their real ‘home’.

Following these reactions and many more letters from Jews in Britain and abroad that were received in the Foreign Office in favour of the Declaration, the War Cabinet met on 31 October. Additional delays, pressed the Foreign Office, will throw the Zionists into the arms of the Germans:Footnote ⁸⁷

The concerns about the Declaration, Balfour explained, were twofold: (i) that Palestine is inadequate to form a home for the Jews; and (ii) the future position of Jews in Western countries. In his replies, Balfour makes an important connection between the two problems – the condition of the territory and the condition of Jews in Europe.

First, he agrees, Palestine under ‘Turkish misrule’ may not be adequate for Jewish immigration, but under scientifically developed conditions it could sustain a large population. Second, the idea of a national home, he explains, should not be exaggerated. He understood it to mean:Footnote ⁸⁸

He then repeated his argument about the connection between Jewish assimilation and citizenship. A British citizen can easily move to the United States and become a full citizen, but having no national citizenship, Jewish assimilation is incomplete.Footnote ⁸⁹

In other words, the Jewish question as a European and global issue of assimilation will be resolved in the new territory by creating a European protectorate over a Jewish ‘home’. Home signifies a place of protection, rather than a place for independent statehood, and it is this protected space, which they lack in Europe, that is provided for them in the new territory. The colonised territory will be transformed into the European home that is needed in order to resolve Europe's Jewish question. With the help of a European protector in occupying that territory, the Jews can finally be at home – in Europe and all over the world.Footnote ⁹⁰ After some more reservations from Lord Curzon regarding the fit of Palestine for Jewish settlement, the War Cabinet authorised the Declaration.Footnote ⁹¹

Under this reading of the Balfour Declaration as envisioning a space in the region for the resolution of the European/Jewish problem of homelessness, it is interesting to geographically contrast the promise to the Arabs in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence and the promise to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration. While both were clear acts of wartime propaganda, they took place in very different imaginary spaces. The promises to Arabs were aimed at influencing the inhabitants of the region to take action against the Ottoman Empire, which is why the regional image that was expressed in them was one of a vast territory, open for local, self-determined (though ambivalent and vague) rule. The latter was meant to influence the Jews in the United States and in Russia to influence their governments to join the war, which is why the region seemed empty and silent – it was only a new space for the resolution of old and particularly European social issues.Footnote ⁹²

5. Article 22 of the Covenant – Legalising Imperial Spheres of Influence

Whereas the Balfour Declaration is part of a story about wartime diplomacy, Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations is part of the story of post-war diplomacy for peace. The impact of the disclosure of the secret treaties by the Bolsheviks proved even greater than the Bolsheviks had anticipated.Footnote ⁹³ France and Britain attempted damage control. On 5 January 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George said that Britain was reassessing its plans for a post-war disposition in the Ottoman territories. He said: ‘Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to recognition of their separate national conditions’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In a joint Anglo-French declaration in November 1918, Britain and France pledged that they would ‘assist in the establishment of indigenous governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia’ by the ‘setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Pressure on Britain and France over how they would treat the Ottoman territories came not only from the East, but from the United States too.Footnote ⁹⁶ In a speech to a joint session of the US Congress on 18 January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared principles that should guide a post-war settlement. He railed against the Europe-dominated order that he saw as a cause of the Great War and, in the same breath, he denounced control of foreign territories: ‘The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Wilson listed fourteen propositions, which became known as his ‘Fourteen Points’, for a just post-war order. Wilson's fifth point focused on colonialism. He demanded:Footnote ⁹⁸

In his twelfth point, Wilson dealt specifically with the Ottoman territories:Footnote ⁹⁹

With its progressive impetus, Wilson's document reveals a fourth image of the region, or more generally, of imperial regionalism, that would also prevail over the subsequent Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations which founded the League's mandate system. This was not a new image but it would be legalised anew in the instrument for the mandate system. Traditionally, empire does not relate to sovereign jurisdictions outside (western) Europe, but to territories and populations. Accordingly, the imperial world is divided into vague and wide geopolitical spheres of influence, large borderless territories over which empires negotiate their claims. A close spatially sensitive reading of the Wilsonian principles raises exactly this image. The proclamation starts from the United States’ perspective and looks at ‘the world’ as a big and open map, which is to be reformed:Footnote ¹⁰⁰

From this grand perspective a programme for world peace evolves. After some universal principles (opening up secret documents, opening the seas to navigation, and opening the world to free trade: Points I to III), the plan requires a more detailed perspective. Here the proclamation moves, not from people to people or from issue to issue – it moves instead across large territories, from region to region, and everywhere it goes it dispels injustice, as if it sweeps it away off the map of the world: point VI clears Russian territory; point VIII reaffirms French territory; point IX adjusts the frontiers of Italy; point X the freedom of the peoples of Austro-Hungary; point XI brings justice to the Balkans. Finally, point XII focuses on the territories of the Ottoman Empire and confirms sovereignty to Turkey, and security of life and autonomous development to all other nationalities, leaving an open space in the Dardanelles for free passage for the ships and commerce of all under international guarantees.Footnote ¹⁰¹

This legacy of Wilson's proclamation passed on to Article 22 of the Covenant by way of the practical translation of a number of international commentators, architects of the League and the mandate system. One of the most prominent of them was the South African General, Jan Smuts.Footnote ¹⁰² In his December 1918 pamphlet, which had tremendous influence on the final draft of Article 22 of the Covenant, Smuts starts from the assumption that the League will have to occupy the ‘great position’ of the old European Empires subsequent to the ‘passing away of the old European order’ and become the foundation for a new international system.Footnote ¹⁰³ As the epitome of western civilisation, the League becomes, in Smuts’ proposal, the heir to the great imperial estates. However, the people in these great estates, in the territories of Russia, Austria and Turkey, are ‘untrained politically; many of them are either incapable of or deficient in the power of self-government; they are mostly destitute and will require much nursing towards economic and political independence’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To prevent a new scramble for the territories, the League of Nations must become ‘the reversionary in the broadest sense of these empires’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To fulfil the task, the League must enact its territorial policy according to the principles of ‘no annexation and the self-determination of nations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

What is the territory upon which those principles will be applied? How does Smuts see the subject of the League's progressive territorial policy? The image of the new and just world that Smuts envisions is, not surprisingly, an imperial image of vast geographical domains and spheres of influence. Smuts, not unlike Wilson, moves from one region to another and reorganises the world and its ‘peoples’ as just, rational and peacefully reformed. Smuts starts from Russian territories; Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he considers, will probably be found sufficiently capable of statehood to be recognised as individual states.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Transcaucasian and Transcaspian provinces of Russia, however, are as yet deficient in the qualities of statehood and may need to settle for internal autonomy. From these, Smuts moves down the imperial map to Turkish territories: Upper and Lower Mesopotamia, Lebanon and Syria are also capable of autonomy but not of complete statehood. Of course, there are delicate variations in each of these vast domains: ‘At the one end a territory may be found barely capable of autonomy: at the other end the approach to complete statehood is very near. Mesopotamia would probably be a case of the former kind; Syria of the latter’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Some populations within these territories, such as those in Palestine and the Armenian Vilayets, may be too heterogeneous for administrative cooperation and so autonomy is out of the question at least for some time;Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and some domains (the former German colonies in the South-Pacific and South-West Africa) are inhabited by barbarians and cannot possibly govern themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁰

So, the great principles of self-determination and no annexation are superimposed on an imperial landscape. Territories are vast and populations are many, and the task of the heirs to the dying empires, each in its own sphere of influence,Footnote ¹¹¹ is – as it always was – to impose order and justice and, by that, to unify and pacify a world of anarchy and barbarism.Footnote ¹¹²

Not surprisingly, the later drafts of Article 22 were very much influenced by Smuts’ scheme.Footnote ¹¹³ The final text expresses the same imperially infused regional image, construing territories and populations within broad areas of influence under a (sacred) protection scheme rather than within jurisdictions and by sovereign states.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The imperial powers who will be nominated as tutors and protectors are also portrayed beyond borders; they are ‘advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position’, rather than by reason of their sovereignty, can best exercise the League's mandates.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The world map is open and the empires are deepening their spheres of influence as advisers, administrators or (in exceptional cases of remote territories) sovereign protectors.

Like Wilson's proclamation and Smuts’ plan, the text of Article 22 hovers from region to region and reorganises domains, territories and populations. The former Turkish Empire is seen as a large territorial continuum with ‘communities’ possessing different levels of development, to be administrated under the advice of a mandate.Footnote ¹¹⁶ From Asiatic Turkey the text drifts to Central Africa,Footnote ¹¹⁷ and then across the continent to another territory, Smuts’ former German territories of barbaric dependency which must be directly ruled as an integral portion of the mandatory power's territory ‘in the interest of the indigenous population’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The League is thus seen as taking responsibility and dealing ‘with the great territorial questions which must arise from the break-up of those empires’Footnote ¹¹⁹ and these questions are understood and responded to within the framework of a regional imperial image in which the world outside western Europe is made of vast domains of concern.

6. Mandate for Palestine: A Jurisdictionally Divided Space

The Palestine Mandate was a legal and administrative instrument; it did not specify the borders of a geographical territory. The territorial jurisdiction of the Mandate was subject to change by treaty, capitulation, grant, usage, sufferance or other lawful means.Footnote ¹²⁰ For all practical purposes the text that founded the Palestine Mandate was a jurisdiction-establishing document, creating a closed, legally bounded, territorial jurisdiction under British administrative control. In this respect, the Mandate for Palestine, formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922, represents a tremendous shift in the imperial regional image that we saw in Article 22, from which it drew its authority. In fact, it represents a shift from all the documents that we have inspected hitherto, and that led to it.

In the Mandate for Palestine we no longer find a vast region, divided into spheres and dominions of influence and being opened up for rule, control or development. In fact, in this document, the image of imperial officials and policy makers, standing over large maps and roaming from one region to another in search of imperial interests, threats and opportunities, seem to have disappeared. Instead, the document frames and closes up a space for legal administration and governance. Instead of open and vague opportunities for rule, we now have a concrete territorial jurisdiction. Instead of vast domains of influence we now have a legally governed state.

This new image of a closely-knit jurisdiction is created by detailed and systematic construction of administrative authority. The first article establishes full powers of legislation and administration. A legal and administrative jurisdiction is thereby erected where legal authority is neither questioned nor shared.Footnote ¹²¹ The second article frames the purpose of this authority:Footnote ¹²²

Thus we have an authority with a determined purpose within a particularly defined jurisdiction.

From this point the document goes on to stipulate what will be the mechanisms that the authority will consider, recognise, facilitate or enact in order to realise its purpose: local autonomy (Article 3); a Jewish agency (Article 4); Jewish immigration and land settlement (Article 6); a nationality law (Article 7); an equitable judicial system (Article 9); a commission of inquiry on religious rights (Article 14); freedom of conscience, religion and religious education (Article 15); equitable conditions of trade (Article 18); a law of antiquity to include regulating and authorising excavations and expropriation of land (Article 21); official languages and official rest days (Articles 22 and 23).

The Mandated authority will also engage, according to the document, in characteristically jurisdictional activities such as establishing foreigners’ immunities and enforcing rules of extradition (Articles 8 and 10); establishing a land system, regulating public ownership and private development of natural resources, public works, services and utilities, and regulating their revenue (Article 11); controlling foreign relations, issuing exequaturs for foreign consuls and protecting citizens abroad (Article 12); protecting religious sites and their immunities and supervising religious bodies (Articles 13 and 16); organising a defence force (Article 17); imposing taxes and customs duties and concluding customs agreements in the region (Article 18); applying international law treaties and principles and cooperating with international bodies (Article 19); submitting international disputes for settlement before the Permanent Court of International Justice (Article 26).

A fully fledged modern state jurisdiction is being created, replacing any former ambiguities of rule. A home for the Jews is being anticipated as a powerful administrative reality of legal government. All previous regional dreams of a vast territory, vaguely governed by suzerains, kings, religious leaders, economic developers or democratic self-governed nations, will from now on be undermined and obscured by the persuasive totality of the new regional image that is being established in a Mandate for Palestine – a region of divided unitary centralised jurisdictions, representing national claims.Footnote ¹²³

7. Conclusion: Closing Up Regional Opportunities

The article explored and highlighted a ‘forgotten regional moment’ in the negotiations over the fate of the Middle East after the First World War. It claimed that at the pre-formative transitional period, leading to the Palestine Mandate, many actors involved in negotiations over its future settlement envisioned the region as a vast space open to different types of political possibility. In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence the region was seen as opening for Arab self-rule. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement it was expressed as a vast space open to development; in the Balfour Declaration it was constructed as a European space of protection for the resolution of European and global problems. In Article 22 it was seen as a sphere of influence for European management of civilisations. In the Palestine Mandate all of these vast and open visions were replaced. For the first time, the idea of the jurisdictional separation of quasi-constitutional states was introduced to shape the reality of the region.

How and why did the transition happen? Why did the classic imperial regional image that still figured strongly in the minds of all those involved in negotiating a new world order during the war vanish in the document that was supposed to operationalise this order? How and why did the urge to open up territories for opportunities of many sorts culminate in a completely opposite impetus towards jurisdictional division and enclosure?

These important questions have not been answered in this article and require further historical inquiry. One reason may be that a closed jurisdictional mandate and a divided region were the solution to the growing pressures of confused British regional politics. This political situation at once created and frustrated expectations and heightened the pressure that strongly affected British policy makers. Thus, British involvement in the ‘region’ caused a critical escalation by a multiplicity of responders (Arabs, Zionists, US delegates and the French). The solution was found in the Palestine Mandate – it was a solution not only because it allowed British control over large parts of the former Ottoman territories with international legitimacy, but also because it sealed the door of the broad ‘regional’ ambitions and pressures, creating, by legal means, a jurisdiction, a space that functions in a controllable, governable way.

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In 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission Report (the Peel Commission, which was sent to Palestine after the Arab Revolt of 1936) concluded that the obligations to the well-being and development of the peoples in the mandate system, in the opening paragraph of Article 22 of the Covenant, were contradictory in Palestine and impossible to implement. The bitter conflict between fundamentally different national communities in this land can be resolved only by the creation of two separate, sovereign states.Footnote ¹²⁴ In that, a further enclosure was taking shape. The open region, full of political possibility, was being reshaped by the Palestine Mandate in the image of ever more firm and neatly defined borders for ‘fundamentally different communities’. Now, a new set of images arose to influence the historical horizon – a vision of jurisdictional partition, a division – as the foundation of peace.