Shmuel Katz

In June 1918, an ingenious solution was accepted by the British government. Osmond Walrond, an intelligence officer attached to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, read out in that city a statement in which the British government officially pledged itself to recreate in the areas not yet conquered the "complete and sovereign independence of any Arab area emancipated from Turkish control by the option of the Arabs themselves."

On this principle Lawrence and the Sherifians now hastened to operate in order to establish the "facts" they required. As an Arab historian has summed it up: "Wherever the British Army captured a town or reached a fortress which was to be given to the Arabs it would halt until the Arabs could enter, and the capture would be credited to them."

Hence the wild chase that followed to raise the Arab flag in towns from which the Turks had already been driven by the British … At Damascus, there was a serious difficulty, and the maneuver did not succeed.

The capture of Damascus, the ancient seventh-century capital of the Arab Umayyad dynasty, was to have been the climax of the revolt, installing Faisal as the indigenous King of Syria before the French could object. General Allenby, the British Commander-in-Chief, ordered the officers in command of the combined British, Australian, and French forces advancing on Damascus not to enter the city.

It was assumed that the retreat of the Turks could be completely cut off north of the city. Only the Sherifian troops were to be allowed to pass into the city, to announce its capture … All this was worked out in advance between the British War Office, Allenby, and Lawrence. Because Faisal’s 600 soldiers were not adequate for the required pomp, one of his supporters was sent to recruit Druze and Haurardans to march in with what was now called the Northern Arab Army (it was, in fact, the southern contingent gone north).

Two unforeseen circumstances upset the plan. The Australian Commander, Brigadier Wilson, finding that he could not cut off the Turks’ retreat without entering the city, therefore went in, and so it was to the Australians that Damascus was in fact surrendered. Later, a British force went in to quell a revolt against the British and against the planned installation of Faisal. It was put down only by the application of considerable force.

Nevertheless, a Sherifian administration was installed, and the fiction was then promoted that the Arabs had captured Damascus.

From this scramble to claim territory by "right of conquest," Palestine was excluded. No such effort was made by the Sherifian forces on either side of the Jordan. Coming as it did a year after the publication of the Balfour Declaration on the Jewish National Home in Palestine, this reaction underlines the fact that the Arab leaders felt no urge to oppose or obstruct the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

In Syria, the clash between French claims, accepted by the British in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915, and Arab claims, conceived and fostered by the British after 1916, was not finally resolved until 1945. In Palestine, the French effectively gave up their claims as early as 1918.