12.4.1 To the Victors Go the Spoils

Already beset by internal problems and increasing difficulty controlling its holdings throughout Arabia and the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire had signed the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918, bringing its participation in World War I to an end. During the war, a number of proposals for dismembering the empire had been considered. In 1919, Allied forces seized areas in the former Ottoman Empire, Greece captured Western Anatolia, and other Allied forces moved into Istanbul. The Turkish National Movement that resisted these occupations was led by Mustafa Kemal, later renamed Atatürk (“father of the Turks”) and already a Turkish hero for his performance at the Battle of Gallipoli.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres partitioned the empire, leaving the Ottomans with control over only Istanbul and Thrace. The Turks led by Mustafa Kemal won battles on several fronts, however, and forced a renegotiation of the treaty. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 provided for an independent Turkey to succeed the Ottoman government. It also established League of Nations mandates in the Middle East. Under the mandate system, the administration of territories once controlled by the Ottomans was transferred to France or Britain, which were expected to govern these regions until some unspecified point in the future when the people there were deemed ready to govern themselves. Among the mandated areas were modern Iraq, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine (Figure 12.14).

Arabia was not easily controlled by the European powers. Warfare continued to break out over access to sites such as Mecca and Medina, both holy places in the Islamic faith. By the mid-1920s, the Saud family had taken control of areas of the Nejd (the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula) and the Hejaz (the peninsula’s western region), and soon after they consolidated that control by forming a new nation, Saudi Arabia, which came into being in 1932.

During the war, Britain and France had each begun to outline spheres of influence for themselves in the defunct Ottoman Empire. A French mandate covered Syria and Lebanon, and a British mandate the area of Iraq, Palestine, and the Transjordan (the East Bank). Despite their talk of self-determination, Europe’s surviving imperial powers clearly planned no deviation from the traditional course of empires in this region. Neither Britain nor France consulted the people who lived in the mandate areas about the decisions their governments would be making for them.

It soon became clear that the mandate system would not ensure full European control. For example, the British mandate over Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq, came under pressure from nationalists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. King Faisal (to whom the British had promised the rule of Syria) accepted being ruler of Iraq, but Britain controlled most of the government. The next king of Iraq had to accept similar conditions, but Iraqi nationalists became increasingly vocal about their frustration with the British presence.

The British complicated matters in another part of their mandate with the Balfour Declaration. This statement, one of many conflicting promises Britain made to various groups during the war, was issued by British foreign secretary Alfred Balfour in 1917. Balfour wrote that Britain supported a “national home” for Jewish people in Palestine. Ever since the nineteenth century, many European Jews had worked through Zionist organizations to encourage the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration marked the accomplishment of the goal that pro-Zionist groups had worked toward for years. Palestine was a British mandate after the war but mainly inhabited by Arab peoples; the move to introduce a substantial number of Jewish residents (with government support) promised to cause problems, and in fact it touched off religious and property disagreements that continue to this day.

The British began by summarily making an area of Palestine available to Jewish immigrants and, between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population as a percentage of the total population increased threefold, from 9 percent to almost 27 percent. The Palestinians immediately complained of being treated as second-class citizens in their own land and about Britain’s failed promise to grant Arabs independence. Riots and protests became so common that Britain ultimately restricted immigration to Palestine, cutting off a route of escape for Jewish people fleeing the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

The Asian and African holdings of the German Empire were also divided among the victors. Some of Germany’s Asian lands had been relinquished early in the war, such as Samoa, which New Zealand formally took over after the war. Australia took German New Guinea and Nauru. The Japanese Empire gained German-held islands north of the equator, such as the Marshall Islands and the Caroline Islands (Figure 12.15).

In Africa, Germany had held Kamerun (including modern Cameroon as well as areas of Chad, Gabon, Nigeria, and the Congo), German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania), Togoland (Togo and part of Ghana), and German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). These became mandates after the war. Both Britain and France gained land in Togo and Cameroon, South Africa took Southwest Africa, and the Belgians received land in Burundi and Rwanda. No one consulted the African peoples in making these divisions, and in fact the borders cut through ethnic groups, leaving some groups divided between two governments. Self-determination of nations was clearly not at work in Africa, and increasingly louder voices questioned whether Europe had any real moral authority over African colonies.