A What-If On The MidEast

By H.D.S. Greenway
November 27, 2007
Boston

AS AN Israeli-Palestine summit convenes this week, take a moment to contemplate one of the more intriguing what-ifs of history.

What if the United States had been landed with the responsibility of ruling Palestine after the end of the Ottoman empire? And what if that mandate had included all of today's Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria too? Would the Middle East have been better off than it is now?

The world has forgotten the King-Crane Commission that Woodrow Wilson set in motion in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference.

To sort out a new world order, Wilson urged that a commission be sent to "elucidate the state of opinion" in Greater Syria about how people wanted to be governed now that the Turks were gone. The allies reluctantly accepted the commission but then bowed out.

The British and French had already divided up the territory between them in a secret agreement. And, as the United States had not fought in the Middle East, nor had it ever declared war on the Ottomans, the allies felt it was really none of America's business.

But neither Wilson nor the United States, just emerging as a world power, could be totally ignored.

In the end only Henry King, president of Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, heir to a plumbing fortune, took off for the Middle East. Neither knew anything about the region. After talking to hundreds of people of all confessions, the commission decided that Greater Syria should be treated as a unitary state and not divided among the allies. King and Crane thought Syria should be given independence, preferably under Emir Faisal whom Lawrence of Arabia had helped to chase out the Turks.

If there were to be a League of Nations mandate, however, the region's Arabs said they would prefer to be ruled by Americans, rather than by British or French, according to the commission's report.

Reasons were that the Americans were not considered true imperialists and could be counted upon to leave one day. Also, Americans had the wherewithal to develop the region.

Dissenting from this opinion, however, were the Zionists who had just been promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine by the British.

The Balfour Declaration also said that a Jewish homeland should not interfere with the rights of Arabs, thus setting up a contradiction that haunts us still.

According to Tom Segev, whose book "One Palestine Complete," chronicles the British Mandate, the early Zionists feared Wilson's obsession with democracy.

"Democracy in America," a Zionist publication, explained, "too commonly means majority rule without regard to diversities of types or stages of civilization . . . ." Since Zionists were a majority in neither Palestine nor the rest of Greater Syria, American style democracy would be bad for the Jews.

The commission argued against a Jewish state on the grounds that to disregard the wishes of the Arab majority would be contrary to Wilsonian principles.

The Jews, and the Christians of Lebanon, should seek autonomy within a Greater Syria, but not independence.

Crane would later be branded as an anti-Semite, justly as it turned out, but the commission's recommendations against a Jewish state was based more on skepticism concerning the unreconcilable contractions in the Balfour Declaration.

Since the Arab majority opposed it, a Jewish state could not be achieved without force of arms, and it would take not less than 50,000 troops to achieve it, the commission found.

When the commissioners returned to Paris, their moment in history had passed. Wilson had already sailed home, where shortly afterward he fell ill and died. The British and French carved up the Middle East between themselves. American participation in the League of Nations was stillborn, and the commission's report was not even published until 1922.

Would an American mandate have been any better than the British and French mandates?

Palestine was a nightmare for the British, trying to keep Zionists and Arabs from each other's throats, and the French were plagued with more than a dozen revolts in Syria.

Perhaps the United States would have been quicker, after World War II and the Holocaust, to recognize a Jewish state, but would the plight of the Palestinians and the travails of Lebanon be any better today if America had been in charge between the two world wars?

America's performance in Iraq would suggest that we all should be thankful that the modern Middle East was never made in America. It's tempting to say that, on the whole, things were better off under the Turks.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.