I am reading up on the Israel-Palestine conflicts, and an area of significant interest is obviously the promises made by the British to the various parties of the middle east during World War 1. I have been trying to find material on how British foreign policy for the region actually worked.
Charles D. Smith states, in his work on the matter (Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict) that "What emerges most clearly is the nature of the great powers' decision-making process, which, in words of one scholar, was 'exceedingly informal, flexible, and by design almost, amateurish.' Individuals rather than governments or united cabinets made decisions."
I haven't found quite enough on the exact offices that made these decisions, and the degree of independence they had to make promises/obligations. What exactly was the structure of foreign policy in the middle east during WW1?
As a bonus: Were the promises made to the Arabs and Zionists (Husayn-McMahon and Balfour) purely out of expediency, or was it also due to the unfortunate floundering of individuals in this supposedly decentralized system?
Looking forward to hearing an answer from a historian, but sounds like you've got to read Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson.
I found the impact of personal decisions and lines of communication particularly interesting. For example, on multiple occasions Lawrence would purposefully leave town so that he wouldn't be there when new orders arrived, allowing him to maintain independence without going rogue. There was a definite chain of command, but savvy agents (not only Lawrence) were able to forward their own agendas by loose interpretation of imprecise orders, and selectively sending information back home.
Someone else will have to fill in on the details of the organizational structures, but a lot of it came down to a lack of sharing of information between various branches of the government and military.
What exactly was the structure of foreign policy in the middle east during WW1?
As the quote you mentioned suggests, the structure was kind of a mess, and it changed substantially over the course of the war. I'm at work and without access to my notes but to give a brief overview you had the following administrations responsible for some aspect of British policy in the Middle East prior to or during WWI:
and an honorary mention for:
8 . The De Bunsen committee, a temporary committee formed shortly after the entry of the Ottomans into the war to determine British war aims in the Middle East and representing basically all of the above: the PM, the Colonial Office, India Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the War Office.
In terms of the primary promises made to the various groups you had:
A. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondences, these were negotiated by Egypt High Commissioner Henry McMahon as authorized by the Foreign Office and Kitchener at the War Office (Kitchener, immediately prior to the wars outbreak, had himself been Consul General in Egypt, and the initial overtures by Sherif Hussein had been made while he was in office.)
B. The Sykes-Picot Agreement: Mark Sykes wore many hats over the course of the war, but I think it would be fair to describe this agreement as being most precisely a responsibility of the Foreign Office, though Sykes was reporting to the War Office.
C. The Balfour Declaration: as the name suggests, the direct responsibility of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, the idea of a Zionist promise was most prominently opposed by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India.
Aside from the formal agreements you also had various on-the-ground decisions that would ultimately play a key role in the final settlement. Sir Arnold Wilson's attempt to govern Iraq as an India-style direct possession contributed to the Iraqi Revolt of 1920, which in turn led to his replacement by Sir Percy Cox and an attempt to find a different means of governing Iraq, which in turn contributed to the "Hashemite Solution."
The navy's conversion to oil, which was sourced entirely from Iran and shipped through the Iraqi port of Basra, obviously under the authority of the Admiralty and Winston Churchill, was directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq literally within 24 hours of the British declaration of war.
Insofar as "possession is 9/10ths of the law" the advances of the both the EEF and the Mesopotamian force from India were critical in adjusting the agreed upon borders. Success on the battlefield allowed the British to argue that the French sphere should be significantly smaller. This was true of Mosul, for instance.
The Colonial Office would play a greater role in the Post-War settlement, with Churchill as Colonial secretary presiding over the Cairo Conference of 1921 which solidified the Sherifian Solution and the "Churchill White Paper" of 1922 on Zionist policy.
From the minutes of the meetings that I've read, General Allenby of the EEF was at the right hand of Prime Minister Lloyd George for the Middle Eastern negotiations during the Paris Peace Conference with the major powers.
The conclusions made at the peace conference itself limited or influenced British policy in certain ways.
This is the aspect of this that I'm perhaps least familiar with, but the Turkish War of Independence and the Treaty of Lausanne which established the final status borders.
The initiative of various officers of the Arab Bureau was obviously responsible for much of the war-time policy, particularly the Arab revolt, but also in providing advice at war's end. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) is obviously the most famous of these individuals, but they included others like Gertrude Bell and St. John Philby who also helped shape British policy in the region.
To your bonus question:
This is hotly debated, perhaps the most hotly debated issue of Britain's involvement in the Middle East generally.
You mentioned two options for motivations, 1. expediency, 2. incompetence/chaos/individual action, but there are actually two others.
The first is the incredibly lawyerly response that the British tried to use as their primary defense at the time which is that, in fact, there was no contradiction between the promises and what they delivered in the region. Many historians (and myself, personally) think this is pretty laughable and that they were trying to save face, not very effectively. It flies in the face of many of the documents we have and all of the casuistry in the world cannot change the fact that there is no common sense understanding in which Palestine can be said to be "west of" the Vilayet of Aleppo, among other absurd contortions.
The second explanation is that this was just pure imperial malice, plain and simple. In this version the Hussein-McMahon correspondences were simply a lie. That it was entirely within the power of the British to grant what they had promised and they chose not to. This is basically the conclusion of George Antonius' The Arab Awakening which first published the Hussein-McMahon correspondence and, despite its polemical nature, remains both an important primary source (Antonius was directly involved in this process) as well as one of the main lenses through which other works have to be viewed.
The motivations for the Balfour Declaration, as a subset of British policy, are a mess within a mess. The British cabinet's Zionist turn was partly the result of the lobbying of Chaim Weizman, partly the result of a weirdly positive conspiratorial anti-Semitism (in the sense of believing that Jews uniquely hold the reigns of world political and financial power and must therefore be appeased), partly Christian Sunday school fantasies, and on and on.
My own conclusion, which follows that of Eugene Rogan, is that these agreements have to be looked at from the perspective of a wider war time effort. You cannot understand the motivations of the men in power in London without constantly keeping in mind the absolute slaughter of the western front. It's very easy for us to sit here, 100 years later as many political commentators do, and say that these men were responsible for many of the recent ills of the Middle East, but I think given the quite literally millions of casualties that they were suffering I think that British government probably would have promised anything they could to anyone they could if it meant shortening the war, and I think that sense of urgency is lost somewhat without understanding that context. You can call that "expediency" but I'm not sure it quite captures the full context.
That being said, it's clear that quite a lot of what actually got put on paper was the result of administrative and individual chaos. "Middle East" as a term really comes into its own out of this war and it's clear from the multiple levels of administrative divisions that the British were not prepared for the kind of regional cohesion and focus that the war would require. Individual foibles and eccentricities played a part in this as well. I've read suggestions that the borders described in both Hussein-McMahon and Sykes-Picot were chosen more with an eye to the classical educations of the negotiators than with any actual modern relevance. I don't know how much stock I put in that but it's the kind of silliness that played a surprisingly large role.
It's separate to your question but I do also think, within the imperialistic context of the time, that the British did actually make a relatively good faith effort to sort this out at the end of the war. They certainly cared about that more than the French did. Much of the result was imperialistic, paternalistic, wrongheaded, what have you, but for a group of imperialist paternalists they were not nearly as callous as some recent political commentators would suggest, that they were simply drawing random lines in the sand. It didn't really happen that way.
Sources:
There's quite a lot of good primary source materials on this in English, many of which are relatively easy to access. The Hussein-McMahon correspondences are readily available. The US minutes of the Paris Peace Conference that I alluded to are available here, you'd have to search for the relevant discussions. It's been a long time since I looked through them, but if I recall there's quite a lot of interesting material in the FCO Correspondence and Records. The Balfour Declaration was public, etc
TBC Ed:phrase
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