The post-Ottoman Arab states were created after the First World War to serve the interests of western imperialists, rather than those of the region’s native inhabitants.
In 1918, as British domination of the post-Ottoman Middle East took shape, an official in the British India Office admitted: “The old watchwords are obsolete, and the question is how we are to secure what is essential under the new ones. This thing can be done, but a certain re-orientation is necessary. The ‘Arab facade’ may have to be something rather more solid than we had originally contemplated.”
By the time the so-called Paris Peace Conference of 1919 began, British imperialists realised that in an age of ostensible “self-determination”, they needed to disguise their domination and rule behind a facade of native authority.
Some of these imperialists, such as TE Lawrence, indulged their vanity by thinking they were aiding the Arabs, but their one true master was the British Empire.
They sought to continue dominating the Middle East, while also claiming to sincerely comply with the new era of freedom allegedly dawning in the post-Ottoman Middle East.
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The mantra of an “Arab facade” was an adaptation of an older British ploy known as “indirect rule”, used in colonised Africa, now attuned to neutralising any emancipatory practice of “self-determination”.
Indirect rule
The British helped the Arabs overthrow the Ottomans.
They subsidised the Arab Revolt led by the Hashemite Sharif Husayn of Mecca in 1916. The Hashemites had served the Ottomans but threw in their lot with the British during the First World War.
The British promised Sharif Husayn an independent Arab kingdom across the Arab East, including Palestine, but they had no intention of granting him any such sovereignty over so vast an area.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs, with the term ‘Sykes-Picot’ becoming a metaphor for colonialism
They needed him to undermine Ottoman unity, or what was left of it at that point.
Most people in the Arab world today know that the British and the French simultaneously agreed to partition the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces among themselves.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs. The term “Sykes-Picot” is used as a metaphor for colonialism more broadly.
In 1917, the British government further muddied the waters. It granted the European Zionist movement in England an infamous anti-Palestinian declaration of support known as the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British government to support the establishment in Palestine of a vaguely worded “national home for the Jewish people”.
The declaration, in effect, supported a European Jewish nationalist and colonising project in Palestine – where Jews at the time were a small minority of the population – yet denied national rights to the vast majority of the population of Palestine: the Arabs, whom the Balfour Declaration referred to dismissively as “non-Jewish communities”.
Colonial conditions
To mollify Arab fears in the wake of revelations about the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the announcement of the Balfour Declaration, the British and French governments decided to publicly spell out their ambitions and goals in the Middle East.
They declared in November 1918 the following:
The object aimed at by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the War let loose by the ambition of Germany is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.
In order to carry out these intentions France and Great Britain are at one in encouraging and assisting the establishment of indigenous Governments and administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia, now liberated by the Allies, and in the territories the liberation of which they are engaged in securing and recognising these as soon as they are actually established.
Far from wishing to impose any particular institutions on the populations of these regions, they are only concerned to ensure, through their support and adequate assistance, the regular functioning of Governments and administrations freely chosen by the populations themselves.
To secure impartial and equal justice for all, to facilitate the economic development of the country by inspiring and encouraging local initiative, to favour the diffusion of education, to put an end to dissensions that have too long been taken advantage of by Turkish policy, such is the policy which the two Allied Governments uphold in the liberated territories.
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This propaganda, known as the Anglo-French Declaration, suggested the need for a more durable Arab facade. The essence of this facade was an unelected native ruler who would have to:
(1) Accept their own subordination to the dictates of British imperialism
(2) Accept that their personal fortunes and dynasties were tied to subordination to the British Empire
(3) Accept, or at least not challenge forcefully, overall British hegemony in the region, including acquiescing to British support for Zionist colonisation of Palestine, no matter how unpopular and unjust such colonisation was
(4) Accept that they have to either mollify their people demanding they do something to liberate Palestine, or, failing that, to crack down on these same people
Given that all these conditions had been met, the fifth and final condition was then set:
(5) That nominal independence and sovereignty might be granted, subject to all the exclusions in points one through four.
As many historians have shown, the Hashemite family fit the bill (though to be fair, so too did many other Arab rulers, such as Ibn Saud and King Fuad of Egypt).
The two sons of Sharif Husayn were installed as dependent rulers in Iraq (Faysal, after colonial France expelled him from Syria in 1920) and Transjordan (Abdullah).
As the brilliant Arab-American, Arab, and Lebanese writer Ameen Rihani put it in a book about the Hashemite King Faysal of Iraq, whom he admired, the native ruler had to be more than a puppet of colonialism but less than a truly independent ruler.
That was the 1920s version of the Arab facade.
The regional contrast to this was post-Ottoman Turkey led by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). His Kemalist movement in Turkey, for all its ills – its systematic oppression of minorities, its cruel “population exchange” with Greece, and its secular nationalist fundamentalism – actually fought off the imperialist partition of Anatolia. Turkey became vastly more sovereign than any of the Arab states, including Faysal’s Iraq.
After the Nakba of 1948, Arab officers revolted against direct and indirect subordination to foreign domination.
Resistance came in form of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers movement in Egypt, who had led a revolution against the British-backed king of Egypt in 1952. The Iraqi revolution of 1958 similarly toppled the Hashemite monarchy there.
But in the decades after 1967, the US supplanted the British as the major foreign power in the Middle East, and it has worked to rebuild the Arab facade.
Arab facade 2.0
Today, we have the Arab facade 2.0.
The original architecture and essence of the British colonial-era facade still endures, but it now serves US imperial hegemony. The restrictive conditions the British laid out in the 1920s have been augmented by a vast recycling of petrodollars to the West.
Like King Faysal of Iraq, contemporary native rulers have a margin of manoeuvre open to them.
They can and are allowed to pursue their own interests, forge their own distinctive diplomacy, and elaborate their own national and dynastic identities – so long as they remain ultimately compliant with US imperatives in the Middle East, often, as in the case of Palestine, in the face of Arab popular sentiment.
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No matter their specific role, these rulers are relegated to being bystanders or accomplices to external powers who despise Muslims and Arabs. US diktats have made an overtly expansionist Israel the centre of the American architecture of domination over the Middle East.
The Camp David Treaty, the Oslo “peace process” and the so-called “Abraham Accords” reflect capitulation to these diktats under the guise of “moderation” and “coexistence”. As Arabs compromise, Israel expands.
There are still episodes of resistance to this architecture – from Gaza to Lebanon to Yemen.
Rulers who acquiesce to US imperial interests, however, dismiss active resistance to Israeli injustice and reject democratic freedom more broadly. They have made their peace with Israeli expansionism, and some even invest in it.
Arabism is gone, but the Arab facade remains.
The lesson seems clear: just as before, the new version of the Arab facade will not lead to liberation, and often actively works against it. The facade was not designed, built, or maintained for that purpose – no matter how many decent people rest in its shade.
But facades, like colonialism, are not everlasting.
Given how much repression this Arab facade 2.0 requires to be maintained, and how much popular loathing there is for Israeli colonialism in the region, especially as a result of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, how long this facade can endure is an open question.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
