‘A Peace to End All Peace’ is a deeply flawed and highly prejudiced work

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
David Fromkin
Holt Paperbacks; 2 Reprint edition (July 21, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0805088091

David Fromkin seems to dislike Arabs. In A Peace to End All Peace he enjoys repeating disparaging comments about them: “ . . . that mysterious child of lies, the Arab . . .” (Fromkin, p. 90); “cowardly . . . insolent yet despicable . . . vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit . . . rapacious, greedy . . . animals,” (p.181); “predatory savages,” (p.443).

About the Ottoman Turks, Fromkin speaks for himself: The Turks “never entirely outgrew their origins as a marauding war band” and that “invading new territories was the only path they knew to economic growth” (p.34). Thus the Ottomans appear akin to a 1960s style American conglomerate, say Litton Industries, but instead of employing unsolicited bids and proxy fights to create higher earnings, the Turks use scimitars and Janissaries.

Fromkin also judges “the Turks had mastered the arts of war but not those of government” (p.34); certainly an extraordinary conclusion, since the Ottoman Empire was around for 600 years or so. If the Turks had not mastered the art of government, it could not have been for want of trying. The efforts of the Ottoman administration must therefore bear a certain resemblance to amorous adventures of Russia’s Catherine the Great of whom it was said that “she never learned to love but was in there trying.”

A Peace to End All Peace’s central theme is the Middle East during World War I and the British and French division of the Arabic speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire which followed, roughly the years 1914–1922. Paris and London carved up the region, which the Ottoman Turks had ruled for 400 years, according to their own interests and in such a way as to make the conflicts which have come to dominate the area seem inevitable, hence the book’s title.

When Fromkin’s book appeared in 1989, reviews ranged from favorable to ecstatic. Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal praised it as “Ambitious and splendid”; Jack Miles in the LA Times called it “wonderful”; Harold Beeley of the Financial Times dubbed it “the book of the year.” William Roger Lewis, then professor of English history at the University of Texas and a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, reviewed A Peace to End All Peace at length for The New York Times judging the book “excellent . . . Readers will come away . . . not only enlightened but challenged.” Perhaps the most laudatory, and incautious, review of all appeared in the London Times which called the book “the truth and nothing but the truth.”

A Peace to End All Peace recently appeared in a 20^th Anniversary edition; quite a success for an author who has no specialist knowledge of the Middle East and whose work relies heavily on secondary sources. While US involvement in the Middle East metastasized over the last twenty years, staggering from one disaster to another, Fromkin’s book has gone from strength to strength, both in government circles and academia. For example, the late Richard Holbrooke, architect of the bombing campaign against Serbia and later special Af-Pak envoy, wrote in the November 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs that for the Middle East “without knowledge of its backstory, no policymaker will get the region right.” Holbrooke continued: “ . . . of the vast array of books on the region, none is more relevant than Fromkin’s sweeping epic, A Peace to End All Peace.”

More recently, in February of this year, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon told the NY Times that he had read A Peace to End All Peace averring, “Having a sense of history is critical to sound policy-making.” The book has also become part of the Marine Corps’ “Professional Reading Program” for field grade officers and senior NCOs and is on a similar list for the US Navy. The US Army’s Command and General Staff College uses Fromkin’s work in some of its classes and the Department of State has made the book recommended reading for applicants preparing for State’s general knowledge test.

A Peace to End All Peace is read widely at American colleges and universities. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government used it last semester in a course titled “Understanding the ‘Arab Spring.’” A small sample of the other institutions making the book required reading includes Swarthmore (“History of the Modern Middle East”), Rutgers (“20^th Century Global History to 1945”), University of Kansas (“Sociology of the Middle East”) and the University of Virginia (“WWI: Birth of the Modern Middle East”).

Despite twenty years of favorable reviews and the endorsements of the US foreign policy and academic establishments, A Peace to End All Peace is a deeply flawed and highly prejudiced work. Fromkin denigrates Arab nationalism, belittles the promises made to the Arabs to prompt their revolt against the Turks and minimizes the Arab contribution to winning WWI. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, A Peace to End All Peace hews closely to the Zionist narrative, American version, of events in the Middle East. Fromkin presents Zionist colonization of Palestine as an essentially benign, if misunderstood, process. He attributes Palestinian Arab refusal to accept a host of unwanted and uninvited European immigrants to British weakness and of Arab ignorance and intransigence.

Fromkin’s book presents the strange notion that the British never promised the Arabs an independent state in return for their uprising against the Turks. In 1914, British officials began an exchange of letters with Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, with the ultimate objective of convincing him to revolt against his overlords in Constantinople. Contacts between Hussein’s son, Feisal, and Arab nationalists in Damascus eventually led Hussein to demand an independent Arab state in Greater Syria (today’s Syria plus the Turkish province of the Hatay, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan) as his price for leading an Arab uprising against the Turks. In October 1915, Sir Henry McMahon, High Commissioner in Egypt, representing the British government, agreed to Hussein’s terms.

Fromkin denies that the British committed themselves to Arab independence in return for help winning the war. He states flatly “McMahon deliberately used phrases so devious as to commit himself to nothing” (p.179) and “Britain did not bind herself to support Hussein’s claims anywhere at all” (p. 183). Fromkin also makes the bizarre claim that Hussein “failed to reach an agreement with McMahon, but felt compelled to support the allies nevertheless . . .” (p. 185). Can anyone seriously believe that Hussein (or any similarly placed official) would risk head, fortune and family yet demand nothing in return?

To support his contention that the British bamboozled the Arabs Fromkin quotes sources who agree with his interpretation of the McMahon-Hussein agreement. But to clinch his argument, why doesn’t he just quote the actual agreement itself? The key section is not long; McMahon to Hussein (Jewish Virtual Library, “Hussein-McMahon Correspondence,” Letter 4):

The two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded from the limits demanded.

With the above modification, and without prejudice of our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits.

As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interest of her ally, France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurances and make the following reply to your letter:—

Subject to the above modifications, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca.

McMahon’s letter does not support Fromkin’s bogus ‘’analysis” in A Peace to End All Peace so Fromkin simply omits it. He very much wants to delegitimize the British October 1915, pledge of independence to the Arabs because it significantly predates the British engagement in the Balfour Declaration, November 1917, to facilitate “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . .” Furthermore, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, granting the French rights in Greater Syria beyond the coast of Lebanon reserved in the McMahon letter, is also later, May 1916. Fromkin, a lawyer by training, wanted to vitiate the superior Arab claim. If a man contracts three marriages, only the first is valid and the other two are illegitimate, along with their offspring.

Having sought to demolish the legal underpinning for an Arab state in Greater Syria, including Palestine, Fromkin next argues that the Arabs were undeserving of a state because their uprising did not contribute significantly to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. But Fromkin has trouble keeping his story straight and contradicts himself, leaving the reader wondering whether the confusion is intentional or whether Fromkin was himself befuddled and would have done well to hire an editor. In his Introduction Fromkin states, “The Arab Revolt . . . occurred not so much in reality as in the wonderful imagination of T. E. Lawrence.” (p.15) But the Arab capture of Aqaba in July 1917 was fact, not chimera. And although Fromkin admits taking Aqaba meant “Hussein’s forces could reach a battlefield on which the British-Turkish war was actually to be fought” (p.310), he does not acknowledge the Arab victory removed all danger of a renewed Turkish assault on the Suez Canal, Britain’s absolutely critical link to India.

Fromkin concedes that “After the capture of Jerusalem, Feisal’s Arab forces . . . showed their worth.” (p.313) But of the decisive battle against the Turks in September of 1918, Fromkin makes the capture of a ford over the Jordan by a small Jewish force serving in the British Army seem at least as important as the Arab success immobilizing the Turkish forces facing the Allies. Of the Arab effort Fromkin merely says, “Further north, Feisal’s Camel Corps disrupted the railroad lines upon which the main Turkish forces depended.”(p.333) According to military historian Basil Liddell Hart, however (The Real War, pp.439–448), the Arabs were a decisive factors in the campaign. They cut the Hejaz Railway north and south of Der’a and the branch line west into Palestine. As a result, the Turks could not deploy their troops to oppose the main British thrust along the Mediterranean, retreat or even keep their forces supplied with food and ammunition. Three Ottoman armies, some 35,000 men, promptly surrendered, bringing the Allied struggle against the Ottoman Empire to a speedy and victorious conclusion.

Despite the Arab’s key role in the final campaign against the Ottomans, Fromkin soon consigns the Arab Revolt to the realm of make-believe once more: “The British did pretend, however, that Feisal and his followers had played a substantial role in the liberation of Syria.”(p.394)

After the war Greater Syria was divided between Britain and France, consistent with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The British obtained the Mandate for Palestine. American and European Zionists drafted the Mandatory document to facilitate Jewish colonization. In addition to betraying the promises made to the Arabs in the Hussein-McMahon Agreement, the Palestine Mandate clearly violated the letter and intent of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points which formed the basis for the Armistice ending WWI, especially Point Twelve: “The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” Fromkin, in his lawyerly way, defends British and Zionist arrangements to side step Wilson and deny self-determination to the Palestinians based on a technicality, claiming the Fourteen Points were not binding in the East because the United States had not declared war on the Ottoman Empire. (pp. 367 & 394).

Continuing his practice of belittling Arabs, Fromkin is scathing in his criticism of Arab nationalist politics in Damascus between the collapse of Ottoman rule at the end of WWI and the French conquest of the city in July 1920. He remarks censoriously that the Arabs in charge of Damascus “were from land owning families, with a stake in maintaining the established order” and were “made up in large part of Ottoman soldiers and officials.” (p.408) Just whom did Fromkin imagine would emerge as leaders in Syria? Bedouin herdsmen and tenant farmers? If land owners and former British officers had been excluded from the American Revolution, Jefferson would not have been in Congress to write the Declaration of Independence and Washington would have been disqualified from leading the Continental Army. Fromkin also chides Feisal for not recognizing the need to put “the Syrian National Congress in the hands of men who would be prepared to endorse . . . extensive concessions . . .”(p.435) Good thing Fromkin wasn’t advising the Continental Congress in 1776; if he had, we would be celebrating Elisabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee instead of July 4^th.

Fromkin claims that the French had “few troops” available to oust the Arab government from Damascus and that “the defenders of Damascus panicked, turned and fled and offered no resistance.” (p.439) Fromkin’s assertions are untrue. The French had 9000 men supported by aircraft and artillery; the Arabs, 3000 men under arms, mostly inexperienced volunteers. The Feisal’s Minister of War, thirty-six year old Yusef al-Azmeh, a graduate of the Ottoman Military Academy in Istanbul and an ex-Ottoman army officer, led the Arabs. The opposing forces met at the Maysaloun, some twelve miles west of Damascus; the Arabs were defeated and al-Azmeh killed. The Arabs suffered around 400 dead and the French about 50. The French entered Damascus the next day.

In the wake of the French occupation Fromkin speaks only of “local uprisings” and “disturbances” (p.440); the truth is rather different. A French attempt to crush a rising in the Jebel Druze in 1925 provoked a general revolt across Syria which took two years to defeat. It may be worth noting that the French never achieved even a modicum of legitimacy in Syria. To rule the country they divided Syria along confessional lines and favored minorities for government positions. Thus the Alawites came to dominate the nascent Syrian military, a situation unchanged through the Assad dictatorships.

Early in A Peace to End All Peace Fromkin tries to explain his efforts to discredit Arab nationalism, “Unlike European nationalists, they were people whose beliefs existed in a religious rather than secular framework. They lived with the walls of the city of Islam . . .” (p.102) But it makes good sense that Arab nationalism and Islam should be intertwined. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Greater Syria spoke Arabic, the language of the Quran, a majority were Muslims and the region had been a part of the Muslim nation for over a thousand years. The Omayyad Caliphate, which conquered much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, had had its capital in Damascus.

While Fromkin finds Arab nationalism tainted by religion, he applauds Zionism, entirely the marriage of nationalism and religion: “The future return to Zion remained a Messianic vision until the ideology of nineteenth-century Europe converted it into a contemporary political program.” (p.271) Fromkin even associates Zionism with late 19^th century European nationalism and the unification of Germany and Italy: “A representative idea of that time was that every nation ought to have an independent country of its own.”(p.271) Fromkin also recognizes the “dark side of the new nationalism: intolerance of groups different from the majority.”(p.272) Thus the Zionist imperative to build a Jewish state with a Jewish majority in Palestine: Jews would gain the protections of a state of their own, but only if they could dislodge the native population.

Comparing German and Italian nationalism and unification to Zionism is, of course, wholly absurd. The vast majority of people within the state Cavour created were already Italian. The situation was similar in the German states Bismarck brought together. At the end of WWI, Jews constituted about 15% of the population of Palestine. The aim of creating a Zionist state required something very unusual: that the minority should oppress the majority until the minority should become the majority. To accomplish this Zionists in the 1920s had to rely on the British to deprive the Palestinian Arabs of self-government and political rights. Had the Palestinians attained political power, they would have immediately halted Jewish immigration and abrogate the advantages the Zionists enjoyed under the British Mandate.

Fromkin writes “Zionist leaders . . . claimed that, had the Arab population of the country been made to feel that the Balfour Declaration was the unalterable policy of the British government and inevitably would be carried into effect, Arabs would have acquiesced-and might even have become receptive to its benefits” (p.445), a spurious argument he repeats in several places. Spokesmen for Zionism outside of Palestine making their pitches in Europe and the United States might have made such a claim, but neither Ben Gurion’s Labor Zionists nor Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, the two major branches of Zionism, had any illusions about reaching a modus vivendi with the Palestinian Arabs. Fromkin himself admits, “Moslem opposition to a Jewish Palestine had arisen long before the war, in the wake of Zionist colonization at the end of the nineteenth century. (pp.92–3) And Yosef Gorny, in his Zionism and the Arabs 1882–1948, records organized protests against European colonization dating from 1891 when “ five hundred Jerusalem Arab notables protested against the revival of Jewish immigration and complained that ‘the Jews are taking all the land out of Muslim hands and taking over all the commerce . . . ’” (Gorny p.21) Clearly the Arabs understood exactly what Zionism sought to accomplish and opposed it from the very beginning.

Although Fromkin quotes Jabotinsky’s call for “an iron wall” of military force to protect Jews from Arabs and notes Jabotinsky’s view that the Palestinians would never accept the takeover of their land, he omits several of Jabotinsky’s key statements because they contradict his narrative that Arab resistance to Zionism sprang from base motives. Jabotinsky scorned the contention “that the Arabs are either fools who can be deceived by a watered down version of our objectives, or are a greedy tribe ready to forgo their prior rights to Palestine in return for cultural or economic advantages” and that there were any “blandishments or promises in the world which would have the power to persuade them to renounce [Palestine]-precisely because they are not a mob but a living nation.” (Jabotinsky, quoted by Gorny, pp. 165–6)

Fromkin may claim that Ben Gurion was a socialist, but when international labor solidary and the interests of Zionist colonization clashed, settlements and the need to create a Jewish majority in Palestine came first. Labor Zionists led the effort to remove Arab labor from Jewish agricultural colonies. Although Fromkin notes that the Arab “peasantry struggled to eke out a living from low-yielding, much-eroded, poorly irrigated plots, while large holdings of fertile lands were being accumulated by influential families of absentee landlords” (p.522), he does not reveal that Arab tenant farmers worked the majority of the arable land in Palestine under informal share cropper arrangements often dating back generations. Zionist purchase of agricultural land for agricultural colonies that used Jewish labor exclusively turned the tenant farmer off the land, out of his house and into an impoverish town dweller or vagabond.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson dispatched the King Crane Commission to Greater Syria in 1919 to ascertain the kind of political settlement the local people actually wanted. The Commissioners sampled public opinion in the region by meeting local groups and accepting signed petitions. As with the McMahon-Hussein agreement, however, Fromkin dismisses the King Crane Report while concealing what it actually said. Why? A Peace to End All Peace states, “Among the Arabic speaking communities of Palestine, there was considerable disagreement on most issues and perhaps even on Zionism (p. 446). Really? In Palestine, the King Crane Commission received 260 petitions, of which 222 or 85% were opposed to European colonization. The Report itself states that “the non-Jewish population of Palestine-nearly nine tenths of the whole-are emphatically against the whole Zionist Program . . . there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this.”

Fromkin aims to make Winston Churchill the leading personality in A Peace to End All Peace, but has his work cut out for him because Churchill made consistently bad military and political decisions in the eastern Mediterranean during World War I. Churchill’s decision to seize two Turkish warships building in British shipyards in 1914 certainly helped convince the Ottomans to join the Central Powers, especially because the vessels had been financed by public subscription. His order to the Royal Navy to confine Ottoman warships to the Dardanelles even before war broke out led the Turks to close the waterway to Russian commerce in retaliation. Russian grain exports and a high percentage of machinery and other capital goods imports were cut off, thus dealing the Russian economy a major blow. Considering Churchill’s intense hatred for Bolshevism, it is ironic that his aggressive military stance toward the Ottomans contributed significantly to fall of the Czar and success of the Soviets.

Churchill continued to support the disastrous British invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli, using largely Australian and New Zealand troops, long after the extremely bloody campaign had utterly failed. When the troops were finally withdrawn in December 1915, Churchill was forced to vacate his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. His political career went into eclipse.

Churchill had little to do with the Middle East between the Dardanelles campaign of 1915 and his appointment as Colonial Secretary at the beginning of 1921. Thus Fromkin’s statement in the introduction that “Churchill, above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them” (p. 19) seems quite silly, even more so because the decisions Churchill did make during World War I in the east were uniformly calamitous. Perhaps Churchill’s consistent support for Zionism informs Fromkin’s assertion that Churchill’s story lies at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, Churchill lectured the Palestinian leadership repeatedly about Great Britain’s determination to impose the terms of the Mandate on a native population who were just as determined to resist becoming aliens in their own land.

Much of Fromkin’s book is a rather unsophisticated apology for Zionism, albeit a very long winded one. Fromkin’s style is to dazzle the reader with an unremitting and sometimes contradictory frenzy of facts, half-truths, misstatements and clever distortions and omissions. The non-specialist and the undergraduate may be forgiven for not recognizing Fromkin’s errors, unsupported conclusions and systemic bias. But the professional academic can offer no such alibi; that A Peace to End All Peace has lived at the heart of the American academic establish unchallenged for years seems downright bizarre.

John Taylor holds degrees in Near Eastern languages and history from the University of Chicago and Cambridge University. He has worked in the region as an archaeologist, banker and civil servant.