“We Tender Our Most Grateful Thanks”
When Winston Churchill was appointed Secretary of State for War and Air in 1919, he was tasked with two major things: demobilizing and economizing. He set to work with his usual enthusiasm and creativity, only to discover that there was one geographic area in which he made no progress, namely the Arab provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The complications connected to this part of the world included the fact that three government offices claimed those provinces as theirs—the Foreign Office, the India Office, and the Colonial Office. France also claimed part of the region based on wartime agreements, but so did the Sharifians and the Zionists. At the same time, not only had the Turks not signed a peace treaty, but a nationalist force was also growing in Eastern Anatolia. To top it off, the Bolsheviks were expanding their power into the Middle East.
After two years of frustration, Churchill convinced the government to put the Middle East provinces under the control of the Colonial Office. He was then appointed Colonial Secretary, again with the tasks of demobilizing and economizing. The first thing that Churchill did was to call for a conference of the British Middle East experts to meet in Cairo and discuss how to deal with the British-controlled areas of Iraq and Palestine. These experts had to keep in mind that, even though the British armies had conquered the areas during the First World War, in the new world order of the League of Nations, the British were only mandated control of these territories with the task of educating the people in democratic practices, such as developing representative institutions, until they were ready to rule themselves.
The agenda for the Cairo Conference was drawn up in London, and then specialists in Cairo worked out the details of the new Middle East policy. The focus was on using air power, local gendarmeries, and cheap Indian troops, as well as supporting members of the Sharifian family—Feisal in Iraq and Abdullah in Trans-Jordan. But as 1921 progressed, Churchill’s optimism about Palestine waned. Despite his many declarations of sympathy for Zionism, he was annoyed. His annoyance
