The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement

By George Antonius. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946. 471 pp. $22.00 (at selected bookstores)

Reviewed by John D. Ruedy

"The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is... morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of the Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population ... No room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession."

These words composed the concluding lines of George Antonius' The Arab Awakening, which was first published in 1939. While the basic moral question about which Antonius wrote has not been altered by the slightest fraction in 45 years, the dislodgment and extermination of the Palestinian nation which he feared is still taking place.

As the first major work in English to tell the story of the modern renaissance of the Arabs, this book still stands as a classic and as a primary reference on the subject.

Critiquing the Mandate

Antonius was a Greek Orthodox Arab of Lebanese origin who first entered British government service in Egypt and later served in Palestine, where he rose to the post of assistant secretary. He resigned in protest after the 1936 revolt in order to write the book that would give English readers a coherent account of the Arab position on the mandate system generally and on Palestine particularly, and provide the historical context within which that position had evolved.

In 400 pages of text, supplemented with extensive and valuable documentary appendices, Antonius deals with three basic themes: 1) the origins in the 19th century and the gathering momentum in the early 20th century of the Arab national movement; 2) the frustration of that movement by the ambitions of a duplicitously pursued Western imperialism; 3) the national authenticity and legitimacy of the post-World War I struggle by Arabs to free themselves from imperial control.

Antonius is quite certain about the origins of the Arab national movement. For him, it began "in Syria in 1847, with the foundation in Beirut of a modest literary society under American patron age." The coming in the 1830s of Western missionaries to Syria (of which Lebanon and Palestine were parts), brought new access to education. They learned Arabic, created a printing press for the production of Arabic classroom materials and texts and thereby contributed to a rebirth of interest in the rich literary and historical heritage of the Arabs. This literary revival, according to Antonius, took place first among Syrian Christians, and later among Muslims, and led by the 1870s and '80s to dreams and programs of political independence from the Ottomans. After 1908, when the "Young Turk" regime in Constantinople began actively to pursue a policy in Turkicization, the dreaming and planning stage of the nationalist movement was transformed into programs of overt and covert action in pursuit of Arab independence.

Pure Double Dealing

Antonius was the first to publish, in one place, relatively complete versions of the correspondence in 1915 and 1916 in which the British High Commissioner in Egypt, for whatever other reservations Britain may have had, clearly agreed to include Palestine in an independent Arab state if, in turn, the Sharif of Mecca would call the Arabs to revolt against their common enemy, the Turks. At exactly the same time, in what Antonius appraises as pure double dealing, the British signed the secret SykesPicot agreement under whose terms they and the French, after the war, were to divide up almost all the Fertile Crescent and a portion of Asiatic Turkey between themselves. A year later, worried about the strategic implications of having agreed with France to an international administration of Palestine, and also disturbed by continuing continental Jewish support for the Central Powers' war effort, the Foreign Office actively began to cultivate British Zionists—contrary to the strong wishes of many English Jews—in order to provide a cover for Britain to take sole control of Palestine. Hence the Balfour Declaration.

The final sections of the book deal with the attempts of Arab leaders in Palestine to use political channels established by the Mandate to slow the rates of Jewish immigration and transfer of economic resources to the settlers. Because British Zionists were firmly in control of the techniques for forming British public opinion and because they had access to the British domestic political process, British attempts on the scene to reach accommodation with the native population were repeatedly undone by the interference of the politicians in London. When peaceful means did not work, the Arabs turned in desperation first to agitation, and then to violence. Antonius predicted that "an unpredictable holocaust of Arab, Jewish, and British lives" would be the cost of pursuing much further the goal of a Jewish state.

Professor Ruedy is Chairman of the Program of Studies, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.