We ended the last segment with the fall of the Ottoman Empire (OE) after it entered WWI as a member of the Central Powers, and the Central Powers were then defeated by the Allies. Our primary focus is on Palestine, which was a province in the now defunct OE. Decisions, declarations, and treaties were made during and following WWI that have been referenced ever since to justify a given perspective on what was intended and agreed to by the decision makers then, and consequently how things should be now. Examples include the Balfour Declaration, Sykes-Picot Treaty, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, and the Treaty of Versailles.
I want you to consider what it would be like if you had been sent to Paris following the end of World War I with the mission of crafting a treaty that would restore peace and sufficiently satisfy the interests of your fellow countrymen that they would concur with the terms of the treaty and other agreements that you helped craft. While there would be multiple leaders and representatives from many countries and people groups in Paris after the Armistice to work out a treaty or a series of treaties, there were basically only three countries and primarily one man from each of those countries that made nearly all the key decisions. They were:
- Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France
- David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain
- Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA
I can think of no time in human history where the tangible fate of more people was riding on the decisions of three men than these “Big Three” at the Paris Peace Conference following WW I.
(Note: Italy was included in “The Big Four”. However, my reading is that Italy’s Prime Minister Orlando did not make a significant difference.)
Let’s stop and recognize the level of chaos, disorder and despair that existed and then attempt to briefly look at the perspectives and challenges of each man. My point for doing this is so that we can understand how immaterial the fate of Palestine was to Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Woodrow Wilson was the only one of the three to care about the self-determination of people with a common ethnic group and culture. (This fell under Point #5 of his famous 14 Points.)
The chaos from lack of governance of key nations. Of the six main powers that were engaged at the beginning of the war: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the OE on one side and Great Britain, France, and Russia on the other, the governments of three: Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia – all monarchies – had been deposed by the time of the signing of the armistice ending WWI. The governments that replaced them were weak and considered illegitimate by many of their respective citizens and by many other nations. Further, there were forces hard at work trying to overthrow the governments that survived the war. Communists aspired to overthrow the governments of Great Britain and France. Nationalism, which I identified as one of the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Empire, was spurred on by Wilson’s promotion of self-determination. Within a few years, the Sultan of the OE would be deposed by Kemal Pasha (aka Ataturk) and the Turkish Nationalists. The world was truly turned upside down.
Destruction, Death, and Injury. France had taken the brunt of the physical devastation of the war with much of its most productive industrial and agricultural areas destroyed. Its GDP was only 60% of what it had been pre-war. Over 4% of its population, about 1.7 million had died and more than 4 million military were wounded. This was the second major war France had had with Germany. In 1871, France had been severely defeated by Germany and was humiliated by the terms of the treaty which required France to pay heavy reparations and to lose territory. Great Britain had not suffered much physical destruction, but about 2% of its population had been killed and twice that many wounded. All totaled, WWI resulted in the deaths of some 20 million people, and even more were seriously wounded.
Spanish Flu. Beginning in 1918, as the war was coming to an end, the Spanish Flu struck. It infected 500 million people, or about one third of the world’s population and killed some 50 million people worldwide. This was in addition to those killed by the war.
Stop a moment and compare the problems facing us today to those of the people living a century ago and appreciate how fortunate we are to be alive now and not then.
Main objectives and obstacles of the three key men.
1. Clemenceau’s main objective was to so cripple and hamstring Germany that it could never threaten France again. He wanted to hang the blame for the war fully on Germany and impose very heavy reparations to repay France for its severe losses. He also wanted to take back from Germany provinces lost by France in the previous war. In the Middle East, he wanted France to control oil rich provinces and port access to them.
2. Lloyd George wanted to make sure that the U.K. had a share in Germany’s colonies and that Germany’s navy would be reduced. He was also under pressure from the British public to punish Germany and make it pay reparations. This was balanced by a desire to keep Germany strong enough to be a useful trading partner for the U.K. (Germany had been GB’s #1 trading partner prior to the War.) In the Middle East, like Clemenceau, he wanted his country to have control and access to the oil fields. Regarding Palestine, per Dr. Fisher “Lloyd George was unimpressed by Zionist pleas, but he definitely opposed the idea of the Holy Places falling into the hands of ‘agnostic, atheistic France’.”
3. Woodrow Wilson. America had suffered far less than the other countries involved so Wilson was inclined to be less harsh towards Germany. He was more interested in a “just and stable peace”. In addition to self-determination, his 14 Points for Peace included freedom of the seas (something Brits totally opposed) and setting up a League of Nations. He felt it would be best to help Germany re-build and encourage everyone to focus more on peace than on revenge.
Woodrow Wilson arrived in France in mid-December 1918. He contracted the flu while in Paris in April 1919, which undermined his ability to advocate more strongly for his ideas. Had he not been so debilitated, it is probable the treaty with Germany would have been more fair and WW II precluded. What Wilson did get was the formation of The League of Nations and the empowerment of this newly created body to oversee the governing and future disposition of over a dozen colonies and provinces that had been held by the Central Powers. That the Treaty of Versailles specifically included a “mandate” that “Palestine” one day be an independent nation with the people within its borders self-determining the kind of government they would have, is amazing considering all the other issues and problems that those men had to address and attempt to resolve.
Woodrow Wilson has really gone up in my eyes for creating the League of Nations and getting the other two men to sign off on having the colonies of their vanquished foes become their respective nations’ “protectorates” rather than simply their new colonies.
While chaos and disorder were reigning throughout half the world, there was one group of people who were laser focused on achieving a two-millennial old goal: To make Palestine a homeland for the Jews. We will turn to this topic in the next segment.
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