Even the Ottoman Empire, head of the world's Muslim community, seemed to have acknowledged the right of the Jews to collective revival in their ancestral homeland. On August 12, 1918, Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, one of the triumvirs who had run the empire since 1913, issued an official communiqué expressing "sympathies for the establishment of a religious and national Jewish center in Palestine by well-organized immigration and colonization" and offering to promote this enterprise "by all means" provided it "does not affect the rights of the non-Jewish population."
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Largely modeled on the Balfour Declaration and formulated in a similar process of lengthy discussions with prominent Jewish leaders, Talaat's proclamation came too late to have real significance—two-and-a-half months after its issuance, the Ottomans surrendered to the Allies—and was apparently designed to improve the Muslim empire's bargaining position in the looming postwar peace talks. Yet its issuance was nothing short of extraordinary given the violent Ottoman reaction to anything that smacked of national self-determination, from the Greek war of independence in the 1820s, to the Balkan wars of the 1870s, to the Armenian genocide of World War I. Indeed, only a year before the declaration, the Jewish community in Palestine (or the Yishuv) faced a real risk of extinction from the Ottomans for the very same reason, only to be saved through intervention by Germany, Istanbul's senior war ally.
Arabs Embrace the Declaration
Emir Faisal. Talaat was hardly the only regional potentate to accept the Jewish right to national revival. The leaders of the nascent pan-Arab movement were perfectly amenable to endorsing the Balfour Declaration so long as this seemed to be conducive to their ambitions. And none more so than the Hashemite emirs Faisal and Abdullah who, together with their father, the Sharif of Mecca Hussein ibn Ali, perpetrated the "Great Arab War" against the Ottoman Empire. They were, as it happened, generously rewarded for their endeavors in the form of vast territories several times the size of the British Isles. Yet since these spectacular gains (which comprise the current states of Iraq, Jordan, and parts of Saudi Arabia) only served to whet their appetite, the emirs continued to pursue their imperial ambitions under the pan-Arab guise.
The Hashemite emirs continued to pursue their imperial ambitions under the pan-Arab guise.
Even during the revolt, Faisal began toying with the idea of establishing his own Syrian empire, independent of his father's prospective regional empire. In late 1917 and early 1918, he went so far as to negotiate this option with key members of the Ottoman leadership behind the backs of his father and his British allies. As his terms were rejected by Istanbul, Faisal tried to gain great-power endorsement for his imperial dream, and it was here that his interests seemed to converge with that of the Zionist movement.
On June 4, 1918, Faisal met Chaim Weizmann, the Russia-born, Manchester-based rising head of the Zionist movement. The two struck up an immediate rapport, and the emir readily acknowledged "the necessity for cooperation between Jews and Arabs" and "the possibility of Jewish claims to territory in Palestine." Yet he refused to discuss Palestine's future until such a time "when Arab affairs were more consolidated."
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(full article online)
Turks, Arabs Welcomed the Balfour Declaration
