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Portrait of the King-Crane Commission at the Hotel Royal, Beirut, July 1919 (courtesy of Oberlin College Archives)
Seated at table, Commissioners King (left) and Crane (right). Standing, left to right, physician and interpreter, Sami Haddad; technical advisers, Captain William Yale, Albert H. Lybyer and George R. Montgomery; secretary, Donald M. Brodie; and business manager, Laurence S. Moore.

The King-Crane Report of 1919 and “the people immediately concerned”

By Jack Schwartzwald

In his Independence Day address of 1918, just months before the firing of the last shot of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson declared that issues of sovereignty should be resolved “upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.”¹ On August 28^th of the following year, America’s King-Crane Commission sought to use Wilson’s axiom to reverse the favorable stance of the U.S. government on Britain’s Balfour Declaration, which called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People.”

The fate of Palestine had been the object of at least three agreements during the Great War. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had promised it to the Jews; the Sykes-Picot agreement (drafted secretly by British diplomat, Mark Sykes, and his French opposite, Charles Georges-Picot, in 1916), had apportioned the northern extremity of Palestine to France, the southern extremity to Britain and the middle, including Jerusalem, to a condominium of the great powers; while the October 24, 1915 “McMahon letter” to Sherif Hussein of Mecca implicitly excluded Palestine from the territories earmarked for eventual Arab independence. While this last point is sometimes debated, the letter’s author, Sir Henry McMahon, always maintained that Palestine had been part of the excluded “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.”² As he told the London Times in July 1937, “I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically that it was not intended by me … to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included … was well understood by [Sherif] Hussein.”³

In any event, the point was rendered moot in January 1918, when the British orientalist, D. G. Hogarth, confirmed in a conference with Sherif Hussein that, “the Jewish opinion of the world is in favour of a return of the Jews to Palestine, and … His Majesty’s Government view with favour the realization of this aspiration … in so far as is compatible with the freedom of the existing population …. ” Sherif Hussein was opposed to the notion of an independent Jewish State—an issue that Hogarth was careful not to explore further during the meeting—but when told that adherence to the British program would win “the support of World Jewry to the Arab cause,” Hussein “agreed enthusiastically.” ⁴ The following year, Hussein’s son, Emir Feisal, seconded this approval in an agreement with Chaim Weizmann and in a letter of confirmation to the American Zionist notable, Felix Frankfurter.⁵

The wheels of the King-Crane Commission were set in motion by a letter, dated February 7, 1919, from American University President Howard Bliss in Beirut to Woodrow Wilson, conveying to the latter the wish of the Syrian people to “express their own political aspirations.” Initially, the commission inquiring into these aspirations was slated to include representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy. The British selected Sir Henry McMahon and D. G. Hogarth as its commissioners, but France and Italy demurred lest the inquiry rob them of spoils agreed upon by the Allies during the war. Rather than risk a breach with France by participating without her, Britain backed out. Hence it was a wholly American commission, headed by Henry Churchill King, President of Oberlin College, and Charles R. Crane, a plumbing magnate and Wilson confidante, which arrived in Jaffa on June 10, 1919.

When it issued its report⁶ 11 weeks later, the Commission’s verdict on Zionism was devastating: Although the report contends that the commissioners began their investigation “with minds predisposed in [Zionism’s] favor,” they had found “that the non-Jewish population of Palestine—nearly nine-tenths of the whole—are emphatically against the entire Zionist program.”⁷ Indeed, “there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this.” Consequently, the Commission recommended “serious modification of the extreme Zionist program … of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.”⁸

In his biography of Henry Churchill King, Donald Love hails the Commission’s report as “a monument to intelligent and idealistic diplomacy.”⁹ Professor E. A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin pronounced it a “perfect example of mathematical demonstration in the field of human relationships,”¹⁰ while George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening, called it “a document of outstanding importance,” constituting “the only source to which the historian can turn for a disinterested and wholly objective analysis of the state of feeling in Arab political circles in the period immediately following the War.”¹¹

High words of praise, to be sure, but at least in Antonius’ case, one need not progress beyond his book’s dedication page before calling his own—and Commissioner Crane’s—objectivity into question; for Antonius dedicated the work to Crane, noting that, in Arab circles, the Commissioner was “aptly” known by the nickname, “Harun al-Rashid”—a reference to the great 8^th Century Arab Muslim ruler of that name who once sent an elephant to Charlemagne as a present. The tribute was a reflection of Crane’s habitual gift giving toward Arab causes. Indeed, as his niece, Mary Barrows, noted in her introduction to Commissioner Crane’s memoir, “Among the varied peoples of the world whom he knew, Charles Crane probably felt closer to the Moslems than to any other group”¹²—a character trait that should have shed doubt on his ability to contribute to “a disinterested and wholly objective analysis” of Zionism. (How much doubt, we shall presently see.)

Nor does the report achieve the “perfection” ascribed to it in the realm of “mathematical demonstration.” Of 1,863 local petitions considered in their deliberations, for example, the Commissioners admit that “the number of petitions from the different sections of Syria is not proportional to their respective populations,” and “the number of petitions from the different religious organizations is not proportional to the numerical strength of the religious faiths.” They also note that many of the petitions “show clearly the influence of organized propaganda,” while others have been “fraudulently secured.” They contend, however, that, “the great majority of irregularities offset one another.”¹³

This wishful contention is open to doubt. The bottom-line recommendation of the King-Crane Commission was that that the peoples of “Greater Syria” (including Lebanon and Palestine) desired unity under an American mandatory rather than division under the British and French—a conclusion that might strike the reader as self-serving purely on nationalistic grounds since it emanated from an American commission. Nationalism, however, may have had nothing to do with it. Before becoming president of Oberlin College, Commissioner King had been schooled at that institution, which was then known for its Christian missionary zeal.¹⁴ As Professor Stuart Knee notes in his seminal 1977 article on the Commission, the first person of note the commissioners met on their arrival in the Near East was Reverend Otis Glazebrook, the American Consul in Jerusalem. Besides being an ardent anti-Zionist, Glazebrook “envisioned…the transformation of the late Turkish empire into a vast theatre for American missionary enterprise.”¹⁵

In the ensuing six weeks, the Commission gathered petitions with the declared purpose of divining the aspirations of the Syrian population. But when the results were tallied it was found that Muslims—comprising more than 75% of the population—authored only about a third of the petitions, while the far less numerous Christian population accounted for more than half. During its 16-day tour of Palestine, where Muslims outnumbered Christians by eight to one, the Commission received “53 delegations of Christians … and only 18 delegations of Moslems.”¹⁶ Knee concludes from such data that, “Far from being an ‘experiment in peacemaking,’ the King-Crane Report was a pro-Christian document.”¹⁷

But even if the report’s numbers had added up, its inconsistencies in logic would have proved its undoing. As noted, the commissioners did not hesitate to adopt Wilson’s axiom of “free acceptance … by the people immediately concerned” in dealing with majority views in Palestine. But when the report turns its focus to Lebanon, “a predominantly Christian country,” that “naturally fears Moslem domination in a unified Syria,” the commissioners reach an inverse conclusion. Namely, that “Lebanon would be in a position to exert a stronger and more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian State, feeling its problems and needs … instead of outside it, absorbed simply in her own narrow concerns,” and that “there would be less danger of reactionary Moslem attitude, if Christians were present in the state in considerable numbers, rather than largely segregated outside [it].”¹⁸ (At first glance, this conclusion may not seem to jibe with Knee’s contention that “the King-Crane Report was a pro-Christian document.” It is to be noted, however, that if King’s intention was to pursue Glazebrook’s “American missionary enterprise” throughout the whole of “Greater Syria,” the inclusion of Lebanon’s Christians would have been needed to build the requisite Christian base.)

More startling than the report’s inconsistencies are its assumptions about Zionist aims and Jewish character. The report states, for example, “that it came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.”¹⁹ If true, it is a matter of some wonderment that none of these repeated examples are to be found in the Oberlin College King-Crane Commission Archives. Instead, the archival materials show that the Zionists spoke repeatedly of working with, and assisting, their Arab neighbors. After a meeting with a Zionist delegation in Jaffa, for example, Captain William Yale, one of the Commission’s technical advisers, made note of the Zionists’ belief that, “Jewish Colonists could mix with the Arabs and could be a help to the Arabs.”²⁰ Two days later, in an address to the Commission at Rishon-le-Zion, a Jewish speaker boasted that the agricultural improvements the Zionists had introduced had been “of use for our native neighbors.”²¹

In point of fact, the whole Zionist position was rooted in the idea that Palestine could accommodate massive Jewish immigration without dispossessing any of the resident Arabs. And evidence to this effect is present in the archives. For example, although Albert Lybyer, the Commission’s general technical adviser, states in his report of June 13, 1919, that the Zionists desire “Jewish immigration until the Jews become a majority” in Palestine,²² he mentions nothing about Jewish plans to dispossess the Arab natives.²³ To the contrary, in a diary entry of the same date, he writes that Jewish delegation member Montague David Eder believed that the “Jewish people need [a] national home to prevent dissolution” and that, in Eder’s estimate, “[there is] room [in Palestine] for 2 million” of them.²⁴ Likewise, on page 3-A of his historical sketch of the commission’s visit to Syria, Lybyer recorded that the Zionists believed that “the land can contain several times its present number of inhabitants,” and that in their view, “the Zionistic plan would bring great prosperity to all in the land, both present population and immigrants.”²⁵ In a petition of June 16, 1919, the Zionist Commission (Zionism’s official voice in Palestine) was even more explicit, noting that, there “is ample room in the land for a large increase in the population”; that “almost 90% [of Palestine’s 10,000 square miles] is now uncultivated”; that, “Expert estimates of the future population of Palestine … vary, but all allow that the land can itself sustain a population at least three times the number of the present inhabitants,” and that consequently, “a large Jewish immigration may be encouraged without touching land now occupied and cultivated.”²⁶

That the Zionists had no intention of dispossessing Palestine’s Arabs was hardly a secret. Chaim Weizmann, the leading Zionist figure of the era, repeatedly stressed this point, saying in 1913, for example, that the Arabs “fear that Jewish settlement in Palestine will oust them from the country and we must dispel these fears and explain to them that there is room in Palestine both for us and for them.”²⁷ As head of the Zionist Commission visiting Palestine in March 1918, Weizmann reiterated the point to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Kamel Effendi, saying, that, “there was room for both [Arabs and Jews] to work side by side.”²⁸ Later, he would confirm the point even more forcefully to a New York audience, saying, that, “We do not even let it enter our minds to build Palestine at the expense of others. There is plenty of room for them and for us and for a large number of Jews who will come and bring with them an abundance of blessing and prosperity.”²⁹ Similarly, in 1918, David Ben-Gurion wrote an article citing scientific evidence that Palestine could accommodate 6 million people, and stating that the Zionist program was “based on the reality of unexploited economic potentials, and of unbuilt-up stretches of land,” adding that equal rights were “possessed by the inhabitants already living in the country—and these rights must not be infringed upon.”³⁰

More disturbing than its misrepresentation of Zionist aims toward the local populace, is the Commission’s misconceived view of Judaism, as embodied in the following passage—the most troubling in the entire King-Crane Report: “With the best possible intentions, it may be doubted whether the Jews could possibly seem to either Christians or Moslems proper guardians of the holy places, or custodians of the Holy Land as a whole. The reason is this: the places which are most sacred to Christians—those having to do with Jesus—and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them.”³¹ The source of this unmerited assertion is not explicitly documented in the report, but there is at least some evidence that it originated with Christian and Muslim delegations in Palestine. In his “historical sketch” of August 1, 1919, for example, Albert Lybyer records that among the “principle considerations” urged by these groups was the claim that “as Christians and Moslems, they can honor all the Holy Places whereas the Jews can honor only their own …. ”³² If these anti-Zionist delegations were indeed the source of the charge, their claim ought not to have been accepted at face value. That it was not only accepted, but also proffered as a viable argument in the Commission’s final report, suggests a degree of ignorance or bigotry sufficient to disqualify the Commission as an impartial body of inquiry.

Sadly, in the case of Commissioner Crane, bigotry would appear to hold the edge over ignorance. In her introduction to his memoirs, Mary Barrows notes that “in view of his sympathy with the Moslem peoples, another question arises: did Charles Crane possibly entertain a prejudice against the Jews?” After stating, in effect, that in the days before Hitler virtually everyone was anti-Semitic (citing as evidence that even Eleanor Roosevelt once said of Felix Frankfurter that he was “an interesting little man but very jew [sic]”), and after questioning whether the term “anti-Semitism … may be used where two Semitic peoples, Arabs and Jews, are involved” (which indeed it can, since as Edward Alexander has noted, “antisemites do not hate ‘Semites’: they hate Jews”³³), Ms. Barrows concedes that there are “a sprinkling of remarks unsympathetic toward Jews in the Charles Crane Memoirs.”³⁴ Unfortunately, there was also a storm of such remarks by Crane outside his memoirs—perhaps the most terse being his advice over dinner to newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, in 1933, that, when it came to Nazi treatment of the Jews, Dodd should “let Hitler have his way.”³⁵