But Nimr and Sarruf quickly realized that the Americans were not entirely open to every aspect of the Arabs’ modernization. The missionaries excluded Arabs from professorships and high positions. “Sarruf and Nimr extolled scientific modernity as a vehicle for Arab emancipation,” Makdisi writes, “without realizing that it was the same historic force that had given rise to powerful Western, including American, ideas about the fundamental superiority of the white Anglo-Saxons over all other races.” Some years later, in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt visited a restive Cairo to tell the Egyptians to abandon their fight for independence from the British. The Arab intellectuals of the time were outraged that the American president would betray his own American ideals. They felt “Roosevelt should act as an American, not as an imperialist European.”
The Arabs, however, still had faith in the American missionaries. It was one of these imperialist missionaries with good intentions, Howard Bliss, who stood before the world leaders in Paris after World War I and proposed that a commission be sent to Syria and Lebanon to ask the Arab people whether or not they wanted to be ruled by a foreign power. President Woodrow Wilson agreed. A Western leader had decided to listen to the natives. Thus began the journey of Charles Crane and Henry King.
If the Sykes-Picot Agreement was an act of imperialism, Makdisi writes, the Arab writer George Antonius saw the King-Crane Commission as the manifestation of American goodness. Crane wrote home that “even the Bedouin of the desert knew and appreciated what America had done for Cuba and the Philippines,” and that Arabs said that should they not be granted independence, they would accept the guardianship of the United States. “They declared that their choice was due to knowledge of America’s record,” King and Crane wrote, “their belief that America had no territorial or colonial ambitions, and would willingly withdraw when the Syrian state was well established as her treatment both of Cuba and the Philippines seemed to them to illustrate … From the point of view of the desires of the ‘people concerned,’ the Mandate should clearly go to America.”
The Arabs were misinformed about Cuba and the Philippines, and Crane and King were clearly biased, but in any case, the remarkable contents of the King-Crane Commission were cast aside for European ambitions. Syria and Iraq were handed over to the French and British, mainly for their oil fields, and Western-backed rulers installed in their capitals, as well as in Cairo, where independence riots were repressed. Writing decades after the event, the journalist Muhammad Haykal recalled that the decision fell on the Egyptians “like a bolt of lightning,” especially because of the betrayal by Woodrow Wilson. “Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to self-determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to self-determination,” Haykal writes. “Is this not the ugliest of treacheries?!”
Despite King and Crane’s grave warnings against it, the Americans would also support the establishment of a Jewish state. It was to be the first in a series of turning points over Israel. The Arabs who admired America so much saw American support for the Jews as “bigotry.” Antonius had believed that the American missionaries had been crucial to the Arab national movement. He had even dedicated his book to Charles Crane. But the ultimate test of the Western-Arab relationship was whether the West would force Palestinians from their land so that the Jewish people who suffered during the Holocaust might have a refuge: “To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world,” Antonius said. “It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another.”
The Arabs who found their lands once again conquered were vulnerable and helpless. They had no modern armies, few sympathetic representatives abroad. Arab intellectuals debated the correct response to such a catastrophic betrayal: nationalism or Islamism, democracy or authoritarianism, pro-Western or anti. The Arab thinker from this general era that Americans may know today is, again, Sayyid Qutb; after September 11, his texts were pored over to understand Muslim fundamentalism, the hidden strain of Arab life that explained everything. But Arab intellectuals were grappling with the crisis of Israel and the Arab world with varying analyses and prescriptions that didn’t involve an Islamic revival. Many, such as the intellectual Constantine Zurayk, who used the term nakba to describe how the establishment of Israel wounded Arab souls, continued to embrace Western progress as a guide for the “wholesale revolution” within Arab society.
On the question of Israel in Palestine, however, there was no debate. The pro-American Arabs of this era, those who had been raised in American schools and who had thrilled to American ideas, would become heartbroken and disillusioned. The Americans, who had by then embraced the spirit of their missionary forebears, found themselves the patriarchs of a region, one of uncommon riches and uncommon despair.