George Antonius was a renowned Lebanese writer and diplomat who moved to Jerusalem in 1921 and remained there until his death. He devoted his life to fighting for the unity of Greater Syria and to defending Palestine.
Introduction
An author, diplomat, and pioneering historian of Arab nationalism, George Antonius is remembered as one of Jerusalem’s most sophisticated intellectuals. But the celebrated Jerusalemite was not in fact from Jerusalem or Palestine. Born in 1891 in the Lebanese mountain village of Deir al-Qamar, southeast of Beirut, Antonius only moved to Jerusalem in 1921 when the Colonial British Mandate administration employed him in the Education Department.1 By 1925, he received Palestinian citizenship; by 1933, he was the personal secretary of the mufti of Jerusalem and was living in his home; and by 1939, he had published the foremost book on Arab nationalism and served as the secretary-general of the united Arab delegation to St. James’s Palace in London.
Who was this brilliant thinker from Mount Lebanon? Why did he move to Jerusalem? And how did he come to embrace Palestinian self-determination as a core and guiding political principle?
Elite Upbringing and Early Political Career
Antonius was born into a Syrian Christian Orthodox family, a minority in the largely Maronite Catholic mountain town of Deir al-Qamar, and within the larger majority-Muslim region. Historian Susan Silsby argues that it was this minority status which created an “affinity with the West and loyalty to Great Britain” in Antonius’s father, Habib.2 In 1902, Antonius’s family moved to British-occupied Alexandria, where his father entered the lucrative cotton trade. “Integrated into a rich and cosmopolitan society of Syrian Christians who were enamored of Europe,” Antonius studied at the prestigious Victoria College in Alexandria from 1902 to 1910 alongside other children “from leading pro-British families” in the city. Indeed, though Antonius wrote and spoke four languages (Arabic, English, French, and German), English came to dominate the young polyglot’s thinking and speaking.
Place Mohammed Ali, Alexandria, Egypt, early 20th century
Credit:
Scoop Empire
The Corniche at Sidi Bish Beach, Alexandria, Egypt, 1935
Credit:
Egyptian Streets
In 1910, Antonius went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for three years, earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering. By graduation in 1913, Silsby explains, “he had acquired a nineteenth century positivist view of the world, as well as the taste, manners, and identity of an elite Englishman.”3 Returning to Egypt, Antonius joined the public works department of the British-administered Egyptian government,4 and a year later, with the outbreak of World War I, he was assigned to the sensitive post of deputy chief press censor in Egypt. He spent the next few years in Egypt mingling with leading British officers and befriending the intellectual elite, including the Nimr family, among other Syrian immigrants, as well as European literary figures like E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy.5
Throughout the war years, Britain made conflicting commitments: On the one hand, it promised the Arabs independence as a united Arab kingdom that would include all of Greater Syria in exchange for their help ousting the Ottomans, and on the other, it plotted the partition of Greater Syria into British and French “spheres of influence,” with Palestine going to the Zionists. These duplicitous policies frustrated Arab nationalists, including Antonius, who had put their faith in Britain as a guarantor of their political aspirations. Antonius reflected on the mandate system later in life: “a crippling obstacle to trade and other forms of intercourse . . . an artificial wall on either side of which each of the two powers . . . established his own language and currency, and instituted altogether different systems of administration, of education and of economic regulation and planning.”6 Like many other elite nationalists, Antonius thus sought to work with his colonial superiors as a way to influence their policies from within.
Antonius became committed to Palestine via his conviction in Arab unity. In late 1920, he traveled to London and “criticized the division of Syria before the Royal Colonial Institute and then joined Amir Faisal in his defense of the Arab case for independence and unity.”7 During this visit, he also met with Henry McMahon, the former British high commissioner for Egypt who had promised the Arabs independence in 1915, and who explained to Antonius Britain’s Palestine policy. Despite his best efforts, Antonius and the many other Arab leaders who appealed to the British and French to retract their plan to partition Greater Syria, the mandates were created and “a truncated Palestine became subject to Zionist settler colonialism.”8 This spurred Antonius to action.
Alienation from British Governance
Despite British betrayal, Antonius and many of his elite counterparts continued to put their faith in British governance, and “Antonius remained a loyal civil servant.”9 In July 1921, he accepted a senior appointment as assistant director of the Education Department in Jerusalem, working directly with Humphrey Bowman, department director, as his personal assistant and replacement whenever Bowman was absent. In this role, Antonius also used his linguistic talents and interpreted during meetings between British administrators, like High Commissioner Herbert Samuel and Chief Secretary Sir Gilbert Clayton, and Palestinian leaders, including the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini.10
In 1925, the same year he was ironically granted Palestinian citizenship by the British Mandate government, he joined Lord Balfour, architect of the Balfour Declaration, as his interpreter on his visit to Jerusalem to inaugurate the Hebrew University. Of Balfour’s “total disregard for Palestinian Arab public opinion,”11 Antonius had the following to say:
Palestine was to him a game, a sort of historico-intellectual exercise and diversion . . . Of the Arabs he was at first not even conscious . . . When the Arabs became vocal, he regarded them as a nuisance—hooligans who had never read Hume or Bergson and who must not be suffered to disturb the serene philosophy of his historical meditations or the delicate equilibrium of his fantastic experiment.12
Balfour was certainly not the only British statesman with racist views towards the Arabs. In fact, Antonius suffered personally and professionally from British prejudice and discrimination in Jerusalem. Throughout his years in the Education Department, and despite his position being second to the director, “he was overlooked as a candidate to replace Bowman when he resigned.” The officer who replaced him, Jerome Farrel, explained that “being an Arab, [Antonius] is ineligible to succeed Bowman.”13 All this despite Antonius’s many talents, which British administrators gladly exploited. Between 1925 and 1928, for example, Antonius joined Sir Gilbert Clayton on several missions to resolve territorial disputes between leading tribes in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, including the Hijaz and Yemen. In 1927, he even earned the prestigious Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) award for his service.14
George Antonius (right) accompanies Sir Gilbert Clayton (left) as his interpreter for a meeting with Ibn Saud in the Hijaz, ca. 1925.
Credit:
AbeBooks
For this and other instances of discrimination against him and Palestinian Arabs more broadly, Antonius felt betrayed and resigned from British service in May 1930. As his daughter put it many years later, “Because he lived so well within that Victorian Englishness, his feelings of disappointment and betrayal were so great.”15
He began working as the Middle East Associate for the Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA), founded in New York by Charles Cane, the US millionaire of the 1919 King–Crane Commission. Antonius was encouraged by this opportunity, since the report of the commission had recommended against partitioning Greater Syria in 1919, and in 1930, Britain sent another commission, led by John Hope Simpson, which produced a white paper calling for the limitation of Jewish immigration and land purchases to Jews. “Antonius found that the 1930 Hope Simpson Report rearticulated Crane’s findings and gave hope to Palestinian Arabs,” and so, until his untimely death 12 years later, Antonius sent monthly reports to the ICWA on developments in the region.16
Creating a Beautiful Life in Jerusalem
Throughout his career with the British Government of Palestine, Antonius made a name for himself among Jerusalem’s Palestinian elite. He moved in aristocratic circles and befriended the city’s most wealthy and influential families, including the Husseinis, Abd al-Hadis, and Alamis. Musa Alami and Jamal Husseini were particularly close friends of his, and he became a trusted confidant of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who employed him as his personal secretary.17
In 1927, Antonius married Katy Nimr, with whom he shared an uncannily similar background and upbringing. Nimr’s father’s family was also Syrian Orthodox from Lebanon, and like Antonius’s parents, Nimr’s settled in Egypt in the 1880s for professional reasons. Nimr’s father, Faris, “a staunch Anglophile (and convert to Protestantism),” married Helen Eynaud, whose British, French, and Austrian family had moved to Alexandria in the 1860s.18 Nimr’s upbringing, like Antonius’s, was thus decidedly elitist and decidedly British.
An aerial view of Karm al-Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s plot of land and villa in Sheikh Jarrah, 1933
Credit:
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-matpc-14306]
The facade of Karm al-Mufti with the splendid gardens, date unknown
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Palestine Remembered
The young newlyweds first lived in the Austrian Hospice in the Old City of Jerusalem,19 but in 1930, they moved to the stately villa of Antonius’s boss, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The expansive property, known as Karm al-Mufti (the mufti’s vineyard), was located just north of the Old City in the growing Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and the home that the mufti built on it was majestic. The Antoniuses took very good care of it, transforming it into a salon for the city’s elites and dignitaries: “Teeming with ‘colourful Bokhara carpets and paintings,’ music and books, Katy Antonius’s salon soon became the leading social arena in which politicians, government officials and intellectuals could mingle” in Jerusalem.20
Short Take
Amin al-Husseini’s Dream Home, Karm al-Mufti: An Elegant Residence during the Mandate Bulldozed by Israel
The mufti’s luxurious home in Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of the city’s rich and vibrant Palestinian past—and of its erasure by Israeli authorities.
An Intellectual Giant of His Time
With a far less demanding job and a very comfortable home life, Antonius was able to focus on his own research and writing, to which he took with earnest throughout the 1930s. In 1938, he published his magnum opus, The Arab Awakening, the foundational book on the history of Arab nationalism. In a nutshell, The Arab Awakening offered “a bitter denunciation of Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs” during the early 20th century.21 In his meticulously researched examination of the rise of the Arab nationalist movement from the 19th century, of the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence, of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, and of the infamous Balfour Declaration, Antonius argued that Britain reneged on promises of independence made to the Arabs.
Antonius’s decision to begin researching for the book coincided with intensifying British suppression of Palestinian political ambitions and of their resistance to the theft of their lands. Throughout the early 1930s, Antonius observed that Palestinian public opinion was rightly shifting “from an attitude directed against the Jews, as being the real enemy coming to occupy their country and to dispossess them of it, to an attitude primarily aimed against the British government, as being their real enemy.”22 As Silsby put it, “he found himself morally compelled to withdraw his loyalty from Great Britain” and to wholly take up the Palestinian cause professionally and intellectually.23
In 1932, Sharif Hussein and Amir Abdallah granted Antonius access to a range of sensitive documents, including the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence. With these and other sources, Antonius began on an unprecedented research journey:
Having acquired the “documentary edifice” for his book, Antonius initiated a rigorous course of oral research. In 1932, he prepared “to travel to and from between Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Jedda, Constantinople, Berlin, Paris and London . . . and to devote a good deal of . . . time to the often thankless task of persuading people to speak frankly and accurately about a tangled and elusive subject.” In addition to numerous interviews, Antonius also studied the private papers and diaries of the Sharif Husayn, D.G. Hogarth, Sir Gilbert Clayton, Mark Sykes, Edward Westermann, and other Americans involved in the King-Crane Report and the Versailles Conference. He poured over mountains of material, including the files of al-Sharq, al-Balagh, and al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani in Damascus; al-Muqattam and al-Qiblah in Egypt; and The Times in London, as well as some 150 volumes of parliamentary debates and documents at the British Foreign Office, the historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defense, and the United States Department of State.24
The result of years of research and writing, Silsby argues, was the establishment of “the framework for an unprecedented historical account of Arab nationalism.” Antonius’s tome was also a personal reflection on his own Arab identity. Having been raised an Anglophile and sent off to England at a young age, his disillusionment with Britain and British policy in Palestine set him on a journey of self-discovery through which “he traced the threads which encouraged his own development as a pioneering, secularly-oriented, pan-Arab nationalist.”25 Antonius’s message to the Arabs in the book, inspired in no small part by events in Palestine, was that the most serious threat to the Europeans was the political and economic unity of the Arabs. To confront violent Western imperialism in the region, he argued, Arabs must work towards “increased unity through development of the Arabic language, through his formulation of an Arabic technical lexicon, and through the efforts of the all-Muslim congress in Jerusalem.” The liberation of Palestine and the rest of Greater Syria was “the crux of the movement.”26
His message was confirmed, day by day, throughout the 1936–39 Great Palestinian Revolt. In fact, in 1935, Antonius predicted that violence was inevitable if the British continued to support Zionism and suppress Palestinians, especially through unchecked Zionist immigration to Palestine and land sales to Jews. Sure enough, the general strike that launched the revolt began months later in April 1936, and had Britain not responded with such brute force, Antonius observed, “the suffering and violence could well have been avoided.”27 Instead, British “policy has turned Palestine into a shambles; they show no indication of a return to sanity, that is to say to the principles of ordinary common sense and justice which are held in such high honor in England.”28
The Leading Palestinian Diplomat’s Untimely Demise
By the end of the revolt in 1939, Antonius was undoubtedly the intellectual figurehead of the Palestinian struggle for independence. Apart from The Arab Awakening, which had come out in late 1938, he was selected to serve as secretary of the Palestinian Arab delegation and as secretary-general for the united Arab delegation at the London Conference in February 1939. Held at St. James’s Palace, the nearly six-week conference convened Palestinian, Arab, British, and Zionist delegates to discuss the future of governance of Palestine. Throughout, Antonius “worked incessantly behind the scenes, convening meetings, and dictating and telephoning from his bed when he became ill.” He advised British officials, wrote in The Times, spoke to the press, and served on policy committees, among many other activities. He even managed to get British officials to agree that it would be unwise to admit to a mistake in the governance of Palestine. Even Malcolm MacDonald, the head of the British delegation, recognized that Antonius was “the most outstanding Palestinian Arab delegate.”29
One of the many meetings on Palestine was held in St. James’s Palace during the London Conference on February 7, 1939. George Antonius is seated at the bottom right without a fez on his head.
Credit:
Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
Despite the efforts of Antonius and many Palestinian and Arab delegates in London, including Antonius’s wife, Katy, who presented “testimonies from Palestinian women who bore witness to Britain’s iron-hand policy toward the Arabs,”30 there was “no effective reformulation of British Palestine policy.”31 Defeated and betrayed, Antonius and Katy returned to the region, but the power couple who hosted Jerusalem’s most lavish soirees split up later that year, and while Katy remained in Jerusalem with their daughter, Soraya, Antonius moved to Beirut throughout the World War II years.32 While in Lebanon, he suffered under Vichy French oppression, nearly facing imprisonment, and spent his final years preparing for a post–World War II settlement in the Arab world.33
Before long, however, “his professional frustrations and deteriorating health brought him back to Jerusalem, where he died in May 1942” in his home, aged 50, “a week after the marriage was annulled.”34 Soraya was 10 years old. Silsby describes Antonius’s untimely death beautifully:
The Arab nationalist goal, as he envisioned it, was to realize Palestinian and Syrian independence and eventual unity, and to establish political and economic cooperation between and among all Arab states for the creation of an Arab federation. That he died at so critical a juncture was particularly tragic, because as Albert Hourani, who visited Palestine shortly after Antonius’s death in 1942, remarked: “George Antonius died at the moment when he was most needed, the moment for which his whole life had been a preparation.”35
Antonius was buried in the Orthodox cemetery on Mount Zion, at the southwest corner of Jerusalem’s Old City. Ahmad Samih Khalidi and Khalil Sakakini delivered the eulogies.36 His tombstone bears the epitaph “Heed and awaken, O Arabs.”
The tombstone of George Antonius on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; the epitaph reads “Heed and awaken, O Arabs.”
Credit:
Bsalzberg via Wikipedia
Sources
Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. New York: Paragon Books, 1946.
Bar-Yosef, Eitan, and Eli Osheroff. “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening: Palestinian Identity, Activism, and Anglophone Literature.” Contemporary Levant 9, no. 1 (2024): 50–67.
“George Antonius.” PalQuest. Accessed November 27, 2025.
Hourani, Albert. Great Britain and Arab Nationalism. Great Britain: Foreign Office, 1942.
Lazar, Hadara. Six Singular Figures: Understanding the Conflict: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2015.
Silsby, Susan. “George Antonius: The Formative Years.” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 4 (1986): 81–98.
[Profile photo: Institute of Palestine Studies via Wikipedia]
Notes
1
“George Antonius,” PalQuest, accessed November 27, 2025.
2
Susan Silsby, “George Antonius: The Formative Years,” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 4 (1986): 81–98.
3
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 82.
4
“George Antonius.”
5
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Eli Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening: Palestinian Identity, Activism, and Anglophone Literature,” Contemporary Levant 9, no. 1 (2024): 50–67.
6
George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (New York: Paragon Books, 1946), 357, cited in Silsby, “George Antonius,” 83.
7
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 83.
8
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 83.
9
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
10
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 84.
11
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 84.
12
Antonius to J. M. Jeffried, November 17, 1936, R.C. 65/AT 26-866-330, Israel State Archives, cited in Silsby, “George Antonius,” 84.
13
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 85.
14
“George Antonius.”
15
Hadara Lazar, Six Singular Figures: Understanding the Conflict: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2015), 191, cited in Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
16
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 86.
17
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 84–85.
18
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
19
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
20
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
21
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
22
Antonius to Charles Crane, October 28, 1933, R.C. 65/860-330, Israel State Archives, cited in Silsby, “George Antonius,” 88.
23
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 88.
24
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 89.
25
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 89.
26
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 89.
27
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 92.
28
Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 398, cited in Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab awakening.”
29
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 93.
30
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
31
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 95.
32
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
33
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 95.
34
Bar-Yosef and Osheroff, “Soraya Antonius’s Arab Awakening.”
35
Silsby, “George Antonius,” 95; Albert Hourani, Great Britain and Arab Nationalism (Great Britain: Foreign Office, 1942), 60.
36
“George Antonius.”