Lawrence had already suggested the creation of a state for Abdullah by the partition of the British zone in Palestine. The region east of a line running northwards from Aqaba along the Jordan would be separated from Palestine and offered to Abdullah, who would rule it as Amir with British guidance and an annual cash subsidy. This suited Churchill. Abdullah’s personal ambitions would be satisfied, general peace in the region would be restored, and he would keep the lid on anti-Zionist agitation.
The proposition was delivered to Abdullah by Lawrence, who, finding him amenable, conducted him to Churchill at Jerusalem. On 27 March, Churchill, Samuel and Abdullah discussed the future over tea. Abdullah was warned that he would have to stamp out Beduin brigandage, renounce his claims to Iraq, Syria and Palestine, and discourage anti-Jewish propaganda. In return he would get a Treasury annuity, British officers to train his army (the newly formed Arab Legion) and the use of RAF armoured cars to bring the recalcitrant Beduin to heel and keep out Wahabbi raiders. Abdullah agreed to the bargain.
On the surface Lawrence and Churchill had triumphed; the Cairo conference had brought a semblance of stability and order to the Middle East. Lawrence had played the kingmaker, procuring two thrones for Faisal and Abdullah, and he had redeemed what he considered a debt of honour incurred during the war. There remained one insoluble problem, Palestine. During 1920 and 1921 Arab antipathy to Jewish settlement had increased. When Lawrence and Churchill landed at Haifa, they were confronted by a noisy anti-Zionist demonstration. At Gaza, where Churchill insisted on an impromptu tour of the battlefield, there was a riot. Lawrence, who throughout the conference had worn a clerkly suit and Homburg hat, conducted Churchill through a crowd of gesticulating Arabs. ‘I say, Lawrence, are these people dangerous ?’ asked Churchill. ‘They don’t seem too pleased to see us. What are they shouting?’ Lawrence thought they were not dangerous, but neither were they welcoming, since they were shouting, ‘Down with the British and down with Jewish policy!’
Two months later when Lawrence was back at his desk in the Colonial Office, he again faced the problem of bringing together the irreconcilable. Several thousand Arabs had attacked a Jewish settlement at Petach Tikuah and he had been asked for his views on a Jewish defence force. He was pessimistic and predicted further violent incidents which might culminate in all-out racial war. ‘The success of Zionism’ might eventually bring peace but this would need at least fifty years. ‘Popular’ as opposed to mandatory government could reduce tension but, as Lawrence knew, this would mean complete Arab domination since the 150,000 Palestinians outnumbered the Jewish settlers.12
Privately, Lawrence’s sympathies were with the Arabs. Meinertzhagen recalled a heated row not long after between himself, Lawrence and Churchill on the matter. Lawrence, ‘grinning from ear to ear and clearly very pleased with himself’ was discussing Faisal’s and Abdullah’s affairs with Churchill. Meinertzhagen had no time for either man, rating Faisal as no more than ‘a stranger, a Hashemite, one of Lawrence’s creations’ and Abdullah as ‘another upstart’ to whom Lawrence had delivered a kingdom hacked out of land which should have been given to the Jews. Incensed, Lawrence retorted that ‘Transjordan was Arab territory and had nothing to do with Palestine.’ Meinertzhagen foresaw the eviction of the Hashemites and the emergence of a Jewish state encircled by hostile Arabs. Abdullah had been given the right to exclude Jews from his kingdom, a fact which angered many Zionists, and Meinertzhagen insisted that more land would be needed for settlers. ‘At the expense of the Arabs?’ Lawrence queried. ‘No,’ answered Meinertzhagen, ‘there are thousands of acres in Transjordan lying fallow and unoccupied owing to Arab laziness.’ It would remain so since, as Churchill commented, nothing could now be done about Transjordan for Abdullah was there to stay. This pleased Lawrence.13
Less pleasing to Lawrence were his final two assignments for the Colonial Office. On 30 June he was ordered to Jiddah as a special envoy to Hussain, who, unlike his sons, still refused to accept British control over Palestine. It was Lawrence’s job to make him change his mind and behave like an obedient client of the British government. This proved impossible, as Lawrence discovered on his arrival in Hejaz at the end of August.
On 2 August, Lawrence cabled the Foreign Office: ‘Old man is conceited to a degree, greedy, and stupid, but very friendly, and protests devotion to our interests.’ Two days later, angered by Hussain’s swollen-headedness, he delivered a sharp assessment of his character which reduced the King and his Foreign Minister to tears. This gave Lawrence hope and he told the Foreign Office, ‘The King is weaker than I thought, and could, I think, be bullied into nearly complete surrender.’ He mistook his man and it was soon Lawrence’s turn to throw a tantrum. He stormed out of one meeting after Hussain again refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty. This ‘fluttered them; the King saying he thought no one could treat royalty so’. The histrionics continued but to no avail. Lawrence briefly left Jiddah and returned on 7 October to find Hussain as adamant as ever, making wild demands for the overlordship of the entire Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Iraq and Syria.14
Lawrence gained a respite from this pointless exercise on 16 October when he was ordered to Jordan for discussions with Samuel over difficulties which were cropping up.15 Abdullah was finding kingship too much for him and indicated that he might quit Jordan. Lawrence was needed to inject some resolution into him, as well as persuade him to hand over Syrian exiles implicated in a recent attempt to assassinate General Gouraud. Lawrence left Hejaz for the final time, certain that Hussain’s days were numbered. Shortly before he departed, he told the Foreign Office that the King’s new Italian aircraft were ‘rubbish’ and that his army could easily be overcome by no more than 1,000 Wahabbis. It was, in 1925, when Hussain fled to exile in Amman and the Ibn Saud made himself King of Hejaz.
Until December 1921 Lawrence stayed in Jordan reassuring and assisting Abdullah. Here the love affair between him and the Arab world finally faded. He abominated routine administration, as Peake, his companion during these days, noticed. ‘Lawrence was not an office man and he was no believer in the system of obtaining information from files, returns and reports.’ Instead he rode across country on camel back or in an unreliable Model-T Ford and saw for himself what needed to be done. Old acquaintances flocked to see him and he was greeted with frenzied enthusiasm by former Beduin brothers-in-arms. Eric Kennington, then in Jordan preparing illustrations for the Seven Pillars, was moved by their devotion, but it was tinged with disappointment, since many who hailed Lawrence hoped that he had come to lead them again to Damascus. This he could not do: rather he had to warn Abdullah that British backing depended on his leaving Syria alone. Such advice must have gone against the grain, since Lawrence privately sympathised with the Syrian nationalists and he believed that the terrorists who had tried to kill Gouraud were merely paying the French back in their own coin.16
Peake found Lawrence unsettled. His moods were mercurial, swinging between silent depression and bouts of volubility during which he recalled old adventures. His duties certainly irked him. Once, in a fit of frustration, he damned offices as manifestations of a national vice. ‘If you must have an office, put clerks in it only and keep officials outside,’ he argued, and put theory into practice by limiting his own staff to an Arab clerk. Paperwork vexed him greatly and he avoided much of it by hurling files into his wastepaper basket. Included in this purge were some passports whose irritated owners later turned up to claim them. Philby, whom he had nominated his successor, discovered him clearing his desk in characteristic manner. ‘Every paper in the office was torn up and consigned to an enormous wastepaper basket.’ This was the same Lawrence who, in 1916, when asked for certain intelligence reports, had replied that they existed only in his head.
On 6 December, Lawrence left Jordan, determined to resign from the Colonial Office. The past four months had been gruelling and marked by disappointments. Hussain defied the British government and Abdullah’s state was still precarious. Administ
ration bored him, he was weary, and the Middle East’s attractions had withered. On 1 October he had told Kennington, ‘The War was good by drawing over our depths that hot surface wish to do or win something.’ Then goals had been obvious and could be achieved. Now they were elusive and obtainable only through the uncongenial and tedious processes of negotiation and administration. Robert Graves found Lawrence, back in England, worn out, unable to sleep and inexplicably, given his £500 All Souls allowance and £1,200 Colonial Office salary, short of money. He had already been granted six months’ leave from the Colonial Office and, despite Churchill’s pleas, he formally resigned on 4 July 1922. He had always considered his appointment a temporary, emergency measure and promised Churchill that he was ‘always at his disposal if ever there is a crisis, or any job, small or big, for which he can convince me that I am necessary’.
Peake wondered whether Lawrence’s moods of despair owed something to a sense that he had failed in the Middle East. If this was so, Lawrence soon recovered his conviction that what he had done had been right. In retrospect, he felt great pride in his achievements. ‘My policy is succeeding in the Arab world,’ he told Mrs Bernard Shaw in 1927, momentarily forgetting the contributions then and later of others. A year later, when he congratulated Sir Gilbert Clayton on his appointment as High Commissioner in Iraq, he was optimistic about the future of the Middle East.
As I get further and further away from things, the more completely do I feel that our efforts during the war have justified themselves, and are proving happier and better than I’d ever hoped.... Give Faisal my regards, when you see him. Tell him I thought a great deal of him during the war: and that I think more of him now. He has lasted splendidly.... The only essential thing is that the show should go along its proper road, after all. So long as that happens the personalities it uses or breaks are trifles.17
The show did run off the road, as it was bound to. With hindsight, the events in the Middle East between 1914 and 1922, in which Lawrence was so closely involved, were a minor episode in the twilight years of Britain’s global supremacy. His prescriptions for a stable Middle East, which emphasised cheapness and dependence on client rulers, can now be seen as signs that Britain was already overladen with international responsibilities.
Lawrence had striven for an impossible objective, the reconciliation of British imperialism and Arab nationalism. As an agent of a British government, he had helped awaken an Arab national spirit and encouraged Arabs to believe that their future would be in their own hands. He had said and promised more than he should. If allowed to run free, such ideas would inevitably collide with British interests, and so Lawrence, while claiming that he was repaying a debt of honour to the Arabs, implemented policies designed to restrain Arab nationalism. It was not surprising that a man riddled with internal contradictions should have urged policies which were contradictory. This was recognised by Faisal, who by the time of his death in 1932 had managed to wriggle free of Britain’s grasp and secure for Iraq some measure of political independence.
A further and potentially more dangerous contradiction lay at the heart of British policy. How could Britain balance sponsorship of Jewish immigration into Palestine with the need to keep the goodwill of the Arabs? Immediately after the Balfour Declaration Lawrence had predicted unending conflict and his pessimism was confirmed during 1921 when, briefly, he became entangled in the problems of Palestine. Knowledge of their intractability may well have helped him decide to quit his Colonial Office post. He had attempted to procure an accommodation between Faisal and the Zionists, not out of conviction but because such a course would assist the Arabs. Meinertzhagen sensed Lawrence’s anti-Semitism when they worked together and it was evident in a 1927 Spectator review of a book by Philip Guedalla.18 The showiness of Guedalla’s style struck Lawrence as a manifestation of a racial vice which embraced ‘Disraeli’s spangled sense of colour, Zangwill’s foppery, Rosenberg’s electric storms: and the commoner manifestation of Mrs Goldstone, wife of the celebrated banker, upon whose ample front last night at dinner long ranks of pearl were paraded’.
Unforeseen and, during the 1920s, unforeseeable circumstances dictated the future of Palestine. Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 and the spread of virulent anti-Semitism in Central Europe quickened the pace of Jewish immigration. This, in turn, led to the Arab revolt in April 1936, less than a year after Lawrence’s death. This upheaval acted as a new and potent stimulus for Arab nationalism and gave Arabs a sense of burning grievance which still remains strong. Arab feelings were as intense as they had been between 1916 and 1918, but now Britain and not the Ottoman empire was the focus of anger.
The Palestinian imbroglio weakened Britain’s influence in the Middle East; the Second World War destroyed it. After the Munich crisis of 1938, a reinforced army in Palestine ruthlessly crushed the Arab revolt. Force was needed again in 1942 when British forces overthrew the pro-German nationalist government of Rashid Ali in Iraq. Another wartime emergency, this time in Syria, threw Britain into alliance with Arab nationalists against the pro-Vichy government in Damascus. In 1941 Britain pledged post-war independence to Syria, which was later endorsed by the United States and Russia. French imperialists suspected a conspiracy devised to secure British control over Syria and so accomplish the ‘vast designs of T.E. Lawrence’ which had been checked twenty years before. Lawrence’s ghost was also raised by nationalists in the Lebanon where, in 1940, popular opinion likened him to Hitler. The German leader was ‘on a par with Lawrence of Arabia’ since ‘the latter brought freedom and independence to the Arabs ... and Hitler was going to drive out the French, wipe out the Zionists and give lots of money and gold to the Arabs’.19 Memories of Lawrence’s sovereigns were clearly evergreen. The next generation of Arab nationalists branded Lawrence as the servant of the Zionists and British imperialism.20
By 1945 the British empire was no longer the fearsome and vigorous beast it had been in 1918 and French imperial pretensions were in tatters. After a world war fought for high ideals, it was no longer possible for the old imperial powers to brush aside wartime slogans about political freedom and the independence of small nations. France grudgingly evacuated Syria and the Lebanon in 1946 and in the same year Britain relinquished her mandate over Jordan. Unable to suppress the Jewish revolt, Britain gave up Palestine a year later. The immediate result was the establishment of Israel and the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–9. Retreat was the order of the day in Egypt and Iraq, which lost their garrisons, and in Jordan, where in 1956 Abdullah’s grandson, Hussain, severed links made in Lawrence’s time by sacking the British officers who commanded the Arab Legion.
The post-war storms dealt harshly with Lawrence’s Hashemite kingdoms. The Arab world was looking to new leaders, forceful army officers like Nasser of Egypt who, in many ways, resembled the Young Turks of Lawrence’s generation. They were the ideological descendants of the educated Arabs he had known and despised in Syria. Like them, the new generation of Arab nationalists drew their ideas from Western philosophies, including Marxism, and were driven by an implacable antipathy towards France and Britain, the weakened imperial powers which seemed unable to give up their domineering ways. Furthermore, both nations, in association with the United States, were almost universally thought of as the sponsors of Israel and therefore enemies of Arab nationalism. Many of the new nationalists were apostles of economic and social revolution and so wished to overturn traditional hierarchies. The Hashemites were therefore isolated on two counts: they were conservative monarchs and stooges of the Western powers.
The Hashemite kingdom of Iraq fell in 1958, a belated casualty of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt two years before, after a coup by Young Turk-style nationalist officers. Faisal’s grandson, Faisal II, was murdered with his family, as was Lawrence’s old comrade Nuri es Said. As Lawrence had recognised, he was a trusty anglophile; in 1954 Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, had called him a ‘wise and true friend of Britain’, qualities which were anathema to the
new Arab nationalists.
Abdullah’s grandson and successor, Hussain, proved more durable thanks to his good sense in courting American as well as British favours. True to Lawrence’s assurances, Britain pledged armed help in 1956 if Israel invaded Jordan. Two years later, the United States helped out. The Sixth Fleet, with Marine paratroopers, stood by in readiness to save Hussain from a repetition of the coup which had recently ousted his cousin in Iraq. He and his kingdom, now shorn of the west bank of the Jordan, still survive, a lasting legacy of Lawrence.
The Middle East of today seems very distant from that which Lawrence knew and believed he understood. In the early 1980s, recalling his efforts to foster Arab–Jewish reconciliation, the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington regretted that it was so hard for ‘moderate’ Arab politicians to flourish in the face of extremists and demagogues. Such creatures had been fewer in Lawrence’s time and he could dismiss them and their borrowed philosophies. As Gertrude Bell had warned in 1908, ‘the great catchwords of revolution, fraternity and equality’ were inflammatory in the Middle East, not least because, taken to their logical conclusions, they challenged a world order in which Europeans were supreme. But nationalism could not be ignored; indeed, properly guided and under safe leadership, it was a useful weapon in the war against Turkey.
The war over, Lawrence was able to build on his friendship with the Hashemites and entice them into Britain’s orbit after their alarming flirtation with anti-European nationalism in Syria and Iraq. They were conservatives who owed everything, including their thrones, to Britain and were accustomed to working in concert with British officials such as Lawrence. In time, their sons would be sent to English public schools and universities, where connections with Britain’s ruling caste would be strengthened and they would learn how to see things the British way. Such arrangements ignored the gathering forces of social and economic change of which Lawrence had been uneasily aware in pre-war Syria.
Golden Warrior, The Page 48