The effect of Lawrence’s memo, then, was to transform the question of an Allied troop deployment to Arabia from its military context and propel it into the political. To wit, those in the British power structure favoring escalation might actually be unwitting dupes of a cleverly constructed French trap, one designed to both sabotage the Arab Revolt and, by the diversion of British troops to Arabia, hobble the offensive in Palestine. By the autumn of 1916, it was hard to conceive of any accusation more injurious to a British officer’s reputation than that of useful fool to the French, but however obliquely, this was essentially the charge Lawrence was laying before Reginald Wingate.
But what to do with such an incendiary document? This was the new dilemma facing Gilbert Clayton on the morning of November 17. As Lawrence was attached to the Arab Bureau, standard procedure called for Clayton to first forward the memo to the bureau’s overseer, Henry McMahon. That, however, would have been preaching to the choir, and as McMahon was already on his way out as high commissioner, anything he might do with the document could have only muted effect. Conversely, Clayton had the option of sending it to Reginald Wingate in hopes that the sirdar might finally see the error of his escalationist ways and change course—except Lawrence had been so derisive of the standby-force plan that the man who had authored it was bound to get his back up.
When it comes to political infighting, though, sometimes one’s bitterest enemy can be turned into a temporary ally. Ever since arriving in Cairo, General Archibald Murray had set out to control or neuter Gilbert Clayton and his Arab Bureau in any way he could. In a fit of pique after failing to have the bureau put under his command, Murray had gone so far as to order his own intelligence units not to cooperate with Clayton’s outfit. Of more immediate interest to Clayton on November 17, however, was Murray’s implacable opposition to sending troops to Arabia. He’d made his feelings on the topic clear at an interagency conference in September.
“There is no good telling me that you only want this and that,” he’d railed at Wingate’s deputy, Cyril Wilson. “From the experience of war, and experience of recent campaigns, it is absolutely clear that you start and you grow. You start with a brigade, that brigade wants some artillery, then aeroplanes and camels. Then comes a request that the force be moved to another point about ten miles [away], which it is absolutely essential to hold. So the campaign grows.”
With all this in mind, it apparently occurred to Clayton that Archibald Murray might be just the man who’d know what to do with Lawrence’s memo.
For the EEF commander, that four-page report must have arrived like a rare gift. Here was not only a précis that dismantled the intervention argument on its merits, but, as an added windfall, hinted darkly that it was all a French plot. He ordered that its author be immediately brought to his office.
Archibald Murray was a famously nervous man. During a pivotal moment in the opening days of the war, he had fainted away from the unrelenting tension, an episode that spurred shocked whispers throughout the British high command and probably contributed to Murray’s demotion from army chief of staff, the number two position in the military hierarchy, in 1915. His transfer to Egypt hadn’t seemed to improve matters, as Lawrence discovered when, answering Murray’s summons to headquarters that day, he was intercepted by Murray’s deputy, General Lynden-Bell. As Lawrence recounted, “I was astonished when, as I came in, [Bell] jumped to his feet, leaped forward, and gripped me by the shoulder, hissing, ‘Now you’re not to frighten him; don’t you forget what I say!’ ” The task before Lawrence, Bell instructed, was to give Murray “a reassuring picture of affairs, and yet not a rosy picture, since they could not afford excursions either way.”
Lawrence seems to have managed this delicate balancing act when finally set before Murray. And despite Murray’s reputation for jumpiness, it soon became clear that when it came to bureaucratic knifework, he had a pretty steady hand himself. Shortly after Lawrence left his office, he fired off a cable to Wingate: “I have just seen Lawrence on his return from visiting Faisal, and his opinion, in which I understand you and Faisal concur, is so strongly against the dispatch of white troops to Arabia that I venture to suggest for your consideration that the CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff William Robertson] should at once be informed.”
Perhaps this request for Wingate’s “consideration” was intended as rhetorical flourish, for Murray had actually sent Lawrence’s memo to Robertson fifteen minutes earlier. As for Wingate concurring with Lawrence’s views, that would be a hard matter for Wingate to judge since Murray didn’t bother sending him a copy of the memo.
In London, Lawrence’s report played to great effect, and was quickly circulated through the upper reaches of both the Foreign and War Offices. As usually happens in such cases, those who agreed with the report burnished the résumé of its author to lend authority to his assertions. On November 19, General Robertson, himself no fan of intervention in Arabia, forwarded the memo to the cabinet while describing its author as a man “said to have an intimate knowledge of the Turks and the Arabs.”
To those in the cabinet unfamiliar with the intricacies of Arabian policy, perhaps the memorandum’s most persuasive aspect was its anti-French tilt. Interestingly, one official who tried to counter that effect was Mark Sykes. “Captain Lawrence’s statement in regard to the French attitude to the Arabs,” he complained to the Foreign Office, “and his reference to their larger schemes of policy, must be the result of some misunderstanding, either by Captain Lawrence of the French, or by the French officers of their own Government’s intentions, as it seems in no way to fit in with anything said or thought here or in Paris.”
His was a lonely voice, however, and little match for the antiescalation/anti-French officials who now had their own “expert” in the field to tout. Henry McMahon joined his efforts to that campaign in a cable to Charles Hardinge, the permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office. Noting that he’d always feared that an Allied intervention in Arabia would corrode Arab morale, McMahon wrote that Lawrence, “whom I knew to be a very shrewd observer, has confirmed my opinion on this point. He has moreover told me, as doubtless you will hear from the Sirdar [Wingate], that the French hold the same view, and it is with this very object that they are magnifying the dangers of the present situation and advocating action at Rabegh. Colonel Brémond even went so far in a moment of confidence as to tell Lawrence that the French object was to thus disintegrate Arab effort.… It is as well to remember this in any proposals that the French may now or hereafter make in regard to our joint assistance to the Sherif.”
Amid the tumult, Lawrence even saw his stock rise among those regular army staff officers in Cairo who had previously held both him and the Arab Bureau in contempt. “They began to be polite to me,” he wrote, “and to say that I was observant, with a pungent style, and character.”
In the face of such an onslaught, the War Committee quietly shelved the Rabegh proposal anew, but not before a rather humorous last act. It wasn’t until November 21, four days after Lawrence’s memo reached London, that Reginald Wingate finally saw the analysis with which he supposedly fully concurred. After his angry cable demanding to know why he’d been kept out of the loop, the War Committee mildly rebuked Murray for failing to first solicit Wingate’s opinion, suggesting that “there is apparently lack of co-ordination in [this] matter.”
Murray begged to differ. “I have always taken special care to keep Sirdar fully informed of all I am doing,” he cabled London back, “and as far as I know we are working in the closest touch. You may rely on me in this matter. As regards Lawrence’s report. As Lawrence had just come to me after spending several days with the Sirdar I naturally understood he was fully in possession of Lawrence’s news. In fact Lawrence informed me to this effect.”
A PERSONALITY TIC of Aaron Aaronsohn’s was to keep constant track of the exercise he got in a day—the time spent bicycling, or the miles walked—and to note it in his diary. It may have been born of his long
and only intermittently successful campaign to keep his weight down, but the long walks he took during his stay in London served an additional purpose: a way to distract himself from the maddening inertia of the British government. As he noted in his diary for November 11, 1916, a day in which he had covered some twelve miles, “If I brooded continually over the situation, it would be enough to drive me mad. What slowness in decisions! It will soon be two months since I have left Berlin, and after all nothing of consequence has been done to discover [sic] the Athlit people.”
Certainly the scientist had done his part. In the nearly three weeks he’d been in London, he had compiled two long reports for his British hosts, one chronicling the plight of the Armenians in Syria, the other on conditions inside Palestine. This second report, running to forty-six pages, provided the British with probably their most comprehensive look inside any corner of the Ottoman Empire since the war had begun. Along with a thorough rundown of the political and economic situation of the region, Aaronsohn detailed the health and medical crises facing it, the condition of its roads and railways, and meticulously listed the location and size of most every Turkish garrison guarding the Syrian coast. He even noted how many gendarmes currently policed Beirut, and what weapons they carried.
Nevertheless, Aaronsohn continued to be shuttled from office to office, ministry to ministry, repeatedly asked to tell his whole story over from the beginning. From no quarter, it seemed, was any effort being made toward returning him to the war theater, let alone trying to establish contact with his spy network back in Palestine.
Part of the issue was surely simple bureaucratic ineptitude, but perhaps joined to this was a kind of collective disbelief on British officials’ part at what they’d been handed. Then as now, intelligence agents were accustomed to getting small slivers of information from a wide variety of sources and trying to fit those slivers together to form a portrait; it was very unusual, even suspicious, to be handed all of it in one fell swoop. Contributing to this was an element of blithe anti-Semitism that permeated the British government at the time—as it did most European governments—which provided as a starting point that a Jew wasn’t to be completely trusted until he proved himself worthy. In the arena of espionage, that created a paradox hard to rise out of. In an eleven-page analysis of Aaronsohn’s Palestine report, an intelligence officer with the War Trade Intelligence Department conceded that the information was “very correct” wherever it could be verified, but also noted the informant was a Zionist and “of the Romanian type of Jew.” That description apparently validated the agent’s conclusion: “Of course we do not know the object of his visit to this country, but he might be just as observant of things here as he has been in Turkey and a purveyor of information of the conditions in England if he should get back to Turkey.”
Naturally, all this was quite invisible to Aaronsohn. Instead, as the interminable delay in London dragged on, the scientist increasingly fretted that perhaps the problem stemmed from the conversation he’d had at 30 Broadway Gate on October 30.
Answering that invitation to call on Mark Sykes, Aaronsohn had appeared at the London townhouse promptly at 9:30. Repairing to the exquisitely furnished study, the two men had soon been joined by a third. This was Gerald FitzMaurice, the former dragoman to the British embassy in Constantinople and now one of Sykes’s key allies in the British power structure. While Aaronsohn provided few details of what the three discussed during their ninety-minute conversation—“we talk of Zionism,” he noted in his diary—he’d initially thought it had gone very well. Weeks later, though, with his London stay reaching the one-month mark, he fell to second-guessing. “I was probably too open with them,” he wrote on November 24, “and they took it as a ruse. Or they are distracted or turning a blind eye. Or maybe they saw it as naivete on my part.”
In fact, Aaronsohn’s apprehensions couldn’t have been more misplaced. Even if he kept it fairly discreet, Mark Sykes could be counted among a small but influential group of British statesmen who had begun turning their thoughts to the creation of a Jewish enclave in Palestine. What’s more, in Aaron Aaronsohn he saw a man who might play a signal role in bringing that idea to fruition.
Part of Sykes’s motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect its religious minority populations. At war’s end, the Christian and Jewish Holy Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made right.
But it was not just religiosity; Sykes also saw a potentially huge political advantage in this. The Jews were an influential but deeply factionalized presence throughout the Western world, with most either staying neutral or siding with the Central Powers so far in the war. A chief cause was the inclusion of the notoriously anti-Semitic czarist Russia in the Entente; even many British Jews could barely bring themselves to support an alliance that included the despised regime in Petrograd. By the Entente’s coming out in strong support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Sykes believed, it would inevitably turn the opinion of international Jewry toward its side. In turn, the advocacy of American Jews—a small but powerful constituency—might finally provide the spur for bringing the United States into the war.
This idea had already been promoted by a British statesman far more powerful than Mark Sykes. In March 1915, the home secretary, Herbert Samuel, had put to the cabinet that Palestine be made a British protectorate at war’s end, and Jewish emigration actively encouraged toward the eventual creation of a majority-Jewish enclave. That resolution had been quickly and quietly shot down by the cabinet—the potential ramifications of such a momentous course of action were too far-reaching to countenance—but the notion had lingered on. When put in charge of hashing out an agreement with Georges-Picot on a framework for the postwar Middle East, Mark Sykes had taken it up again.
Immediately a potential obstacle presented itself. In his correspondence with Emir Hussein, Henry McMahon had specifically listed all those territories to be excluded from Arab sovereignty or subject to later negotiation, but nowhere had he mentioned—let alone made a claim for—Palestine. A strict reading of that correspondence, therefore, could only lead to the conclusion that Palestine was to be part of the independent Arab nation. That was not such a big obstacle as far as Mark Sykes was concerned; since he and Georges-Picot were ignoring most other promises made to Hussein as they carved the Middle East into imperial spheres, what was the harm in adding Palestine to the mix? In the draft version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that Syrian province had been penciled in to fall under the “international administration” of Britain, France, and Russia.
But even this arrangement wouldn’t bring about the British-protected Jewish state that Sykes envisioned, nor could it possibly be a harmonious one. As he conceded in a March 1916 cable to George Buchanan, the British ambassador to Russia, “Arab Christians and Moslems alike would fight in the matter to the last man against Jewish Dominion in Palestine.” At the same time, the Jews were stoutly opposed to an international administration there, while the French and Russians would most certainly oppose a solely British one. To break the logjam, Sykes informed Buchanan, he’d bandied about a new idea with Georges-Picot.
A peculiar signature of Sykes’s “solutions” was a kind of quasi-scientific notion that fantastic intricacy might lead to ultimate simplicity, as if the world were a motor vehicle in which, once its myriad moving parts were properly aligned, all would hum along nicely. So it was with his new idea for Palestine. Invoking Herbert Samuel’s cabinet resolution of a year before, he proposed that Palestine be put under a British protectorate; that Emir Hussein appoint one of his sons as the sultan of an independent Palestine; that Britain and France jointly act as the sultanate’s guarantor; while simultaneous
ly a “privileged chartered company” be established for the purpose of buying up land for Jewish colonization. “I regret complicated problem requires complex settlement,” Sykes concluded to Buchanan, “but under above France gets a position in Palestine, Russian demands are satisfied, Arabs have a Prince, Zionists get constitutional position and have British protection, which I understand they desire.”
But lest the champagne be uncorked too soon, Sykes’s neat formula elided some inconvenient realities. First, Samuel’s proposal of the previous year had been rejected out of hand by the cabinet. Second, Sykes had floated his plan without clearing it with any of his superiors—and floated it to the chief French negotiator deciding the future composition of the Middle East, no less. The day after Sykes’s cable to Buchanan had reached his desk, Foreign Secretary Edward Grey wrote a withering rebuke, ordering Sykes to “obliterate from his memory that the Samuel’s Cabinet memorandum made any mention of a British Protectorate.… I told Mr. Samuel at the time that a British Protectorate was quite out of the question and Sir M. Sykes should never mention the subject without making this clear.”
That slapdown may have led to greater discretion on Sykes’s part, but it certainly didn’t cool his ardor for thinking creatively when it came to Palestine. Through the spring and summer of 1916, he held a series of private discussions with Moses Gaster, a leader of the British Zionist movement, to keep the ideas percolating. It was when he met Aaron Aaronsohn, however, that his passions returned to full flourish. According to Sykes’s biographer, Roger Adelson, “If Rabbi Gaster a few months before had provided Sykes with the grace-note of Zionism in Europe, here was Aaronsohn who had actually played the trumpet in Palestine. Sykes liked the sound of it.”
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