He was also getting out of Syria at a very good time. That autumn, Falkenhayn had struggled to bring a new elite Turkish force, the Yildirim Army Group, south for a preemptive assault on the British massing in the Sinai, but he had been beaten to the punch by Allenby, with the British smashing through the Turkish line at the end of October. In the month since, and with transiting Yildirim units still scattered over the breadth of Syria, the British had seized much of southern Palestine, and now stood poised on the outskirts of Jerusalem itself. In all of this, Djemal stood perfectly blameless.
But it also wasn’t as if either Djemal or the Turkish war effort in Syria were finished just yet. Instead, and as had happened so many times over the centuries when all seemed lost for the Ottoman Empire, it was precisely at this darkest moment that a shocking turn of events had the chance to change everything.
On November 7, the very day that the Turkish army had been abandoning Gaza, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks had overthrown the Russian government of Alexander Kerensky. The following morning, the Bolsheviks released their Decree on Peace, announcing their intention to immediately withdraw from the war. All along the front, Russian forces stood down in a unilateral cease-fire. Just like that, the Ottoman Empire had seen its most implacable foe of the past two centuries simply fall away, one of the three enemy armies tearing at its frontiers suddenly go silent.
More extraordinary news had soon followed. Rifling through the overthrown government’s files, the Bolsheviks found a copy of the still-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. No document could have more confirmed the Bolsheviks’ accusation that the slaughter visited on the earth over the past three years had been in the service of imperial aggrandizement, and in mid-November they published the compact for all to see. Of course, that document also played to Djemal Pasha’s long-standing accusation—that British and French talk of supporting Arab independence was simply a ruse to grab Arab lands for their colonial empires—and he used the occasion of his speech in Beirut to reiterate that point to the entire Arab and Muslim world.
“The [Sykes-Picot] Agreement was a device for bringing about an Arab revolt to suit the designs of the British who, needing tools and catspaws to serve their own ends, encouraged certain Arabs to rebel by giving them mendacious promises and hoodwinking them with false hopes,” Djemal said. For a long time, he told his audience, he had puzzled over why King Hussein had turned his back on his Muslim brethren; now the answer was revealed. “Eventually, the unfortunate Sherif Hussein fell into the trap laid for him by the British, allowed himself to be ensnared by their cajoleries, and committed his offence against the unity and the majesty of Islam.”
But with the Western imperialist scheme thus exposed, Djemal suggested, there was still time to defeat it. Hussein could repent for his past sins by renouncing his unholy alliance. Arabs everywhere, now shown the true face of the conniving enemy, could unite to defeat them. “I am going to Constantinople, but I shall soon be back,” Djemal vowed at the end of his speech. “I beg the leading inhabitants of the town to pay no attention to false rumors, and to be patient during the few remaining days of the war, so that we may reach our goal.”
The following day, his Beirut speech, with its exposure of Sykes-Picot, was carried on the front page of newspapers throughout Syria and Turkey.
Djemal hadn’t limited his efforts to oration. Just prior to his Beirut address, he had penned letters to Faisal ibn Hussein and to the rebels’ chief military commander, and arranged for them to be delivered to Aqaba through a confidential emissary. In his letter to Faisal, Djemal rather magnanimously conceded that the Arab Revolt might be justified if it brought about a truly independent Arab government in which the “dignity and splendor of Islam” was secured. “But what sort of independence can you conceive … after Palestine has become an international country, as the allied governments have openly and officially declared, [and] with Syria completely under French domination, and with Iraq and the whole of Mesopotamia forming part and parcel of British possessions? And how is such a government as this going to undertake, with independence and majesty, the shaping of the destinies of Islam? Perhaps you had not foreseen these results at the outset, but I am hoping that the spectacle of the British conquering Palestine will reveal to you this truth in all its nakedness.” The letter was intended as more than a scold. “If you admit this truth,” Djemal concluded, “there is nothing easier than to announce a general amnesty for the Arab revolt, and reopen negotiations with a view to solving the problem in favor of Islam.”
Djemal had been quite strategic in choosing the recipient of his overture. As he knew from the time they’d spent together in Damascus, Faisal was simultaneously probably the most devout and the most modern of Hussein’s four sons. Djemal had also selected his words with great care, returning again and again to two: “Islam” and “independence.” If he’d done so in hopes of stirring doubt in Faisal, he’d selected well.
· · ·
FOR HIS STATE visit to Jerusalem in 1899, Kaiser Wilhelm had arranged for a special entryway to be carved from the city’s ancient walls. Astride a black stallion and clad in a uniform studded with medals, the German leader used this portal to enter the Old City, sacred ground to the world’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims, like some latter-day conquering Crusader.
The move had proven something of a public relations black eye for Germany, and for their own celebratory entry into Jerusalem in December 1917, the British strived to keep things more low-key. Adhering to the long-distance counsel of Mark Sykes, World War I Britain’s version of a political stage manager, it was decided that General Allenby would enter through one of the city’s traditional gates and on foot, and that no British flags would be flown. The Allies had been handed a tremendous propaganda victory with Jerusalem’s capture, Sykes pointed out, and anything that smacked of British or Christian triumphalism was a sure way to sabotage it.
Rather by chance, one of those participating in the historic procession into the Old City on that morning of December 11 was T. E. Lawrence. After his traumatic ordeal in Deraa, he had returned to Aqaba and then been summoned to Allenby’s field headquarters in southern Palestine. He had made the journey fully expecting to be upbraided, perhaps even demoted, for his failure at Yarmuk, but instead found Allenby pleasantly distracted by his continuing string of battlefield victories. He was still at General Headquarters on December 9 when word came that the Turks and Germans were pulling out of Jerusalem. Lent an army uniform and the appropriate officer’s “pips,” he changed out of his worn Arab robes and joined in the ceremonial entry masquerading as General Clayton’s staff officer. Even for a man whose Christian faith was now moribund, Lawrence found the import of that day overwhelming; for the first time in over six hundred years, a European army had returned to the cradle of Western religion, and the Middle East was never going to be the same. “For me,” he later wrote, “[it] was the supreme moment of the war.”
Lawrence undoubtedly felt overwhelmed for other reasons, too. It was only when he had hobbled into Aqaba in late November, racked by illness and still weakened by his ill-treatment at Deraa, that he had learned the extent of Allenby’s victories in Palestine. It was also when he first learned of the Balfour Declaration, and of the Russian revolution that had brought the Bolsheviks to power. A bit closer to home, he had also been apprised of the final fall from grace of his old nemesis, Édouard Brémond.
Senior British officials had been gunning for Brémond since the previous spring; in fact, antipathy for him appeared to be one of the few points on which Lawrence and Mark Sykes fully agreed. “I am convinced that the sooner the French military mission is removed from Hejaz, the better,” Sykes had written the Foreign Office back in May. “The French officers are without exception anti-Arab, and only serve to promote dissension and intrigue.” In Sykes’s opinion, that antagonistic tone was set by the head of the French mission, in “the deliberately perverse attitude and policy followed by Colonel Brémond.”
The for
ce of Sykes’s condemnation may have actually served to keep the French colonel around that much longer. Anxious not to appear acquiescent to their ally, upon being informed of British displeasure with Brémond, Paris had replied that, coincidentally enough, they were already considering radically downscaling his Jeddah mission. Apparently to create a face-saving “decent interval” that would allow for French authorship of the idea, nothing was then done for the next six months. Playing their own role in the charade, British officials busied themselves in the meantime by debating just what honorific to bestow upon their irritant. The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, it was finally resolved, and Reginald Wingate had taken the opportunity of that conferral to extend to Brémond his “warm compliments and congratulations on the valuable work recently performed by the French Detachment under your command in the Hejaz.”
But just because Édouard Brémond was now the holder of one of Britain’s highest military commendations didn’t alter the fact that, at the end of the day, he was still a Frenchman. As the dismissed colonel set sail for France—to maintain the decorous façade, he was officially taking a six-week leave—Wingate fired off a cable to a senior official at the Foreign Office. “Brémond’s antecedents are known to you,” he wrote, “and I think it very probable that main object of his journey is political and to canvas opinion in Paris against entente policy of Picot and Sykes. Latter should be warned.”
What Brémond’s departure didn’t mean was an end to French maneuvering in the Middle East. Very much to the contrary. With Allenby’s success in Palestine, what had previously been a hypothetical divvying up of Middle Eastern spoils between the Entente powers had suddenly turned quite real. And with tangible stakes in the game, the political intrigue was about to grow far more intense.
Lawrence got a glimpse of this on December 11 when after the ceremonial entry into Jerusalem, the senior British staff repaired to a banquet hall for lunch. As the French political agent officially attached to Allenby’s army, Georges-Picot enjoyed a place of honor during the ceremony, and he evidently took that to mean the two-year-old plan he and Mark Sykes had worked out for Jerusalem’s international administration remained in effect. In the banquet hall, Picot approached Allenby to announce, “And tomorrow, my dear general, I will take the necessary steps to set up civil government in the town.”
In Lawrence’s telling, the comment brought an awkward silence to the hall. “Salad, chicken mayonnaise and foie gras sandwiches hung in our wet mouths unmunched, while we turned to Allenby and gaped. Even he seemed for the moment at a loss.” Only for a moment, though. Turning to the French political agent, Allenby explained that, as Jerusalem fell within the British military zone, the only true authority there was the military commander in chief—namely, himself.
But if the changed military situation was drawing new pressures from the French, that was only one small facet of the political troubles now facing the British. Lawrence saw this firsthand when, after the Jerusalem ceremony, he went on to Cairo. He found a city seething with rage.
Mark Sykes, apparently thinking better of his earlier opinion that the Arabs would have no objection to increased Jewish settlement in Palestine, had endeavored to keep knowledge of the Balfour Declaration in the Arab world to an absolute minimum. That effort had been an abject failure, and as news of the declaration spread among the Egyptian populace that November, dismay had quickly turned to anger. Even as British authorities tried to placate those protests, there had then come Djemal Pasha’s speech in Beirut exposing the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. With startling speed, and with potential consequences that might reduce Allenby’s victories in Palestine to virtual insignificance, the long British campaign to win and keep the Arab world to its side was dealt a serious double blow.
As he observed the situation in Cairo, Lawrence foresaw dark days ahead; if the Balfour and Sykes-Picot revelations were stirring the normally quiescent and heavily policed Egyptian population to near revolt, what effect would they have among the Arab rebels gathered in Aqaba and their prospective allies across Syria? If secretly thankful that he’d had the foresight to inform Faisal of Sykes-Picot nine months earlier—if knowledge of that had only come now, so improvidently combined with that of the Balfour Declaration, it was hard to imagine Faisal ever trusting in Lawrence or any other Briton again—the news was certain to fuel fury among those won over by the Arab leader. No matter how committed they were to Faisal or the cause of Arab independence, it had never been far from any of these men’s minds that the Hashemite leaders of the revolt might be dupes, unwitting or otherwise, of their British and French paymasters. This had been the contention of Constantinople all along, of course, and that charge had now been given both amplification and credence by Djemal Pasha’s disclosures in Beirut.
In Cairo, Lawrence soon received confirmation of the box in which Faisal was finding himself, and also learned of the potential escape hatch being offered by Djemal.
After receiving Djemal’s peace-feeler letter of late November, Faisal had forwarded a copy to his father. In mid-December, Hussein had in turn passed it along to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah. Perhaps Hussein did so to show that, even now, he fully trusted in the British, or perhaps it was meant to convey a warning that in the face of British double dealing, other options were available to him. Of course, he may have simply figured the British would soon find out anyway, since Djemal had mentioned his peace overtures to the Arab rebels in his Beirut speech.
Whatever the motive, Hussein’s proffer of Djemal’s letter set off alarm bells in British Cairo. A few days prior, Clayton had warned Sykes that with news of Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration spreading through the Arab world, it was surely only a matter of time before the Turks approached the rebels with a counteroffer; Djemal’s letter was proof that this time had already come. Fortunately, in Clayton’s view, neither Faisal nor Hussein had responded to the overture—they had done the proper thing and notified the British authorities—but who knew what might happen when the next Turkish offer came?
Lawrence saw matters quite differently. In fact, in Djemal Pasha’s letter, he saw a unique opening for the Arab cause.
As he’d confided to George Lloyd in October, Lawrence no longer regarded himself as fighting for Great Britain, but for Arab independence. Within the upper reaches of the British military and political staff in Cairo, it was common knowledge that British emissaries had for the past several months been meeting in Switzerland with their Turkish counterparts toward forging a peace deal, and if Great Britain felt no compunction against secretly negotiating with the enemy, then why should the Arabs? To the contrary, by playing the Turkish card, by possibly extracting specific terms of settlement from them, the Arabs might then be able to turn around and wring concrete concessions from the British and French. Ultimately, by playing their cards adroitly, the Arabs might gain independence no matter who finally won the war.
Not that Lawrence chose to spell any of this out to his superiors in Cairo. Instead, he suggested that it might be in Britain’s interests to ascertain just what the Turks were willing to offer the Arabs, so that the British could respond preemptively. Implausible as it might seem, this suggestion found a receptive ear in Reginald Wingate. “I have recommended King Hussein to send no official replies [to the Turks],” Wingate cabled the War Cabinet, “but Major Lawrence will consult Faisal as to whether any further confirmation of new Turkish policy could be obtained by interchange of verbal [sic] messages between him and Djemal.”
The War Cabinet swiftly moved to scotch this proposal, but not swiftly enough; Lawrence, it turned out, had left Cairo on the same day, Christmas Eve, that Wingate had sent his cable, so that by the time the War Cabinet weighed in, he was already back in Aqaba with Faisal. Just as he had done at other critical junctures, Lawrence would now capitalize on the delay in receiving orders as an excuse to pursue his own course. That course was to encourage Faisal to enter into a dialogue with his Turkish enemies. Over the coming
months, Faisal and Lawrence would establish and maintain just such a dialogue with the chief Turkish general operating on the south Syrian front.
In Seven Pillars, Lawrence engaged in rather labored reasoning to justify these dealings with the enemy, arguing that with the Ottoman regime increasingly riven between Islamists like Djemal Pasha and Turkish nationalists like the general, Faisal might drive a wedge between them. “By suitably guarded phrases,” Lawrence wrote, “we could throw the odium of the [Arab] Revolt on [Djemal’s] clerical party, and then perhaps the militarists might fall out with them.” Ultimately, so this reasoning went, such a falling-out would benefit both the Arabs and the Turkish nationalists, the former to gain their independence, the latter freed up to concentrate on preserving their homeland of Anatolia.
Perhaps recognizing the thinness of this argument, Lawrence subsequently tried to put distance to his own role in the affair. Thus, the account in the 1922 so-called Oxford Text edition of Seven Pillars—“Faisal, with my full assistance, sent back tendentious answers to Djemal”—became Faisal acting quite on his own by 1926.
Three years later, Lawrence offered a much simpler—and more jaded—rationale for his and Faisal’s actions. It came in reply to a question about those wartime contacts put to him by none other than William Yale. “All is fair in love, war, and alliances,” Lawrence wrote Yale in 1929. “Poof!”
IT APPARENTLY WASN’T enough for Aaron Aaronsohn that he flagrantly violate Chaim Weizmann’s gag order while in the United States. It was also necessary that Weizmann be made fully aware of it, as Aaronsohn proceeded to do in a lengthy report to the British Zionist leader on December 13, 1917. Along with a series of meetings with officials in Washington, he recounted, there had been his address to the City Club in Boston, “to which all the Jewish notables of the city were invited.” This was followed by his talk at the conservative and steadfastly anti-Zionist Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, precisely the sort of opposition bastion that Weizmann desired be avoided but where, according to Aaronsohn, he had been warmly received. “I tried to be brief—I didn’t speak for more than forty minutes—and all hostility in the audience ceased.”
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