Under these circumstances, the notion that Lawrence might be permitted to stand down from his crucial post over a point of honor was so risible that he apparently didn’t even broach the topic with Allenby. “There was no escape for me,” he recounted. “I must take up again my mantle of fraud in the East. With my certain contempt for half-measures, I took it up quickly and wrapped myself in it completely.”
After a quick visit to Jerusalem to see his old friend Ronald Storrs, the city’s newly appointed military governor, Lawrence continued on to Cairo. There, on March 8, he wrote a short letter home.
For many months, he had been telling his family in Oxford that he hoped to soon make use of the leave time he had accrued since 1914 to arrange a visit home. That hope was now more distant than ever. “I’m to go back [to the war front] till June at least,” he wrote. “One rather expected that, I’m afraid.” He went on to dimissively tell of his latest promotion and military citation, stemming from his leadership role in an action that was already coming to haunt him, the massacre at Tafileh. “They have now given me a DSO [Distinguished Service Order medal]. It’s a pity all this good stuff is not sent to someone who could use it! Also apparently I’m a colonel of sorts.”
During his brief stopover in Cairo, Lawrence also acceded to meet with a young American intelligence officer who was eager to speak with him.
“MAJOR LAWRENCE’S OPINIONS demand the most serious consideration,” William Yale wrote Leland Harrison on March 11, “because of his intimate knowledge of the Arabs and the importance of the work he is engaged in.… Speaking Arabic fluently, traveling, living and working among the Bedouins, he has a knowledge of the sentiments and feelings of the Arab tribes that probably no other westerner has. His knowledge of the true condition of affairs existing at the present time among the Arabs should be more accurate than that of any other person.”
It marked the third time that Yale and Lawrence had crossed paths. In their last encounter in the autumn of 1914, the newly minted British intelligence officer had pumped Yale for details on Turkish troop movements and supply lines in southern Palestine. Now it was William Yale who was the inquiring intelligence agent, Lawrence on the receiving end of a battery of questions related to the state of affairs in Syria.
Long accustomed to the opacity of British officials, Yale was clearly startled by Lawrence’s candor. It enabled the special agent to report back to the State Department that “the British forces in Palestine would soon commence an offensive from which excellent results are expected.” Even more remarkable, Lawrence provided Yale with almost precise details on the Arab rebels’ military objectives in that coming offensive, even pinpointing the spot in the Syrian interior where he hoped to forge a link between the Arabs and Allenby’s forces.
When the conversation turned to the political, Lawrence was just as forthright. As Yale reported, “Lawrence states the Arabs have no faith in the word of England and of France, and that they believe only such territory as they are able to secure by [their own] force of arms will belong to them.” In Lawrence’s judgment, the Arabs’ inherent distrust of their Western allies had taken on new depth with the Balfour Declaration. “He characterizes it as a dangerous policy and speaks of the activities permitted the Zionist in Egypt and in Palestine as being unwise and foolhardy.” Should the British go any further in their support of the Zionists, Lawrence warned, it could quickly bring about the ruin of the Arab nationalist movement—or at least its end in any way beneficial to the Allies. With his long experience in the region, he dismissed the sunny vision of a man like Mark Sykes and his imagining of a Jewish nation gradually forming in the face of grudging Arab acceptance; in one of Lawrence’s most prescient comments, he allowed that “if a Jewish state is to be created in Palestine, it will have to be done by force of arms and maintained by force of arms amid an overwhelmingly hostile population.”
For a British military officer to so openly disparage the policies of his own government simply wasn’t done in 1918, let alone to a foreign intelligence agent, but it reflected just how powerful Lawrence had become: he was his nation’s vital link to the Arab rebels in the field, no one else could fulfill that role, and because of this, he could say or do nearly anything he wished. Yet, just as at their first encounter in Beersheva, it seemed Lawrence harbored something of a hidden agenda at this meeting with Yale, an agenda masked by his disarming candor. Without showing his guiding hand, he hoped to steer Yale—and through him, the U.S. State Department—toward a policy of his choosing.
Lawrence was now keenly aware of just how little freedom of movement the Arab rebels had, that by tethering their effort directly to that of the British, the fate of both the Arab Revolt and Hussein’s Hashemite dynasty had become hostage to the dictates and caprices of their vastly more powerful ally. While this had always been true to a degree—certainly the Sykes-Picot accord made plain the Arabs’ junior status in the larger scheme of things—what was occurring in early 1918 was of an entirely different order of magnitude.
This was starkly illustrated by a visit Lawrence had made to Aqaba just days before his meeting with Yale. The once-sleepy port village had been so radically transformed over the previous few months as to be unrecognizable, with vast tent cities dotting the narrow coastal shelf beyond the ship-clogged harbor, towering stockpiles of supplies and war matériel everywhere. Where the British presence had once consisted of a handful of officers, there were now hundreds of Crown soldiers handling logistics, training rebel recruits, tending to the myriad needs of an encamped fighting force of thousands of warriors. Aqaba even had its own resident air force now, a fleet of Royal Flying Corps airplanes that periodically set off to bomb the Hejaz Railway and Turkish military installations inland.
The change in circumstances had also been evident in the manner of his visit. Sent to inform Faisal of Allenby’s plans for the upcoming Syrian offensive, Lawrence hadn’t gone to Aqaba aboard one of the slow-moving Red Sea transport ships, but as the passenger in an RFC biplane commandeered by headquarters for the purpose. In his talks with Faisal, long gone were the languorous discussions of tactics or politics over tea in the prince’s tent; instead, their time together on this visit had been less an exploration of what the rebels might do in the coming offensive than a briefing by Lawrence on what they would do. Then, after little more than twenty-four hours on the ground in Aqaba, Lawrence had reboarded the requisitioned airplane and flown back to Cairo.
It all illustrated one of the paradoxes of power, that what the Arab Revolt had gained in importance in the eyes of its British overseers had come with a corresponding loss of autonomy. The ultimate danger of that, in Lawrence’s view, was that the British were now taking their tethered Arab allies down a path that might well lead to their destruction.
From the outset, Hussein’s notion of a British-sponsored pan-Arab revolt with himself as its leader had been built on very shaky ground, viewed skeptically by both Arab conservatives and progressives. To ibn-Saud, Hussein’s chief rival in Arabia and the leader of the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement, the king’s alliance with the British made him a toady of the Christian West (never mind that Saud was also on the British payroll). At the same time, the more cosmopolitan Arabs of Syria had felt little in common with the Bedouin “primitives” riding out of the Hejaz. These were problems to deal with down the road, once the war was over, but with the Balfour Declaration the road had rushed up to meet Hussein.
Taken aback by the furious Arab reaction to that declaration, the British had put great pressure on their principal Arab ally to come out in its support. This Hussein had done, tepidly, but instead of calming the Arab waters, the move had served to strengthen Arab opposition to Hussein. In early January, David Hogarth, Lawrence’s old mentor and now the “acting director” of the Arab Bureau—the title was little more than an honorific, true authority lay elsewhere—had called upon Hussein in hopes of finally clarifying the boundaries of a postwar Arab nation. Instead, he had found a king who only
wished to talk of the growing threat he now faced from ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists. Simultaneously, Arab nationalists in Egypt and Syria had adopted ibn-Saud’s toady language in deriding Hussein’s accommodation with the Zionists. Just how badly this British scheme had backfired was evident in an alarming letter Reginald Wingate received from Hussein in early February. As Wingate reported, “[Hussein] refers to the contingency of suicide as [an] alternative to political bankruptcy.… The phraseology is vague, but the Sherif of Mecca appears to be affected by apprehensions caused by the Allies’ pro-Zionist declarations.”
It was at this juncture that Lawrence became ensnared. In late January, he had penned an essay for an even more restricted version of the Arab Bulletin, one seen by only a handful of officials, in which he’d strongly touted Faisal’s base of support in Syria, while besmirching his opponents there as dupes of French or German propaganda. While the article was a fairly transparent effort to boost Faisal’s claim to authority in Syria, it also helped alert those British officials grappling with the Arab fallout from Balfour that perhaps it was Faisal, not Hussein, whom they should be looking to for help—and, of course, wooing Faisal meant going through Lawrence. In early February, just days after Lawrence’s article appeared, Gilbert Clayton informed Mark Sykes that “I have urged Lawrence to impress on Faisal the necessity of an entente with the Jews.”
The irony of being enlisted to sell Faisal on a policy with which he himself vehemently disagreed was not lost on Lawrence, and he had only halfheartedly agreed to do so. “As for the Jews,” he’d answered Clayton from Tafileh, “when I see Faisal next I’ll talk to him, and the Arab attitude shall be sympathetic—for the duration of the war at least.” There was a limit to how far Lawrence would go, though; as he informed Clayton, if some public declaration by Faisal was hoped for, that “is rather beyond my province.”
But however much he opposed the policy, Lawrence was enough a practitioner of realpolitik to realize he had little choice in the matter; the Balfour Declaration was a fait accompli, the Arab rebels were hardly in a position to renounce their alliance with the British over it, so the chief goal now must be to limit its damage or to play it for advantage elsewhere. In this latter category, the obvious candidate was greater Syria. Lawrence could see a calculus whereby, in return for the Arab rebels ceding to Balfour, a grateful Britain would then uphold the rebels’ claim to the rest of Syria against the French. The problem was, Lawrence had sufficiently lost faith in his own government to realize that this was a very risky bet.
So what other cards to play? Certainly the most radical—and perilous—was to negotiate with the Turks. In early February, Faisal had received another secret peace feeler from General Mehmet Djemal, the new commander of the Turkish Fourth Army. This missive had been a good deal more specific and accommodating than Djemal Pasha’s previous letter, and Faisal had sent an equally specific, if guarded, reply. While overtly rebuffing the overture, he had also left the door open for a possible settlement if the Turks withdrew their troops from Arabia and southern Syria. This was not such a deal-breaking ultimatum as it might sound; by February 1918, the Young Turks were already looking to concentrate their military efforts on reclaiming those Turkic lands being vacated by the defeated Russians, and might be quite happy to abandon the impoverished and quarrelsome Arab regions to do so.
But before anything so drastic as cutting a deal with the Turks, there was one more potential actor who could aid the Arab cause: the Americans. This was almost certainly why Lawrence found the time to meet with William Yale in Cairo.
Since bringing his country into the war in April 1917, President Wilson had repeatedly stressed that the age of imperialism was over, that his crusade for the world to “be made safe for democracy” also meant self-determination and independence for oppressed peoples and “small nations” everywhere. It had taken his European allies some time to accept that the American president actually held to such a quaint notion, but all doubt was dispelled with Wilson’s “Fourteen Points for Peace” proclamation in January 1918.
Probably more than any other single document of the twentieth century, Wilson’s Fourteen Points captivated a global audience. Amid the abject and unending ruin of World War I, the American president had outlined a semi-utopian vision of how the earth was to function in the future, a radical sweeping away of the imperial structure that had held sway for millennia, in favor of all peoples enjoying the right to self-determination, a world in which patient negotiation at a “League of Nations” might make war obsolete. So profound and revolutionary was this document that it sent shock waves through all the imperial powers, the war-shattered citizenry of Berlin and Vienna seeing it as a potential pathway out of their misery just as much as their brethren in London and Paris and Rome. Adding to its attraction was that in simple, unambiguous language, Wilson had laid out a road map—his Fourteen Points—for how this process would begin.
The twelfth point of that proclamation was taken up with the dispensation of the Ottoman Empire. While the American president decreed that the Turkish portion of that empire should remain its own sovereign state, “the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” To Lawrence, as to most other objective readers, that didn’t sound at all like the Sykes-Picot Agreement, nor, for that matter, like the externally imposed Balfour Declaration.
In his conversation with William Yale, Lawrence emphasized the enormous esteem in which Arabs of all stripes held the United States. Indeed, so forcefully did Lawrence hit on this note that in his summing up of their conversation for Leland Harrison, Yale noted that the main points “upon which all evidence is agreed, are the distrust of the Arabs in the good faith of England and of France; the opposition to Zionism; and the complete confidence of the Arabs in the United States.”
Idle flattery had never been one of Lawrence’s strong suits, and this surely wasn’t the motive behind his message to the American agent. Rather, as Yale wrote, “he declares that later, if things should not turn out as well as is expected, and if there should be an imminent danger of the disaffection of the Arabs, a declaration by the United States concerning the future of the Arabs and their country would prove to be a ‘trump card’ to play against the Turko-German propaganda, and he feels that such a declaration would have an enormous effect upon the Arabs.”
Perhaps lulled by Lawrence’s candor on other matters, Yale appears to have accepted this argument at face value—or at least not pondered it too deeply. If he had, he might have realized that such an American declaration would be a far less effective tool against “Turko-German propaganda”—after all, the United States was at war with Germany, so her motives would naturally be suspect—than against the acquisitive aspirations of America’s allies, Britain and France. In essence, and while obviously of far less treasonable consequence than negotiating with Turkey, Lawrence was looking to a foreign government as the vehicle by which to undermine the policies of his own.
To that end, the time Lawrence carved out of his hectic Cairo schedule to meet with William Yale would seem well spent. In the months just ahead, the State Department’s special agent would increasingly urge his government to take a more active role in Middle Eastern affairs, and to stand with the Arabs against those who would subordinate them.
DURING THE SAME week that Yale and Lawrence were meeting in Cairo, on the evening of March 14, about a dozen men gathered in a stateroom of SS Canberra as it lay to its mooring in the Italian port city of Taranto. Nine were members of a group called the Zionist Commission, while two more were British government liaisons, or “minders,” tasked to both facilitate and monitor that group’s work. The meeting was intended as a kind of last-minute strategy session, for in the morning the Canberra, a converted Australian steamship, would sail for Egypt, the starting point of the Zionist Commission’s historic mission to the Middle East.
Framing the task before
them was William Ormsby-Gore, the British Conservative member of Parliament who had become an ardent convert to Zionism, and who now served alongside Mark Sykes on the British War Cabinet’s Near East Committee. In the four months since the Balfour Declaration’s release, Arab opposition had only grown more strident. The primary goal of the commission, Ormsby-Gore explained, was to assure the leaders of both the Christian and Muslim Arab communities that they had nothing to fear from a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.
Chaim Weizmann, the head of the delegation sailing to Egypt, then bluntly laid out his “one leading principle” for the mission, “which was that until the end of the war, the Arabs were a military asset to the British government. After the war, they might become a liability.” In short, now wasn’t the time to be confrontational with those who opposed them. Rather, the goal was to mollify and to calm, to bide their time and look for advantage in the future.
Needless to say, this was hardly Aaron Aaronsohn’s vision of their mission—but then he was only tangentially a member of the commission at all. Back in London, there had been such fierce opposition to his inclusion by some other committee members that his official status was now that of a mere adjunct “agricultural expert,” and that only on the insistence of American Zionist leaders like Louis Brandeis.
Part of this resistance stemmed from the revelations about his NILI spy ring. That had sparked fierce debate within both the Zionist community and international Jewry as a whole, with many accusing the spy mastermind of having endangered the very existence of the Palestine yeshuv through his actions. Just as worrisome, though, was the scientist’s reputation for argumentativeness, for it was hard to imagine a more exquisitely delicate diplomatic mission than that being undertaken by the passengers on the Canberra.
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