At the same time that they attempted to calm Arab fears of a Jewish takeover, the commission needed to unite the deeply fractious Jewish community in Palestine under the Zionist banner. The best, perhaps only, way to do this was to convince them of the dramatic changes soon to be coming to Palestine in the wake of the Balfour Declaration—in other words, nearly the precise opposite of what they would be telling the Arabs. In addition to these constituencies were the British military and political officials in the region. Even those favorably disposed toward the Balfour Declaration tended to view it as an extraordinary complication, a new British commitment to compete with those already made to the Arabs and the French.
In the Canberra stateroom, Weizmann laid out with a broad brush how this complex initiative was to proceed. Obviously, the favor of British officials would be won or lost depending on whether the Zionists made their lives less or more difficult, so the first task was to mollify the Arabs. To this end, it would be publicly and repeatedly stated by the commission—and by “commission” in this context, Chaim Weizmann was referring specifically to Chaim Weizmann—that the Zionists had no intention of trying to install a Jewish state in Palestine at the end of the war, nor did they intend to start buying up land. To the contrary, the Zionists fully supported the British authorities’ recent moratorium on land sales in Palestine, and were only looking for the opportunity for those Jews who wished to do so to return to the land of their forebears, to engage in its political and economic development hand in hand with the region’s other religious or ethnic communities.
This was to be the overt message, at least. As Weizmann went on to explain, Zionist organizations needed to actively encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine on a large scale, and to stockpile funds for the purchase of land once the sales moratorium was lifted. Certainly there was no backing away from the ultimate goal—the creation of a Jewish state—but nothing to gain by acknowledging it publicly.
At least initially, this complicated dance was performed to great effect. After an ecstatic welcome by the Jewish community in Alexandria—hundreds of schoolchildren lined the wharf to sing the Hebrew song “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”)—the Zionist Commission continued on to an even warmer reception in Cairo. To both British officials and members of the Syrian exile community in Egypt, Weizmann stressed time and again the benign intentions of the Zionist cause. As Kincaid Cornwallis, Gilbert Clayton’s deputy at the Arab Bureau, reported on April 20, the Zionist leader told a delegation of Arabs known as the Syrian Committee that “it was his ambition to see Palestine governed by some stable Government like that of Great Britain, that a Jewish Government would be fatal to his plans and that it was simply his wish to provide a home for the Jews in the Holy Land where they could live their own national life, sharing equal rights with the other inhabitants.” Further, Weizmann assured his Arab listeners that the status of Muslim holy places would remain inviolate, spoke with great sympathy of the Arab Revolt against the Turks, and even suggested it was he who had pressed on the British the land-buying moratorium. “Suspicion still remains in the minds of some,” Cornwallis concluded his report, “but it is tempered by the above considerations, and there is little doubt that it will gradually disappear if the Commission continues its present attitude of conciliation.”
Among those with an intimate view of this charm offensive was U.S. State Department special agent William Yale. One of the Syrian Committee leaders whom Weizmann repeatedly met with in Cairo was a man named Suleiman Bey Nassif, who also happened to be one of the troika of Jerusalem businessmen who had held the oil concessions purchased by Standard Oil in 1914. Yale had stayed in close touch with Nassif since coming to Cairo, and from the exiled businessman he received a detailed account of those meetings with Weizmann. “On the whole,” Yale reported to the State Department, “these conferences were a success, the Syrian leaders came away from them with the impression that the Zionists did not wish to impose a Jewish government in Palestine, and that the Jews were coming to Palestine under conditions and with ideas that they could accept.”
But if the Syrians were convinced, Yale harbored doubts. For one thing, he found it odd that the Zionist Commission would soon be traveling on to Palestine, their way facilitated by the British government, while Nassif and his fellow Syrian Committee members remained barred from the region. Yale’s suspicions deepened further when he had a chat with Louis Meyer, the sole American “observer” delegate to the commission.
Perhaps Meyer was another of those who didn’t fully appreciate the duties of a State Department special agent, or maybe he was simply lulled by the prospect of talking to a fellow American, but he went decidedly off script in his meeting with William Yale. As Yale would recall, “Meyer told me very directly that just because Weizmann was currently disavowing any intention of creating a Jewish state in Palestine, that didn’t imply that he was bound to that disavowal for the future. Instead, the ultimate goal is a Jewish nation under either British or American protection.”
As he probed further, Yale ascertained that the plans for that Jewish nation were in fact quite well advanced. Indeed, within the Zionist Commission was an ongoing debate over what should become of Palestine’s Arab population once nationhood had been achieved, with those arguing that “cheap Arab labor” was essential “to the growth and success of Zionism” pitted against those who foresaw the day when non-Jews would have to be expelled. In the end, Meyer opined, it came down to numbers, that “as in the [American] south the white population would never submit to a domination by the negroes, so a Jewish minority in Palestine would never submit to a domination by an Arab majority.”
To the American intelligence agent, the commission increasingly appeared to be a kind of political Potemkin village, and he took at least a small measure of delight when the façade it was presenting to the world suffered its first small tear. As might have been predicted, that tear came at the hands of Aaron Aaronsohn.
Day after day in Cairo, Aaronsohn suffered in silence through the interminable meetings and speeches to which the commission was subjected, his frustration piqued just as much by the long-winded and quarrelsome Jewish delegations as those of the Arabs. One protracted session with a group of Jewish religious notables, in which Weizmann had been forced to patiently explain why Zionism was not antireligious, had almost proved too much; as Aaronsohn railed in his diary, “once again, pearls have been thrown down in front of the pigs of the community.”
Unfortunately, the agronomist reached his breaking point at the worst possible time, during a meeting with Suleiman Nassif’s Syrian Committee. When one of the Arabs suggested that Jewish settlers tended to be clannish and exclusively traded with their own, to the detriment of Arabs, a furious Aaronsohn rose to denounce the charge as a lie. Weizmann swiftly tried to defuse the situation, offering that while such a lamentable state of affairs might well have occurred in the past, steps would be taken to ensure it didn’t in the future. But Aaronsohn’s public outburst cast an understandable pall over the gathering. “It is to be hoped,” Yale wryly reported to the State Department, “that Dr. Weizmann will keep Mr. Aaronsohn in the background in all the [future] dealings of the Commission with the Arabs.”
Weizmann obviously thought along similar lines. At the next conference with the same Syrian Committee a few days later, Aaronsohn was nowhere to be seen.
ON THE MORNING of April 2, Lawrence and a small entourage of bodyguards set out from Guweira, bound for the Syrian interior. It was the first time Lawrence had been on a camel in over a month, and the journey quickly lifted his spirits. “The abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me,” he wrote, “and rendered my mind vacant with its superfluous greatness, a greatness achieved not by the addition of thought to its emptiness, but by its subtraction. In the weakness of earth’s life was mirrored the strength of heaven, so vast, so beautiful, so strong.”
Pastoral splendor aside, this trek had been made necessary by a worrisome feature on the map of Syria, one that cal
led into question General Allenby’s proposed march on Damascus. While the British army held a strong and orderly line across the breadth of central Palestine, an approximately thirty-mile span extending from the Mediterranean shore above Jaffa all the way to the Jordan River, everything east of the Jordan still lay in Turkish hands. This meant that the farther the British pushed north for Damascus, the more exposed they would become to a Turkish counterattack on their ever-lengthening eastern flank. This danger would have been vastly reduced had the Moab Plateau been seized, but, following Zeid’s sabotaging of that effort, British war planners had come up with a new scheme, a preliminary operation to pave the way for the main thrust on Damascus.
In consultation with Lawrence at those headquarters meetings in late February, it had been decided that the three-thousand-man Arab army encamped in Aqaba would storm the critical railhead town of Maan, just thirty miles northeast of the Arabs’ forward headquarters at Guweira. Both to mask that attack and to prevent Turkish reinforcements from being rushed to Maan, a British cavalry force would simultaneously sweep across the top of the Dead Sea, some 120 miles above Maan, to destroy critical stretches of the Hejaz Railway in the vicinity of the town of Amman. Once Maan was firmly in Arab hands, all Turkish troops to the south, including those still holding Medina, would be permanently stranded. By then turning their attention to the north, the Arab army and British auxiliary forces could quickly clear the railway of all the small Turkish outposts below Amman. If all went according to plan, the British and their Arab allies would then have a unified east-west battle line across almost the entire length of greater Syria, allowing for the push on Damascus to commence.
The role chosen for Lawrence in this roll‑up operation was relatively limited, but one for which he was uniquely qualified. As other British advisors oversaw the principal engagement, the assault on Maan, he was to take a small group of rebels one hundred miles north to a valley known as Atatir. There he would join with other tribal forces to conduct “worrying” raids against the Turks around Amman in conjunction with the British cavalry raid coming from the west. With that raid tentatively scheduled for early April, Lawrence had set out from Guweira a few days ahead of time to get into place.
By April 6, his party had reached the valley of Atatir. In Lawrence’s rendering, the place was like an Eden in the first burst of spring, its hills and streambanks a riot of young sawgrass and wildflowers. “Everything was growing,” he wrote, “and daily the picture was fuller and brighter till the desert became like a rank water-meadow. Playful packs of winds came crossing and tumbling over one another, their wide, brief gusts surging through the grass, to lay it momentarily in swathes of dark and light satin, like young corn after the roller.”
If Lawrence’s high spirits and focus on the beauty surrounding him seemed a bit incongruous for a man preparing to go into battle, another detail made it even more so. Just before setting out for Atatir, he had learned that two of the men he’d left to guard the Azraq citadel had died from cold over the brutally harsh winter. One was Daud, one of the pair of camp imps Lawrence had taken on as his personal attendants six months earlier. The bearer of that news had been Daud’s inseparable companion, Farraj.
“These two had been friends from childhood,” Lawrence noted in Seven Pillars, “in eternal gaiety, working together, sleeping together, sharing every scrape and profit with the openness and honesty of perfect love. So I was not astonished to see Farraj look dark and hard of face, leaden-eyed and old, when he came to tell me that his fellow was dead, and from that day till his service ended, he made no more laughter for us.… The others offered themselves to comfort him, but instead he wandered restlessly, gray and silent, very much alone.” Despite his grief, or perhaps because of it, Farraj had joined Lawrence on the trek north.
In Atatir, Lawrence received word from the British army—but it was not at all what he’d expected to hear. According to the plan worked out at headquarters, the mixed cavalry and infantry force, some twelve thousand men in all, was to charge up from the Jordan valley to seize the town of Salt, in the hills some ten miles west of Amman. From there, a raiding party would continue on to destroy the most vulnerable points on the Hejaz Railway—two high-spanning bridges and a tunnel—outside Amman. But with the enemy apparently tipped to their plans, the attack force had been met in Salt by entrenched units of German and Turkish soldiers, and what was envisioned as a jaunt had turned into a bloody two-day battle. When at last Salt was secured and the raiding party made for the railway at Amman, the enemy had been waiting there, too, forcing the British to turn back without achieving any of their principal objectives. But then the news grew even worse: having suffered some two thousand casualties, the British had been forced out of Salt and were now scrambling back across the Jordan with the Turks in close pursuit.
“It was thought that Jerusalem would be recovered [by the Turks],” Lawrence wrote of the ever more ominous reports he received in Atatir. “I knew enough of my countrymen to reject that possibility, but clearly things were very wrong.” Worse than the physical defeat, though, was the psychological effect it was likely to have on the Arabs. “Allenby’s plan had seemed modest, and that we [British] should so fall down before the Arabs was deplorable. They had never trusted us to do the great things which I had foretold.” With the rout at Salt, those doubts were sure to be deepened.
With nothing left to do around Amman, Lawrence turned south with fifteen of his bodyguards to join in the ongoing assault of Maan—but the ill-starred nature of this venture wasn’t over yet. The next day, in the desert outside the hamlet of Faraifra, an eight-man Turkish foot patrol was spotted haplessly trudging along the railway ahead. After their fruitless mission north, Lawrence’s men begged for permission to attack the outnumbered and exposed patrol. “I thought it too trifling,” he recalled, “but when they chafed, agreed.”
As the Turks scurried to take cover in a railway culvert, Lawrence dispatched his men into flanking positions. Too late, he noticed Farraj; completely on his own, the young camp attendant had spurred his camel and was charging directly at the enemy. As Lawrence watched, Farraj abruptly drew his mount up beside the railway culvert; there was a shot, and then Farraj fell from view. “His camel stood unharmed by the bridge, alone,” Lawrence wrote. “I could not believe that he had deliberately ridden up to them in the open and halted, yet it looked like it.”
When finally Lawrence and the others reached the culvert, they found one Turkish soldier dead and Farraj horribly wounded, shot through the side. With efforts to stanch his bleeding to no avail, Farraj’s companions attempted to lift him onto a camel, even as the young man begged to be left to die. The matter was rather decided when an alarm went up that a Turkish patrol of some fifty soldiers was approaching along the rails.
Knowing the hideous end the Turks often perpetrated on enemy captives, Lawrence and his bodyguards had a tacit understanding to finish off any of their number too badly wounded to travel. With Farraj, this coup de grâce task fell to Lawrence. “I knelt down beside him, holding my pistol near the ground by his head so that he should not see my purpose, but he must have guessed it, for he opened his eyes and clutched me with his harsh, scaly hand, the tiny hand of these unripe Nejd fellows. I waited a moment, and he said, ‘Daud will be angry with you,’ the old smile coming back so strangely to this gray shrinking face. I replied, ‘salute him from me.’ He returned the formal answer, ‘God will give you peace,’ and at last wearily closed his eyes.”
After shooting Farraj, Lawrence remounted his camel, and he and his entourage fled as the first Turkish bullets came for them.
Before the day was over, there was to be one more illustration of the mercilessness of this war, and of Lawrence’s growing imperviousness to it. That night, as the party camped a few miles away from Faraifra, an argument developed over who should inherit Farraj’s prize camel. Lawrence settled the dispute by drawing his pistol once more and shooting the animal in the head. At dinner that night, they at
e rice and the camel’s butchered carcass. “Afterwards,” Lawrence noted, “we slept.”
BY MID-APRIL 1918, Djemal Pasha was probably feeling quite sanguine about the future. Defying the rumors of his political demise of just a few months earlier, he remained very much a force within the shadowy CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) leadership, just as respected and feared as before. There was also heartening news from the battlefield. On March 21, Germany had launched its massive offensive in France, smashing through the Allied armies before them to make the greatest territorial gains of any Western Front army since the beginning of the war. Indeed, the first wave of that offensive, code-named Michael, had only stalled because the advancing German forces had outrun their supply lines. By April 13, a second offensive, Georgette, was closing on the French coast and the vital seaports there. Suddenly it appeared Germany just might succeed in defeating Britain and France before the incoming Americans could rescue them.
And if Germany was currently experiencing great success on the Western Front battlefield, Turkey wasn’t doing so badly on the Eastern. Having first reclaimed those northeastern provinces that had been occupied by Russia, in early February Turkish troops had taken advantage of the continuing power vacuum brought about by Russia’s defeat to smash into Armenia. By mid-April, those troops were preparing for the next phase of operations, a sweep all the way to the shores of the Caspian Sea and the fantastically rich oilfields of Baku. Rather like Djemal Pasha himself, the Ottoman Empire had become like a strange ever-mutating organism, shorn of influence and authority in one place only to regain it in another.
Looking to the south, it could be argued that earning the displeasure of international Zionism had produced unexpected benefits for Turkey. The Balfour Declaration had won the Zionists to the British, but it had come at the price of an enraged Arab world. That had allowed Djemal and other Ottoman leaders to make appeals to a number of disenchanted Muslim and Christian leaders in Syria, and even to the chief traitor himself, King Hussein in the Hejaz. By mid-April, there were signs that this last and most important overture was starting to bear fruit. As Djemal had learned through his intermediaries in Syria, Hussein’s son Faisal had recently responded to a Turkish peace offer by setting out demands of his own. The two sides were still quite far apart, but if there was any lesson to be learned from the musical-chairs game that World War I had become, it was that everything was fluid, that what had been lost yesterday might be recovered tomorrow. All that really mattered was who won out in the end, and by April 1918 there could be no doubt that the advantage lay with the Central Powers.
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