But a short, blue-eyed, blond-haired, lantern-jawed, hard-as-nails young man whom Hogarth had known at Oxford and now had brought into his intelligence operation in Cairo would do so. T. E. Lawrence, perhaps unfairly, came to overshadow every other British officer and Arab Bureau colleague serving in the Middle East. Some of these men were daredevils themselves, but none of them possessed Lawrence’s flair and charisma, or his genius for publicity; and of them all, only he could write like an angel. Even his dispatches back to the Arab Bureau read almost like literature, albeit literature advocating military stratagems and informed by an acute military intelligence. An example:
The Hejaz war is26 one of dervishes against regular troops—and we are on the side of the dervishes. Our text-books do not apply to its conditions at all. It is the fight of a rocky, mountainous, ill-watered country (assisted by a wild horde of mountaineers) against a force which has been improved—so far as civilized warfare is concerned—so immensely by the Germans as almost to have lost its efficiency for rough-and-tumble work.
His trenchant and beautifully written reports established his reputation, first in the Middle East and then beyond. “Lawrence is quite27 excellent,” Clayton, the director of intelligence in Cairo, informed the director of intelligence in London, “you may take his stuff as being good.”
As practically everyone knows, Lawrence emerged from an unconventional background. His father, Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, heir to an Irish baronetcy, abandoned his wife to live with his daughter’s governess. He then changed his surname to Lawrence. They did not marry but had five illegitimate sons, of whom Thomas Edward was the second. The family lived in modest circumstances, eventually moving to Polstead Road, Oxford, where young Ned (as he had been nicknamed) attended high school and then Jesus College, Oxford University. Already he knew that he wanted to become an archaeologist. Before the war he traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Middle East, learning and mapping the countryside, participating in important digs, studying the people and their language and dialects. When war broke out, he volunteered for service. Inevitably the authorities posted him to Cairo to work for intelligence; but bored with opening mail, answering the telephone, decoding telegrams, and designing postage stamps, Lawrence managed to transfer to his old Oxford mentor, Hogarth, at the Arab Bureau. His duties there bored him too, so in mid-October 1916 he jumped at the chance to accompany Ronald Storrs to Jeddah for consultations with Sharif Abdullah.
The next step in the Lawrence saga is again well known. They journeyed by ship down the Red Sea; Lawrence took potshots at glass bottles lined up on the rail, much to the annoyance of Storrs, who would rather play chess. They arrived in Jeddah28 to be greeted by the British agent, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson, whom they both viewed as dull-witted, even though he served as principal adviser to Grand Sharif (as he still was) Hussein. The French, jealous of Britain’s growing influence in the region, had likewise established a consulate in Jeddah under Colonel Edouard Brémond. Their aim was to support the Arab Revolt just enough that it could continue to harass the Turks without actually liberating Syria, for which they had their own postwar plans. Thus the English in Jeddah engaged in an awkward pas de deux with their “froggy Allies,” as General Murray once termed them; they were partners in the Great War with common enemies and common purposes, but they had competing interests in the Middle East, which Sykes and Picot had resolved only momentarily. At one dinner, perhaps searching for something to discuss that would not lead to friction, Brémond mentioned that one of his staff had purchased, not for an hour or an evening but body and soul, une “jeune négresse.” Storrs recalled Brémond going on to explain: “A Negress, [but] she29 is Circassian; only one calls such women Negresses.” This was, Storrs considered, “a curious and pleasing convention.”
Lawrence, who as we have seen wanted “to biff the French out of Syria,” made the most of the situation. He attended a meeting where Storrs and Wilson informed Abdullah, who had traveled down from Mecca, that the British would not send airplanes or troops for the rebellion, even though these had been promised. In this conference Wilson tried to keep up, but his rudimentary Arabic rendered him the third man out among the Britons. Storrs confided to a friend, “He reminds me of30 a very low-geared bicycle working at full speed day and night.” But “super cerebral Lawrence” impressed Storrs with his knowledge of the language. Moreover he impressed Abdullah “with his extraordinarily31 detailed knowledge of the Turkish Army.” When Abdullah telephoned to his father in Mecca and put Storrs on the line to explain matters, the Englishman suggested, on the spur of the moment, that Lawrence visit Feisal, who was at Hamra, barely maintaining the siege of Medina, to assess the situation. Storrs implied to the grand sharif that Lawrence then might be able to persuade the British government to send troops and airplanes after all. Of course, that was what Lawrence wanted the government to do, if only to keep the French out.
So he leaped at this chance, arranged by Storrs and endorsed by Hussein. Next day he took ship from Jeddah to Rabegh, first stage of the journey to Hamra. At Rabegh he met Ali and the youngest of the four brothers, Zeid. Ali did not approve of Lawrence’s mission. Infidels did not travel in the Hejaz, he reminded him. Moreover hostile tribes stood in the way. He would permit Lawrence to journey inland only in great secrecy, after dark, wearing an Arab cloak and head-cloth and adjured to silence. It was a hard, dangerous passage, difficult for Lawrence, who was as yet unused to traveling by camel, let alone in the desert heat, as he had to do the second day of his journey. But of such experiences would his legend be made, and finally he and his guides arrived in Hamra and the long lean figure of Feisal stood before him: “I felt at first glance32 that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory.”
Lawrence had to report back to his superiors on Feisal’s needs and persuade them to make them good—and then the British must actually do so. In this respect it did not hurt that back in London Asquith’s government had just fallen, and that a new one led by David Lloyd George, a confirmed easterner, had taken its place. Soon Lawrence and Feisal were planning the assault upon Wejh and then undertaking it. By the time they entered the town and claimed it for the Arab Revolt, the two men were comrades. Feisal gave him his own white silk gold-embroidered wedding garments to wear in the desert heat. The image we all have of Lawrence of Arabia, whitely shimmering in Arab costume, was beginning to take shape. The two men began planning the next stage of the war with Turkey—“to set the desert on fire” as Lawrence put it—by attacking the railway line.
Sykes made his connection with Weizmann, and Lawrence cemented his with Feisal, in January 1917. Thus did the Zionist and the Arab movements hasten at ever increasing speed toward a point of convergence.
CHAPTER 14
Managing the British-Zionist Connection
EUROPE HAD BECOME a charnel house. The number of casualties mounted into the millions, staggering the imagination, beggaring description. No government implicated in such slaughter could survive, not even H. H. Asquith’s carefully constructed coalition in England. It fell on December 5, 1916, not long after the Battle of the Somme, in which Britain suffered more than 400,000 dead, wounded, or captured. It was the last British cabinet in which members of the Liberal Party formed a majority.
Asquith’s supporters lamented that the war had transformed into liabilities some of Liberalism’s proudest prewar features, such as a willingness to compromise and a cautious approach to the expansion of government power. Liberals mourned the inutility of tolerance, judiciousness, and moderation during wartime. On the other side, Asquith’s political opponents—and even some of his friends, albeit with more or less reluctance—emphasized the government’s indecisiveness, lack of organization, general ineffectiveness, and drift. William Waldegrave Palmer, second Earl of Selborne and a Conservative member of Asquith’s coalition in which he served as president of the Board of Agriculture, voiced typical complaints in an aide-mémo
ire that he wrote upon resigning in June 1916. The prime minister, he thought, would have made a great judge during peacetime. “As a War PM,” however, he had been “quite hopeless … He had … no ounce of drive … not a spark of initiative.” As for the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, Selborne deemed him equally irresolute: “He never came to the Cabinet and said ‘this is the position, this is what I think ought to be done, do you agree?’” Selborne rendered a more positive verdict on David Lloyd George, the man who would replace Asquith as prime minister: “Very clever, with vision, precision, driving power and courage in wonderful combination.” But Selborne did not trust Lloyd George: “He would leave anyone in the lurch anywhere if he thought it suited his purpose.” (We will have reason to recall this assessment later.) Selborne also made insider observations of Herbert Samuel (“a clever, efficient1 and straight little Jew”) and of Edwin Montagu (“a very clever Jew … he will go far”).
Six months later, when Lloyd George wrested the premiership from Asquith, he offered cabinet positions to both those clever Jews. Samuel declined without hesitation, remaining characteristically, undemonstratively, and steadfastly loyal to his previous chief. His cousin Montagu, however, agonized. At first he withstood temptation, writing to Asquith, “I do not want you2 to cease to be Prime Minister because I am certain that any other Prime Minster cannot succeed.” He hoped the king would bring Asquith and Lloyd George together and “endeavor to arrange an accommodation between you.” It did not happen. The Liberals had split, weakening themselves irreparably. Six months later Montagu accepted a job from Lloyd George after all, as minister without portfolio in charge of reconstruction. He would be the only Jew holding a senior post in Lloyd George’s government when it came time to debate the Balfour Declaration. His anti-Zionism remained undiminished.
Meanwhile Lloyd George took measures to streamline his government. Asquith’s dozen-strong cabinet had debated and dithered; the new prime minister installed a War Cabinet of only four members in addition to himself. Two were party leaders, Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservatives and Arthur Henderson of Labour. More important, he appointed two conspicuous Conservative imperialists: Lord Nathaniel Curzon, a former viceroy of India, and Sir Alfred Milner, who had been the high commissioner in South Africa during and immediately after the Boer War. Both men had vigorously opposed Lloyd George during the latter’s radical anti-imperialist phase, but both possessed administrative genius and a prodigious capacity for work. Wisely, Lloyd George focused on these latter qualities.
But Curzon and Milner had not changed their imperialist spots. When the government discussed the future of the German and the Ottoman Empires, these men staked broad terrorial claims for Britain. Perhaps they influenced their prime minister, for Lloyd George too staked broad claims. Meanwhile the new, lean cabinet worked efficiently and at full throttle, calling upon other members of government only when necessary. One upon whom it called often was Arthur J. Balfour, the Conservative imperialist whom Lloyd George had made foreign secretary.
The new prime minister, it will be recalled, belonged to the camp of easterners who sought a way around the abattoir on the Western Front. Curzon, the former Indian viceroy, favored the “eastern” strategy too, and so did Milner. All three, Lloyd George in particular, distrusted the commander in chief of Britain’s forces on the Continent, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who could think only to throw more and more men against the Germans. They had no high opinion either of the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, who essentially shared Haig’s outlook and approach. As civilians, they did not quite dare to overrule these top military experts, but the ascendancy of easterners in the cabinet meant that Lloyd George’s government, more than Asquith’s, would look with favor upon those who requested support for the Arab Revolt against the Turks,3 or who asked for reinforcements for the army in Egypt so that it could engage the Turks in Palestine and push them out of Syria altogether. That this approach might help Zionists as much as Arabs, the Zionists in England quickly realized. Given their preference for a British protectorate in Palestine, they realized too that the new government’s willingness to expand Britain’s imperial reach in the Middle East might redound to their benefit. They had lost their chief advocate in the cabinet, Herbert Samuel, but from the sea change in the British government’s general outlook, they gained.
In far-off Egypt, the sea change swept up General Murray. He appears to have been a rather cautious warrior. Slowly, systematically, he pushed his forces beyond the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula, beating off Ottoman attacks, extending supply lines and a water pipe, aiming for the port town of El Arish, only twenty-five miles south of the Palestinian border. “The Turks … are fine fighters, especially behind entrenchments,” he warned Robertson back in London. “Their handling of machine guns is excellent … I am proceeding with all due precautions.” A week later El Arish fell to Murray’s well-prepared forces. But the easterners who had just taken hold of the government wanted much more than El Arish. Robertson wrote to Murray, “The War Cabinet is very4 impatient. They want a victory every day and if they do not get it they begin to propose going to some fresh place to find one. They are giving me a good deal of trouble.”
Murray attempted to provide his masters in London with a fresh victory. On March 26, 1917, his troops crossed the border into Palestine, aiming for Gaza, some forty miles farther up the Mediterranean coast. Twice the Turks beat them back, the second time inflicting heavy casualties, although nothing like those on the Western Front. Murray wrote to Robertson, perhaps in propitiation, “I feel that it is a great blessing to have a straight white man at the head of affairs.” But Robertson was not all that straight. He never mentioned to Murray what he actually thought: that the War Office had sent Murray to Egypt “in order to get him5 out of the way … and there they have kept him all these months knowing that he was no good.” Nor did he inform the man who had taken El Arish of the War Cabinet’s growing disillusionment with his stumbling Palestinian campaign. Murray discovered it as a bolt from the blue: “I have just got6 your telegram notifying that [General Sir Edmund] Allenby takes my place.” Lloyd George instructed this new man, whom he had recalled from France, to take Gaza and continue right up through Palestine and into Syria. The ultimate aim was to capture Damascus and to drive the Ottoman Empire from the war, but he wanted Allenby to capture Jerusalem on the way, by Christmas; it would make a fine seasonal gift for the British people. He promised to ensure that Allenby had the means to do it.
The Zionists in London sensed these shifting currents. They caught the tide and rode it, balancing with great skill.
With the help of the Persian Armenian, James Malcolm, Chaim Weizmann made his first contact with Sir Mark Sykes on January 28, 1917. The two protagonists quickly realized each other’s importance and the need for fuller discussion and closer cooperation. A second meeting between Sykes, Weizmann, and the latter’s Zionist allies must take place soon, but because Herbert Samuel could not attend until the following week, it was put off until February 7. All concerned appear to have realized that Moses Gaster would have to be handled delicately. Malcolm, who happily assumed the role of go-between, wrote to Sykes: “From what I hear7 it seems that Dr. Gaster wants to take the leading part, whereas the general impression is (including I think both yours and mine) that Dr. Weitzman [sic] … should take the leading part in the negotiations.”
Malcolm relished his role as intermediary, meeting with Zionists, meeting with Sykes, and interpreting (or occasionally misinterpreting) one to the other. Clearly he aspired to be more than a bit player fostering Sykes’s connection with Zionism; he wanted to facilitate an effective Zionist movement. He understood that Sykes increasingly viewed the peoples of the Ottoman Middle East—Armenians, Arabs, and Jews—as links in a future chain of British dependencies. Possibly his own mind had been moving along a similar track, or perhaps he merely wished to curry favor. At any rate he wrote to Sykes, “For some time past I have conside
red that the greater object of the establishment of the proposed new autonomous States in the Near East should be a defensive federation between them … in close sympathy with England and France. This is one of the reasons why I have interested myself in the Palestine question.” He wanted each people to be sufficiently organized so as to be able to negotiate with its future protector.
Malcolm took the opportunity to lecture Sykes about Jews: “Most people have misunderstood the Jewish character. The Jew will always stick to his bargain, but he will never consent to readjusting the terms of an agreement.” Himself the unwitting target of John Buchan’s misdirected anti-Semitism as we have seen, Malcolm was not above indulging in anti-Semitic thinking of his own. Somewhat obscurely, he blamed the Jews for starting World War I: “In the Near East hitherto the Jew has pursued an exclusive policy, which has perhaps contributed more than anything else to bring about the present war.” On the other hand, he also believed that the Jews held the key to future peace. “The question of finance will be a great factor in the future,” he lectured Sykes. “It would therefore be important to secure the sentimental support, at least, of the Jewish people.”
For the Zionists, the week preceding February 7 passed in a blur of small conferences, preparations, and a fair amount of scheming. Weizmann’s assiduous cultivation of Rothschilds now began to pay off. James de Rothschild agreed to attend the February 7 meeting; so did Walter Rothschild, who, upon his father’s death, had taken up the role of titular head of the British branch of the family and therefore of the British Jewish community. Herbert Samuel agreed to attend as well, as did Nahum Sokolow. Weizmann also mobilized Harry Sacher and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring in Ahad Ha’am. It was to be a gathering of Weizmannites with the man who, they now realized, played the crucial role in advising the British government on its Middle Eastern policy.
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 26