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JERUSALEM FOR CHRISTMAS
I
At the end of 1916, when David Lloyd George took office as Prime Minister, British fortunes in the East took a turn for the better. The blundering incompetence of the Government of India in conducting the Mesopotamian campaign—the advance on Baghdad late in 1915 that ended in the spring of 1916 in the defeat and surrender of the British Indian Army at Kut el-Amara—had shocked London into making a clean sweep at the top. Thus a new chief of the expeditionary army, who understood its logistical requirements, re-opened the campaign under a new Secretary of State for India, a new Viceroy, and a new commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. Major-General Stanley Maude led his Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigris forward into the Mesopotamian provinces in December 1916, and in a methodical campaign captured Baghdad on 11 March 1917.
Although it had never been clear as to what purpose the Baghdad campaign was meant to serve in the overall strategy of the world war, the capture of the ancient capital, glamorous from its association with the Arabian Nights, caught the imagination of the new Prime Minister. It brought him cheer at a time when it was badly needed, and inspired him to aim at Jerusalem for Britain’s next great triumph.
The successes of the Army of the Tigris raised the question of what was to be done with the Ottoman provinces that it had occupied. The Government of India, although wary of committing itself, had envisaged all along that the Mesopotamian provinces of Basra and Baghdad would fall within its sphere if they were detached from the Ottoman Empire. To Sir Mark Sykes and his Arab Bureau friends, the notion that such areas should be administered in what they regarded as India’s paternalistic way was abhorrent. In a memorandum written in 1916, Sykes warned the Cabinet that “if you work from India you have all the old traditions of black and white, and you can not run the Arabs on black and white lines.”1
To mark the capture of Baghdad, Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of General Maude’s expeditionary force, drafted a proclamation to the populace that essentially limited itself to calling for cooperation with the provisional British-Indian administration; but London ordered him not to issue it. Several drafts were written in London, and after discussion the War Cabinet chose one written by Sir Mark Sykes as a basis for the text that was finally approved. The proclamation invited the Arabs’ leaders—though it was unclear who they were to be—to participate in the government in collaboration with the British authorities. It spoke—as was Sykes’s wont—in high-flown phrases of liberation and freedom, of past glory and future greatness, and expressed the hope that the Arabic peoples might find unity north, south, east, and west. It pointed, however vaguely, toward an Arab Middle Eastern confederation under the leadership of King Hussein—a Sunni Moslem, although most of the inhabitants of the provinces of Basra and Baghdad were Shi’ite, and the differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites were profound and more than a thousand years old.
General Maude objected to the Sykes draft. As a military man, he deemed it essential to install a British administration to maintain security while the war continued. Moreover, he observed that in offering a measure of self-government to the Arabs of Baghdad, the proclamation took no note of the fact that—according to him—a majority of the inhabitants of the city were not Arabs but Jews.*
The Sykes draft nonetheless was imposed on General Maude and Sir Percy Cox by London, and caused widespread confusion. Apparently intended to assert that the occupying forces of British India were not going to rule the provinces of Mesopotamia, the proclamation did not make clear who was going to rule in their place.
On 16 March 1917 the War Cabinet created a Mesopotamian Administration Committee under the chairmanship of Lord Curzon to determine what form of government should be installed in the captured provinces. The committee decided that the province of Basra should become British—not British-Indian—while the province of Baghdad should join or should become an Arab political entity subject to a British protectorate. Meanwhile Indian personnel should be withdrawn from the occupied provinces.
General Maude had cabled to his superiors that “local conditions do not permit of employing in responsible positions any but British officers competent to deal with Military authorities and with people of the country. Before any truly Arab facade can be applied to edifice it seems essential that foundation of law and order should be well and truly laid.”2 Sir Percy Cox raised the same issues in a different way when he asked who the Arab leader of Baghdad was going to be.
It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi’ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces, and the commercial predominance of the Jewish community in the city of Baghdad made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.
Cox raised other immediate and practical issues that obviously had not been thought through in London. The laborers and other noncombatant support groups of the Army of the Tigris were Indian; if the Cabinet were serious in ordering the Indians out of the Mesopotamian provinces, who would take their place? Moreover, under Turkey, the system of law courts in the provinces had operated under, and with a right of appeal to, the high court in Constantinople, while under General Maude the court system of India offered similar rights; but if the connection with India were to be broken, what would happen to the administration of justice?
The Mesopotamian Administration Committee had no ready replies, for the Ottoman administration of Mesopotamia had been driven out, and no body of experienced officials other than those of British India existed in the provinces to replace it. The war continued, and orders had to be given and administrative decisions taken daily. Public facilities and utilities had to be managed. Who was to do it?
London was driven to reconsider, and to accept the administration of the Government of India so long as it was agreed that it should not be permanent. General Maude, in whose name the Sykes proclamation had been issued, was put in the position of preaching self-rule while discouraging its practice. The compromise formula at which the British had arrived might have been expressly designed to arouse dissatisfaction and unrest: having volunteered what sounded like a pledge of independence to an area that had not asked for it, the military and civil authorities of the occupying power then proceeded to withhold it.
The Mesopotamian provinces were the first to be captured from the Ottoman Empire by Britain during the war. Whitehall’s failure to think through in practical detail how to fulfill the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local inhabitants was revealing, and boded ill for the provinces that were the next to be invaded: Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. It showed that Sir Mark Sykes and his colleagues had adopted policies for the Middle East without first considering whether in existing conditions they could feasibly be implemented, and, if so, whether British officers on the spot would actually allow them to be implemented.
It was an inauspicious beginning and suggested the extent to which the British government did not know what it was getting into when it decided to supersede the Ottoman Empire in Asia. If there was this much muddle when British India occupied nearby Mesopotamia, it was reasonable to suppose there would be even more muddle when British Egypt marched on an area of such complex international interests as Palestine.
II
The new commanding officer sent out to Egypt was General Sir Edmund Allenby, a cavalry officer who had served and commanded with distinction in France. He was chosen in June 1917, after Smuts had definitely decided that he would not accept the appointment. Allenby’s commission from the Prime Minister was to invade and occupy Palestine and to take Jerusalem before Christmas.
Allenby brought drive and discipline to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and a new professionalism. As head of Military Intelligence he chose Colonel Richar
d Meinertzhagen, who had distinguished himself in a similar capacity with Smuts in East Africa. Meinertzhagen chose Wyndham Deedes, the expert on Ottoman affairs, to serve under him in charge of the political section of the division.
Meinertzhagen took charge of espionage operations behind enemy lines—operations meant to pave the way for Allenby to invade Palestine. Though he had been strongly anti-Jewish, Meinertzhagen was moved to change his mind by Aaron Aaronsohn, whose spy network in Jewish Palestine he regarded as invaluable. But Aaronsohn paid a high price for winning the respect and friendship of British Military Intelligence: his spy ring exposed the Jewish settlers in Palestine to possible Turkish reprisals—at the worst of times, for the local Ottoman administration was inclined to strike out against the Jewish community in any event. In the spring of 1917, on the feast of Passover, Djemal expelled the Jews and Arabs of Jaffa; it was not clear where he meant them to go, although he spoke vaguely of the Syrian hinterland. The plight of the refugees, without means or supplies, evoked memories of the Armenians. Soon afterward Djemal indicated that he meant to deport the civil population of Jerusalem, of which the majority was Jewish. Only the firm intervention of the German Foreign Ministry kept the tragedy from occurring.
In these circumstances, the Palestinian Jewish community faced catastrophe if the extent and effectiveness of Aaronsohn’s activities were uncovered—as eventually they were. Aaron’s sister Sarah and a number of her associates were arrested by the Turks in October 1917, tortured and interrogated. Some were hanged. Sarah Aaronsohn, after four days of torture, succeeded in committing suicide. Reprisals against the Jewish population might have followed had not the Germans and Talaat intervened. As it was, only about a third of the Jewish population remained in Jerusalem by the end of 1917; most of the rest had died of starvation or disease.
III
Meinertzhagen was impressed by the effectiveness of Aaronsohn’s Jews in contributing to the preparations for a British invasion of Palestine, but was less impressed by the effectiveness of Feisal’s Arabs.
The British civil authorities in Cairo had little contact with T. E. Lawrence, their liaison with Feisal’s Arabian guerrillas: and in the spring of 1917 he disappeared into the desert. The British military authorities in Cairo showed little concern for whatever Lawrence and Feisal might be doing, having given up interest in the Arab Revolt the previous year.
Lawrence had gone off with Auda abu Tayi, the fighting chief of the Bedouin tribal confederation of northern Arabia, whose adherence Lawrence had secured by the payment of 10,000 pounds sterling. Their objective was Aqaba, a sleepy, tiny port at the southern tip of Palestine, situated at the head of a channel of the Red Sea so narrow that the Royal Navy dared not enter it while its shore batteries were in enemy hands. Its several hundred Ottoman defenders and their gun positions faced out to sea, so Auda’s band planned to steal up from behind to take Aqaba by a surprise attack.*
It was Auda who led the expedition, though Lawrence rode with him. With Bedouin cunning, Auda led his followers from the Arabian coastline northward into the desert, where their movements were lost from view. When they reappeared in southern Palestine two months later, their coming was a total surprise. On 6 July they overwhelmed Aqaba’s small and unprepared Turkish garrison. Despite his two punishing months in the desert, Lawrence immediately set off on an arduous and dangerous trip across a wilderness of enemy-held territories to Suez to report Auda’s capture of Aqaba. He astonished everyone by unexpectedly emerging from the Sinai desert, in Arab dress, creating a sensation at headquarters just after General Allenby came to take up his new command.
Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth. A few months before, he had sent a letter to General Clayton that contained an almost certainly fictitious account of an expedition he claimed to have undertaken on his own.3 Now he had real personal exploits to announce and to exaggerate, as he allowed his listeners to understand that he had played the chief role in the Aqaba campaign. Lawrence’s arrival with the news from Aqaba completed his nine months’ transformation into a military hero. Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of the eastern Howeitat, who had in fact won the victory, did not have a name that tripped easily off the tongues of British officers. Instead they said, as historians did later, that “Lawrence took Aqaba.”
Whoever deserved credit, the capture of Aqaba transformed the Hejaz rebellion which had hitherto been bottled up in the Arabian peninsula by the Turkish garrison at Medina. Now the Royal Navy could transport Arabian tribesmen to Palestine; and thus, for the first time, Hussein’s forces could reach a battlefield on which the British-Turkish war was actually to be fought, for Lawrence persuaded Allenby that Arab irregulars could assist British forces in the coming Palestine and Syria campaigns.
Feisal still remained at headquarters in the Hejaz when Allenby approved Lawrence’s plan to transport him and a small striking force of his tribesmen by sea from the British-held coast of Arabia to Aqaba—a sea voyage of 250 miles. There they could act as a diversionary force on the right flank of the British army in the coming Palestine campaign which Allenby planned to launch in the autumn. Feisal accepted the plan, although it meant cutting himself off from the Hejaz, his father, and his brothers; he was deputized as a British general and came under Allenby’s command.
A few months earlier, the Arab Bureau had considered the problems that would arise from any attempt to employ Feisal’s forces in the Palestine and Syria campaigns. The bureau had reported to Clayton on 16 May 1917 that Feisal’s Bedouins could not stand up to regular troops, and that an additional disadvantage of employing them was that their going into settled districts would be unwelcome to town dwellers. According to the Arab Bureau, the problem could be solved by recruiting Syrian deserters from the Ottoman army to serve under Feisal. This would “change the character of Sherif Feisal’s campaign from a series of desultory raids against the railway to an organized attempt to free the country.”4*
IV
In the autumn of 1917 Allenby invaded Palestine. The Turks and their German commanders expected him to launch his attack on coastal Gaza, the obvious gateway to Palestine; but its defenses and defenders were well prepared and Allenby merely feinted at it while, with stealth and speed, his main forces swung around through the desert to attack inland at Beersheba instead. The Ottoman forces were taken by surprise, and fell back in disarray.
One reason for the Turks’ surprise was a ruse devised and executed by Meinertzhagen. On 10 October he rode into no man’s land; when an Ottoman cavalry patrol fired at him he pretended to be hit, and dropped a blood-stained sack that contained apparently confidential British documents indicating that the main attack would be at Gaza. “Meinertzhagen’s device won the battle,” David Lloyd George later wrote; he was “One of the ablest and most successful brains I had met in any army.” Lloyd George added that “Needless to say he never rose in the war above the rank of Colonel.”6
While Allenby’s forces were rolling up the Gaza-to-Beersheba line, Feisal’s forces harassed the Turks on the British right flank. As liaison officer between the British and Arab officers, first as a major and then as a colonel, T. E. Lawrence enjoyed a colorful campaign that later won him great publicity—but also much envy.
Brémond, the French representative in the Hejaz, later jealously observed that Lawrence “represented” 200,000 pounds sterling,7 but it was more than that: by the end of the war, the Arab Revolt had cost Britain more than fifty times that amount. Whatever the sum, it was immense in those days—and more so by desert Bedouin standards. The tribes had never known such wealth as Lawrence brought them. Eventually the wealth transformed not merely the face of tribal allegiances but also the appearance of the young Englishman who served as paymaster; his Arab wardrobe grew to be even more splendid than Feisal’s. Nearly half a century later, when asked if he remembered Lawrence, a Bedouin sheikh replied “He was the man with the gold.”8
The sheer logistics of getti
ng the gold safely to Lawrence posed a problem, for not many people could be trusted with the possession of it. In Cairo, Wyndham Deedes used to spend his Saturday afternoons personally packing gold sovereigns into cartridge cases and watching them being loaded onto camels for the journey to Lawrence in the desert.
Apart from the tribes, whose role was sporadic, Feisal’s army consisted of about 1,000 Bedouins supplemented by about 2,500 Ottoman ex-prisoners of war. British expectations that the ex-prisoners of war would transform Feisal’s forces into something akin to a regular army were, at first, a disappointment. A representative of the U.S. Department of State in Cairo reported at the end of 1917 that Feisal’s army remained “incapable of coping with disciplined troops” and his report undoubtedly echoed official British opinion in Cairo at the time.9
Another disappointment was the performance of Lawrence’s raiding party when assigned a specific operational task by Allenby: they were to dynamite a high-arched viaduct to cut the railroad communications of the Ottoman forces headquartered in Jerusalem. Lawrence and his men failed in the task, but Allenby, having pushed the Turkish right flank north of Jaffa, then thrust through the Judaean hills, and captured Jerusalem anyway—even earlier than Christmas. Though Lawrence bitterly blamed himself for his failure, Allenby did not—and showed it by inviting Lawrence to attend, as staff officer of the day to General Clayton, the ceremony of entrance into Jerusalem.
V
On 11 December 1917 General Sir Edmund Allenby and his officers entered the Holy City of Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate, on foot. At the Citadel, Allenby read out a proclamation placing the city under martial law. To the French representative, Picot, Allenby explained that the city fell within the military zone, so that authority in the area was vested solely in the commanding general. As commanding general, Allenby would decide how long the area would remain under an exclusively military administration. Only when he deemed that the military situation permitted him to do so, said Allenby, would he allow civil administration to be instituted. Until then, the question of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the ultimate disposition of Palestine would be deferred.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 36