The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (35 page)

Hussein and his soldier sons depended upon British support, but the British argued among themselves about how much to give them. Those who believed the war would be won on the Western Front, the so-called westerners, begrudged sending even a single man to help the Arab Revolt—a sideshow within a sideshow, as they deemed it. Those who believed the Western Front was a killing field from which neither side would emerge victorious sought a way around it. These “easterners,”
²³
as they were called, favored the landing at Gallipoli, the campaign in Mesopotamia, and support for the sharif’s rebellion, among other strategies.

In London the government alternated between the two poles, sometimes favoring one, sometimes the other. In the Middle East, it is safe to say, every Briton who counted advocated the “eastern” position. Of course the British maintained a sizable force in Egypt in order to safeguard the Suez Canal, and no westerner opposed that. But they would not augment it to help the sharif. “With another British Cavalry
²⁴
Division I think I might almost guarantee to clear the Turks out of southern Palestine and relieve the pressure on the Sherif,” Sir Archibald James Murray, the normally cautious British commanding officer in Egypt, informed the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson. Here is Robertson’s position: “My sole object is
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to win the war and we shall not do that in the Hejaz.” Murray did not get the extra cavalry division.

The British army in Egypt had beaten off a first Ottoman invasion in February 1915. Under Murray it beat off a second attack in August 1916. Now slowly, warily, systematically, without reinforcements, Murray pushed his line of defense farther north and east into the Sinai. But that was still a long way from Sharif Feisal in Wejh or Grand Sharif Hussein in Mecca or Abdullah and Ali and Zeid in Jeddah and the vicinity of Medina. The British army in Egypt would play no central role in their drama for some time to come.

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:

His trenchant and beautifully written reports established his reputation, first in the Middle East and then beyond. “Lawrence is quite
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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 Jeddah
²⁸
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] she
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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 of
³⁰
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 extraordinarily
³¹
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 glance
³²
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.

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-mémoire 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, efficient
¹
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 you
²
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.