On 24 October 1915, McMahon replied to Hussein. Laced with deliberate vagueness, the reply was designed to be read differently by both parties. McMahon agreed to Hussein’s empire, east of the Syrian cities specified by Lawrence, but excluded the fuzzy area to the west. Palestine was not mentioned and nor was Jerusalem. The sherif would be unlikely to accept Jerusalem’s exclusion but the British had their own interests there, so not mentioning the city sidestepped the problem. Besides, McMahon insisted that all French interests were excluded – and France had ancient claims on Jerusalem too. In fact, the high commissioner planned to place Jerusalem nominally under the Albanian dynasty of Egypt so that the Holy City would be Muslim but under British control.
Britain needed the Arab Revolt immediately so it made the necessary promises as unclearly as possible. Yet McMahon’s promises were not ambiguous enough, for they raised Arab expectations just before Britain and France began the real negotiation to divide up the Ottoman empire.
The British negotiator, Sir Mark Sykes, MP and Yorkshire baronet, was a creative and irrepressible amateur who had travelled in the East and therefore become a towering expert – though Lawrence called him ‘a bundle of prejudices, intuitions and half-sciences’. His real talent was an ambitious ebullience that was so attractive that his superiors happily allowed him to dabble in any eastern policies he chose. Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, who had served as consul in Beirut, agreed that France would receive Syria and Lebanon, Britain, Iraq and some of Palestine. There would be an Arab confederation, under British and French supervision – and Jerusalem would be internationalized under France, Britain and Russia.* This all made sense to the three empires that had been striving to control Jerusalem for the last seventy years – and it allowed for an Arab state of sorts. But it was soon outdated because Britain secretly coveted Jerusalem and Palestine for itself.
On 5 June 1916, Sherif Hussein, oblivious to the secret of Sykes–Picot but aware that the Ottomans were about to overthrow him, raised his red banner in Mecca and launched his Arab Revolt. He declared himself ‘King of All the Arabs’, a title that alarmed the British, who persuaded him to downgrade it to ‘King of Hejaz’. This was just the beginning: few families in history would wear so many crowns in so many kingdoms in such a short time. King Hussein appointed each of his sons to command his small armies but the military results were disappointing and revolts in Syria never materialized. The British found it hard to work out whether the Sherifians could ever be effective. So, in October, Ronald Storrs, who would later govern Jerusalem, and his subordinate, Lawrence, arrived in Arabia.
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA:
THE SHERIFIANS – ABDULLAH AND FAISAL
Lawrence had a good look at the king’s four sons in order to find the ideal Arab ruler, but he quickly realized that the second and third, Abdullah and Faisal, were the only ones that mattered. He dismissed Abdullah as ‘too clever’ and Abdullah dismissed Lawrence as ‘a strange creature’, but the moment Lawrence set eyes upon Prince Faisal, he almost swooned: ‘tall, graceful, vigorous, almost regal. Aged thirty-one, very quick and restless. Is clearskinned as a pure Circassian, with dark hair, vivid black eyes. Looks like a European and very like the monument of Richard I at Fontevraud. A popular idol.’ Lawrence gushed that he was ‘an absolute ripper!’ but Faisal was also ‘a brave, weak, ignorant spirit – I served him out of pity’.
The Arab Revolt was failing even in the Sherifian fiefdom of Hejaz and Lawrence saw that Faisal’s few thousand cameleers could be defeated by ‘one company of Turks’. Yet if they raided outposts and sabotaged the railways, they could tie down an entire Ottoman army. When he was posted to Faisal, Lawrence put this into practice and created the prototype of the modern insurgency. But it was Faisal who dressed the Lawrence of legend, ‘fitting me out in splendid, white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments’. As he wrote in his guide to Arab insurgency – required reading for American officers in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan – ‘If you wear Arab things, wear the best. Dress like a sherif.’ Lawrence had no military training and the spirit of an ascetic poet, but he understood that ‘the beginning and end of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies by listening and indirect inquiry.’ He learned to ride camels and to live like a Bedouin. But he never forgot that doling out vast sums of British gold was what kept his army together – ‘this is the fattest time the tribes have ever known’ – and even fifty years later they remembered him as ‘the man with the gold’.
The slaughter and grit of war both horrified and excited him. ‘I hope this sounds the fun it is,’ he wrote feverishly after one successful raid. ‘It’s the most amateurish, Buffalo-Bill sort of performance and the only people who did it well are the Bedouin.’ When one of his men murdered another, Lawrence had to execute the murderer himself, to avoid a blood feud. After a slaughter of Turks, he hoped ‘this nightmare ends when I’ll wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible.’
Lawrence knew the secret of the Sykes–Picot carve-up of the Middle East and it shamed him: ‘We are calling them to fight for us on a lie and I can’t stand it.’ There were times he risked his life in a fit of despair, ‘hoping to get killed on the way’. He described himself as ‘strongly pro-British and pro-Arab’, but he despised imperial conquest, preferring an independent Arabia as a dominion – but under British protection. ‘I presumed I would survive and be able to defeat not merely the Turk on the battlefield but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.’
Lawrence confided the secret of Sykes–Picot to Faisal together with his plan to remedy it. If they were to avoid a French Syria, they had to liberate it themselves and they had to begin with a spectacular piece of military élan that would earn the Arabs the right to Syria: Lawrence led Faisal’s forces on a circular 300-mile escapade through the punishing Jordanian desert to seize the port of Aqaba.10
FALKENHAYN TAKES COMMAND: GERMAN JERUSALEM
After Jemal’s third offensive against Egypt had failed, the British counterattacked across Sinai. In spring 1917, they were twice severely defeated at Gaza by 16,000 Germans backed by Austro-Hungarian artillery. Jemal realized that they would attack again. Palestine now seethed with anti-Ottoman intrigue. The pasha’s secret police uncovered a pro-British Jewish spy-ring, NILI, whose members were tortured – their nails ripped out, their skulls squeezed in vices until they cracked – and then hanged. In Jerusalem, Jemal’s police were hunting down another Jewish spy, Alter Levine, a poet, businessman and fixer born in Russia, whom they claimed had set up a chain of brothels-cum-spy-nests. Levine turned up at the house of his friend, Khalil Sakakini, the respected teacher, in Jerusalem, who agreed to protect him. The Zionist spy-rings outraged the Slaughterman, who in April summoned the foreign consuls to a menacing soliloquy at the Augusta Victoria Fortress: he threatened to deport the entire population of Jerusalem – and after the dystopic Armenian ‘deportations’, that would mean the death of thousands.
‘We’ll find ourselves compelled to fight for Jerusalem,’ Jemal told Enver. They invited Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn, the former German Chief of Staff who had commanded the Verdun offensive, to come to Jerusalem and advise on how to defeat the British. But Enver went over Jemal’s head and placed the German in supreme command. ‘Falkenhayn’s Verdun was disastrous for Germany’, Jemal warned Enver, ‘and his Palestinian offensive will be disastrous for us.’