The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (57 page)

British officers on the spot who knew something about the Sykes-Picot Agreement may also have thought a race was taking place between the Arabs and the French, with the track tilted in favor of the latter and with Syria the prize. They did not consider Palestine, however, because whatever Sykes and Picot had envisioned, they aspired to assert British influence there after the war. Some British officers undoubtedly hoped the Arabs
would win their race against France, or would at least gain meaningful authority in the part of Syria that lay east of Palestine and south of Damascus. That would constitute a buffer between a British-dominated Mesopotamia and a French-dominated Syria and Lebanon and it would be more or less under their control. But they were not yet thinking much about Zionism.

At least one British officer, however, may have seen a little further. He even may have hoped the Arabs would establish something more than a mere puppet buffer state.

It seems likely that T. E. Lawrence had developed genuine sympathy for Arab nationalist aspirations by early 1917. He saw too that they would run up against Zionist, French, and British aspirations. He had met Aaron Aaronsohn in Cairo and learned of Zionist plans for Palestine. These troubled him. He knew enough to suspect that McMahon’s correspondence with Hussein contradicted aspects of the agreement that Sykes had negotiated with Picot, even though he did not yet know the agreement’s details. Like many British officers in the Middle East, Lawrence had concluded, even with only partial knowledge, that Sykes had ceded too much territory to France. In other words, even before he knew its details, he objected to the Sykes-Picot Agreement both for Arab nationalist and for British imperialist reasons.

In July 1917 he interviewed King Hussein and became painfully aware that the latter misunderstood British intentions for Mesopotamia, as well as French plans for the Syrian coastal region. But Lawrence had concluded long since that if Hussein wished to stake any convincing claim to any part of Syria, his troops, led by his son Feisal, must enter Damascus before the troops of any other country did. One night at Wejh he and Feisal and some of the latter’s advisers discussed the matter. “We all swore
¹
to not go to Mecca till after we had seen Damascus,” Lawrence recorded in his diary. But the evidence about his attitude is ambiguous, as is most evidence about this extraordinary figure. Some months after making this pledge, he wrote to Mark Sykes (in a letter never delivered):

He was, he added, “strongly pro-British and also pro-Arab.” But he increasingly came to realize that he could not be both, and the realization wore him down.

Lawrence had met Sykes in Cairo in early May 1917, when the latter arrived on the joint mission with Picot, the one that led King Hussein to conclude erroneously that the French would treat Syria’s coastal region in the same manner that he thought the British would treat Mesopotamia—that is to say, as temporarily occupied territory, generously paid for. This appears to have been when Lawrence concluded, to the contrary, that the Arabs must stir themselves if they did not wish to lose Syria altogether. Shortly after the meeting with Sykes, he embarked from Wejh on the famous expedition north into Syria dramatized in David Lean’s celebrated film. Accompanying him were, among others, seventeen Ageyli soldiers from the towns of central Arabia, and most notably, Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of a section of a northern tribe, the Howeitat, which, with Auda’s help, Lawrence intended to mobilize against the Ottomans.

Auda abu Tayi is the fabled figure portrayed by Anthony Quinn in the movie: a warrior who had once reputedly cut the beating heart from a dying enemy and bitten into it, and who had killed seventy-five men in battle—not including Turks, whom he considered not worth counting. He possessed the ravaged face of a tragedian with “large eloquent eyes, like black velvet in richness,” Lawrence thought, and a mind “stored with poems of old raids and epic tales of fights.” More important, Auda believed in the creation of the greater Arab kingdom envisioned by King Hussein. Lawrence valued him less for his remarkable personal qualities than because he could swing an important tribe, the Howeitat, behind Hussein’s revolt.

Their joint expedition has assumed mythic status. It had several purposes: to recruit to Feisal’s cause northern Arab tribes in addition to the Howeitat; to make contact with the surviving Syrian revolutionaries in Damascus and perhaps spur them to activity (to facilitate this goal a member of the al-Bakri family accompanied them); to further disrupt Turkish communications with Medina by destroying track along the Hejaz Railway. But by far the most important goal was to capture the tiny but strategically crucial port of Aqaba, at the northernmost point of the Gulf of Aqaba, which extends from the northern end of the Red Sea like a finger pointing farther north into Syria. Famously, the Ottoman defenders of the port kept powerful guns facing the water, protecting against French and British warships. Lawrence and Auda (which man devised the strategy is
unclear) intended to surprise them by attacking by land from the east, with Howeitat and other tribal soldiers, although to come out on the right side would require an epic trek through the waterless and broiling desert. Once captured, however, Aqaba could become the jumping-off point for further northern campaigns. The Arab forces engaged in them could constitute the right wing of a largely British army that, as Lawrence correctly anticipated, soon would advance northward into Palestine. As the Arabs moved north from Aqaba in parallel to the British, they could assert control, by virtue of military occupation, of a good part of Jordan and Syria, northern Palestine included. Which aspect of this strategy lay uppermost in Lawrence’s mind remains uncertain.

On the afternoon of May 9, 1917, Lawrence and his party left Wejh and headed north into the desert. A report among the papers of General Gilbert Clayton (entitled “Notes on Capt. Lawrence’s Journey”) provides a barebones summary of what followed:

And so they continued, blowing up or digging up railway track, hitting Turkish outposts in deadly lightning attacks and then vanishing back into the desert, recruiting additional members of various tribes until “from Guweira they marched on to El Kethira (wiping out a post of 3 officers and 140 men) and thence to El Khadra in the North of Wadi Ithm, where the Aqaba garrison surrendered at discretion.”

This utilitarian account doubtless served its purpose as a military report but perforce left out much interesting material. For example, on May 24, as the scorching sun beat down mercilessly and the heat reflected upward from the desert floor so that the men upon their camels could not tell whether it came from above or below but only how much they suffered from it; as the horizon was dissolved in shimmering mirage so that men could not estimate distance either before or behind; and as each man retreated
deep within himself simply in order to endure the brutal day, Lawrence suddenly realized that he could not see his personal servant, Gasim. The man had fallen behind and must be lost—a certain death sentence unless someone quickly rescued him. Lawrence wheeled his camel around and began retracing his steps, alone now in the furnace, with only a compass to guide him. After an hour and a half, he found Gasim “nearly blinded
⁴
 … his black mouth gaping open.” But he was still alive; Lawrence had saved him.

Another occasion, at night this time: Lawrence and his companions sat by the fire “while the coffee
⁵
maker boiled up his coffee … when there came a volley from the shadowy dunes east of us and one of the Ageyli toppled forward.” Death could come unexpectedly and in an instant. And not only from enemy guns—poisonous snakes proved equally dangerous, if slower: “Twice puff-adders
⁶
came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain and a swelling of the poisoned limb.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this fabled adventure took place inside Lawrence’s head. “I could see,”
⁷
he wrote in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, his famous book about the Arabian campaign, that

He finally attempted to resolve this terrible contradiction, at least to his own satisfaction. “I vowed to make the Arab Revolt the engine of its own success, as well as handmaid to our Egyptian campaign,” he records in
Seven Pillars
. He “saw the liberation of Syria happening in steps, of which Aqaba was the indispensable first.” Successive steps, he now realized, must be taken rapidly thereafter. But first he must ride alone much farther north, indeed all the way to Damascus and beyond, to spy out the land and to plot what those steps should be. “Also,”
⁸
he wrote in his book, “a rash adventure suited my abandoned mood.” But at the time, in a message to General Clayton (also never delivered), he wrote: “I’ve decided
⁹
to go off alone to Damascus
hoping to get killed on the way. For all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are getting them to fight for us on a lie and I can’t stand it.”

In this frame of mind, Lawrence embarked upon a journey more extraordinary than the one from which he had just taken temporary leave. His route led from Wadi Sirhan, home base of the Howeitat and their romantic chieftain, Auda, all the way to Ayn al Barida, 130 miles northeast of Damascus, where he made contact with another tribe, the Wuld Ali, whose support would be helpful when it came time to engage the Turks there. From this location he traveled westward into modern Lebanon and then south, to the very gates of Damascus itself. There he met Ali Riza al Rikabi, the Arab nationalist general who had kept his true beliefs secret from the Turks and who had been entrusted by them with defense of this most important Syrian city. The general warned Lawrence that Damascus would not rise up, which would only have confirmed the Englishman in his belief that Feisal’s army must make those next steps north if they were to seize control of their homeland. Next he rode south, making contact with the leader of the Druze people and then, more important, with the sheikh of the powerful north Arabian Rwala tribe. He returned to Wadi Sirhan on June 18, having been gone nearly two weeks. He had exorcised the suicidal mood, if ever it had truly existed, with constructive work.

Finally the advance began. It took place in stages: from Wadi Sirhan to Bair; from Bair to El-Jefer; from that town to Ghadir el Haj, where they carried out extensive demolition work on the railway line; and then to “the low rolling
¹⁰
grass-covered hills that flank each side of the Aqaba road near Ain Aba el-Lissan.” An Ottoman detachment occupied this town and had to be disposed of before the march could continue. Lawrence and his men held the high ground and pinned them there for a day, but “it was terribly hot
¹¹
—hotter than ever before I had felt it in Arabia.” Even the hardened Bedouin tribesmen could not take it “and crawled or had to be thrown under rocks to recover in their shade.”

At dusk Auda broke the impasse with fifty horsemen in a wild dash down the hill into the teeth of the Ottoman guns. The Turkish defenders broke, just as Lawrence and another detachment rolled in upon them from the flank. A massacre ensued: three hundred Ottoman soldiers dead in just a few minutes. The Arabs lost two men. For once Lawrence wrote of himself not as the hero but as a sort of goat. At the height of the charge, firing wildly, he had shot his own camel in the back of the head. It had fallen as if poleaxed; he had flown from the saddle over its ears and landed hard, and
then lay stunned for the remainder of the battle. By contrast, Lawrence records, the Turks had shot Auda’s horse out from under him; their bullets had smashed his binoculars, passed through his holster and scabbard, but never touched his body. He had taken part in the bloody work from beginning to end. We do not know how many Auda killed in this battle, perhaps because, as noted, he did not bother to count his victims if they were Turkish.

Lawrence and his army collected capitulations as they marched south toward a still-unsuspecting Aqaba, finally accepting the surrender of the port’s only defensive outpost on the landward side. As they approached the town itself, “all the Turks
¹²
we met were most happy to surrender, holding up their arms and crying ‘Muslim, Muslim’ as soon as they saw us.” So the epic journey ended on July 4, 1917, with Arab troops splashing in the warm salt water of the gulf, and Lawrence already pondering the next move north—but whether primarily in aid of Arab nationalism or British imperialism, we still do not know.