The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (58 page)

So: As the Zionists in London moved during the spring and early summer of 1917 to assert control over the British Jewish community and to influence the Foreign Office, the Arabs pushed north from Wejh up to Aqaba. They intended to head into Syria proper and claim their homeland—almost certainly they thought that meant claiming Palestine. Had they reached Damascus before November 2, 1917, it is an interesting point whether the British would have felt confident enough about the future of that territory to release the Balfour Declaration at all. The tragedy from the Arab point of view was that the war in the East moved at a significantly slower pace than diplomacy and politicking now moved in the imperial metropolis. It took Feisal much longer to blow up the Hejaz Railway, raise the tribes, help defeat the Ottoman Army, and enter Damascus than it took for Weizmann to arrange meetings with British politicians and vanquish the Conjoint Committee. Feisal did not know that a Balfour Declaration was being contemplated; he moved as fast as he could. The British seemed happy to help, but they had a very different end in view than he did. In any event, Feisal did not move fast enough. And meanwhile poor Lawrence of Arabia, Britain’s man on the spot, tore his soul into pieces trying to juggle his country’s and Arab interests.

With Aqaba secured,
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Lawrence drew up a plan for those next quick steps. He envisioned seven roughly simultaneous attacks upon Ottoman
positions, to take place in late August. One force would capture the fertile area east and southeast of the Dead Sea. Four separate forces would attack along a 350-mile stretch of the Hejaz Railway between Maan (in modern southern Jordan) and Hama (one hundred miles north of Damascus, in Syria). Then the Druze, with whose leader Lawrence had recently conferred, would descend upon Dara, where the east-west and north-south railways of the region intersected. Yet another force would attack that east-west railway a bit west of Dara in the Yarmuk Valley. The track here represented the Ottoman lifeline into Palestine. Lawrence intended to sever it. He hoped additional Arab tribes would be inspired by such a flurry of offensive activity to rise against Turkish rule and that the culmination would be the occupation of Damascus by Arab troops. If Arab soldiers under Feisal had somehow occupied Damascus before November 2, 1917, and thus perhaps caused the British government to withhold the Balfour Declaration, then Middle Eastern and even world history might have unwound very differently.

The former Oxford student turned desert fighter and military strategist made yet another hard journey by camel, this time from Aqaba to Cairo. There he outlined his plan to General Sir Edmund Allenby, who had recently replaced General Sir Archibald Murray as commander in chief of British forces in Egypt. Allenby, fresh from the front in France, “sat in his chair
¹⁴
looking at me—not straight as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He did not ask many questions, nor talk much, but studied the map … ‘Well, I will do for you what I can,’ he said finally.” What he did not tell Lawrence was that he thought he could use him, and London’s growing appreciation of him, to pry men and equipment from the westerner General Robertson, chief of the Imperial General staff (CIGS). “The scheme
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proposed by Captain Lawrence can only be realized in conjunction with the prosecution of offensive operations by me in this theater,” Allenby warned. But he would not be ready to advance into Palestine until mid-September. Thus, the wheels of war were grinding slowly, from the Arab nationalist point of view.

Predictably, Robertson stalled. Convinced that the war could be won only in the West, he begrudged sending Allenby anyone or anything at all. He confided to a friend that he could not stand men who were “dying to go
¹⁶
to Jerusalem and Damascus and other places.” He thought Allenby should remain on the defensive in Egypt and that British occupation of Palestine would serve no useful purpose. Even the War Cabinet, desperate for a victory in the Middle East since it could not find one in the West, failed to move him. “It is necessary,”
¹⁷
the War Cabinet instructed, “to strike the Turk
as hard as possible during the coming Autumn and Winter.” Still he procrastinated. It took Lloyd George himself to get things moving. British heavy guns should be sent from the Western Front to Egypt, he directed the CIGS. “There they could
¹⁸
 … be employed to reinforce General Allenby and enable him to deal the Turks … a crushing blow.” By now it was September 22, and in the meantime Allenby had postponed his offensive another month.

Lawrence continued with his raiding parties north of Aqaba. He seems to have rethought his schedule of Arab liberation, for we have no evidence that after the initial meeting with Allenby he pressed further for its fulfillment. Perhaps he had concluded that the timetable was unrealistic. The war moved at a pace of its own. He was aware of Zionism but not of its rapid advance in London. Anyway he had developed a malevolent genius for blowing up track and trains, and during the fall of 1917 he gave this talent full scope. Here is an example of his work, in his own words, written at the time for the
Arab Bulletin
, not polished for his book, which came after the war.

This was a not-atypical engagement for Lawrence. He returned to Aqaba for a few days, then headed out again on September 27. This time his mines “shattered the firebox
²⁰
of the locomotive (No. 153 Hejaz), burst many of the tubes, threw the l.c. cylinder into the air, cleaned out the cab, warped the frame, bent the two near driving wheels and broke their axles.” The mines killed twenty Turks as well.

Slowly—too slowly
²¹
from the Arab nationalist point of view (but the Arab nationalists did not know it)—Allenby prepared his invasion of Palestine. The Arabs moved slowly as well, at least in comparison with the Zionists in London. Hussein’s sons Ali and Abdullah maintained the siege of Medina, which meant they occupied the sidelines. Feisal, who had moved up to Aqaba, built his forces for the northern campaign, but slowly too. He would not rely upon Hejazi tribesmen to take Syria, but rather upon the Syrians themselves—some three thousand Turkish conscripts captured by the British, who had switched sides along with their officers—to form the “Arab Legion.” They trained in Egypt, however, and would not arrive in Aqaba until November. Some of their officers had been active in the secret society al-Ahd. They did not
²²
get along with the Iraqi officers whom Feisal also employed. Indeed it is a fair point whether they cared about the great Arab empire that Hussein expected to found, or only for an independent Syria. Like the Zionists in London, they sensed the tectonic plates shifting beneath their feet in a direction that might prove favorable to them.

Near the end of October, Allenby launched his offensive. He prepared with care, tricking the Turks into thinking he would repeat General Murray’s ill-conceived direct assault upon Gaza of the previous spring. First he sent Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a former ornithologist turned daredevil warrior, on reconnaissance. The colonel allowed himself to be seen by the enemy and chased. Purposely he dropped several notebooks as he fled; they contained information suggesting a frontal attack like Murray’s. On October 26, Allenby unleashed an extended pounding of Turkish positions in Gaza. The Ottomans, thinking this presaged the main attack, kept most of their troops there. But on October 31 the bulk of Allenby’s force attacked Beersheba, thirty-five miles to the southeast, taking the Ottomans completely by surprise. Fearing encirclement, they retreated up the coast, leaving Gaza undefended. Allenby took it and began to chase the Ottomans. Great Britain had entered Palestine at last. But the famous declaration bearing Lord Balfour’s name had been written six days before Gaza fell; it would be published the day after. The Arabs had lost the race for Palestine already, although they did not realize it.

Likewise ignorant of developments in London, T. E. Lawrence had ridden
north once more. Allenby feared that the Ottomans would reinforce their soldiers in Gaza via the railway that branched west at Dara into the Yarmuk Valley some 420 miles north of Aqaba. That railway represented the main artery connecting Damascus to Palestine. It wound up and down the valley in switchbacks and across gorges along track supported by a series of bridges, eminently suited for destruction by explosive. Lawrence had advocated destroying them back in July; now Allenby wanted him to make the attempt. He should do so as near to the date of the attack upon Gaza as possible. Lawrence accepted his most dangerous assignment. This time he took with him, among others, a British explosives expert, C. E. Wood, as backup in case he himself should be killed; also a number of Indian troops who were adept with the machine gun; and also, for the first part of the expedition, George Lloyd of the Arab Bureau.

George Lloyd is the man who had served as honorary consul with Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert at the British embassy in Constantinople twelve years before; who had entered Parliament as a Conservative MP just as his two friends had done; and who had joined the Anglo-Ottoman Society and allowed it to use his name to recruit others, including Herbert. He is important here for the revealing discussion he had with Lawrence as the two rode together on the first leg of the trip.

Lawrence liked and respected Lloyd. He was, Lawrence later wrote, “the rare sort
²³
of traveler who could eat anything with anybody, anyhow and at any time.” Moreover “he was the only
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fully taught man with us in Arabia.” But these two British experts disagreed fundamentally about Arabia’s future. As they rode their camels in the starry night across the desert, Lloyd told Lawrence that he wished to tie “down the Arab movement to its military purpose … and to risk no breach of faith with the Arabs by raising hopes beyond it.” No doubt he was thinking of King Hussein’s various misapprehensions. After all, he had been present at Jeddah when Feisal and Fuad went to Colonel Newcombe with their worries. No doubt, too, his call for plain dealing appealed to Lawrence.

The assumption behind it, however, that the Arabs’ role should be merely military and supplemental, cannot have appealed. Lloyd kept a “Diary of a journey with TEL to El Jaffer,” in which he scribbled Lawrence’s quite different viewpoint. Given that the Balfour Declaration had already been written, it has a rather poignant aspect. Suppose Feisal were triumphantly installed in Damascus as a result of his own efforts, Lawrence posited to Lloyd. Then: “Sharif’s flag flies along coast from Acre northwards … Feisal’s attitude will be non-negotiatory—‘What I have, I will keep.’” Note that this meant keeping northern Palestine, which Zionists
now believed the British government would assign to them. Note too that Lawrence had no doubt Feisal would be entitled to keep it—or rather that neither Britain nor France would be entitled to, let alone to give it to the Jews. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence told Lloyd either that night or sometime during the next day, was “at best one between France and England for partition of a country in armed occupation of forces of Sharif of Mecca.”

Lloyd opposed Sykes-Picot for a different reason. Like so many Britons, he thought Sykes had given France too much. Lawrence thought so too, or he may have thought by now that Britain had given both too much to France and not enough to the Arabs. At any rate, both men agreed that the Sykes-Picot Agreement must be revised. Thus Lawrence rejoiced when Lloyd left him three days later, although he would miss his company. Lloyd was headed ultimately for London, where he could work against Sykes-Picot. As Lloyd put it, Lawrence “felt that there was
²⁵
a risk that all his work would be ruined in Whitehall and he thought I could save this.” But as far as Palestine was concerned, it had been ruined already.

With Lloyd gone, Lawrence turned his mind exclusively to military matters. Things did not go smoothly. While the Zionists in London were rejoicing at the Balfour Declaration, Lawrence found himself, after yet more hard traveling, in Ain el Beidha, haggling with the sheikh and chief men of the Serahin tribe for recruits. They politely heard him out and then declined to provide any. Lawrence had counted on their help to blow up the Yarmuk Valley bridges. He turned from the sheikh and appealed to the tribesmen themselves, in a “halting, half-coherent speech,” which nevertheless struck a chord. They would go after all, they affirmed. Momentarily cheered, he then discovered that one of his men had deserted and would likely warn the Turks of his mission. “We … decided to push on none the less, trusting to the usual incompetence of our enemy.”

It took another day and night of difficult trekking, part of it in a driving rain, to reach the bridge they intended to take down. When they did reach it, a guard spotted them almost immediately and opened fire. The Serahin tribesmen returned fire. Also they quickly dumped their sacks of gelignite, fearing that incoming fire would detonate them. Lawrence and his men had to retreat, without their explosives. “Our minds were
²⁶
sick with failure,” he wrote. It was November 7, two days before the London
Times
reported the Balfour Declaration.