Wasif saw “starvation spread all around the country,” along with “typhus, malaria, and many people died.” By 1918, the Jewish population of Jerusalem had fallen, from epidemic, starvation and deportation, by 20,000. Yet Wasif’s voice, his oud and his ability to rustle up pretty guests for wild parties, were never more valued.
WAR AND SEX IN THE CITY: WASIF JAWHARIYYEH
Jemal, his officers and the Family grandees enjoyed a life of feverish pleasure while the Jerusalemites just struggled to survive the calamities of war. The poverty was such that young prostitutes, many of them war widows charging just two piastres a trick, patrolled the Old City. In May 1915, some teachers were sacked when they were found entertaining prostitutes during school hours. Women even sold their babies. “Old men and women”—particularly the poor Hasidic Jews in Mea Shearim—“were bloated with hunger. On their faces and all over their bodies, slime, filth, disease and sores.”
Wasif’s every night was an adventure: “I only went home to change my clothes, sleeping in a different house every night, my body totally exhausted from drinking and merrymaking. In the morning I’m picnicking with the Jerusalem Notable Families, next I’m holding an orgy with thugs and gangsters in the alleys of the Old City.” One night Wasif Jawhariyyeh found himself in a convoy of four limousines, containing the governor, his Jewish mistress from Salonica, various Ottoman beys and Family grandees including Mayor Hussein Husseini, being driven out to Artas near Bethlehem for an “international picnic” at the Latin monastery: “It was a lovely day for everyone during the hard time when hunger and war were making people suffer. No one hung on ceremony, everyone drank wine, and the ladies were so beautiful that night, there was no time to eat and they all sang like one choir.”
The governor’s Jewish mistress “so adored Arabic music” that Wasif agreed to teach her the oud. He seems to have existed in a dizzy parade of orgies with his patrons, attended by “the most beautiful Jewish women” and sometimes Russian girls trapped in Jerusalem by the war. Once, the Fourth Army quartermaster, Raushen Pasha, got “so drunk that the beautiful Jewish women made him lose consciousness!”
Wasif did not need to work because the grandees, first Hussein Husseini and later Ragheb Nashashibi, arranged sinecures for him in the city administration. Husseini was head of the Red Crescent charity. As so often, charity was the shameless pretext for extravagance and social climbing: the “attractive ladies” of Jerusalem were asked to dress up in fetchingly figure-hugging Ottoman military uniforms decorated with Red Crescents, a look that proved irresistible for the supremo Jemal: his mistress was Leah Tennenbaum, whom Wasif considered “one of the most beautiful women in Palestine.” Sima al-Magribiyyah, another Jewess, became mistress of the garrison commander; an Englishwoman, Miss Cobb, serviced the governor.
Sometimes, the oud-player himself enjoyed a tidbit from high table. When he and his band were invited to play at a party in a Jewish house, he found a “huge hall, and a group of [Ottoman] officers prowling around the ladies,” who included a certain Miss Rachel. Suddenly the drunken Turks started to fight, shooting their pistols first at the lights and then at each other. The demi-mondaines and musicians ran for their lives. Wasif’s beloved lute was broken but the pretty Miss Rachel pulled him into a cupboard that led through a hidden doorway into another house—“she saved my life,” and, perhaps just as joyously, “I stayed the night with her.”
On 27 April 1915, the anniversary of Sultan Mehmet’s succession, Jemal invited Ottoman and German commanders and the Jerusalemite grandees to staff headquarters in the commandeered Notre Dame outside the New Gate: fifty “prostitutes” accompanied the Ottoman officers while the grandees brought their wives.
Even as Jerusalem deteriorated, Count Ballobar’s dinner parties for Jemal remained banquets: the menu for one feast on 6 July 1916 included Turkish soup, fish, steak, meat pies and stuffed turkey, followed by ice cream, pineapple and fruit. While they ate, Jemal talked about girls, power and his new Jerusalem. He fancied himself a city planner and wanted to knock down the walls of Jerusalem and cut a boulevard through the Old City from the Jaffa Gate to the Temple Mount. Then he boasted that he had married the glamorous Leah Tennenbaum.c Jemal often turned up chez Ballobar without warning—and, as things got more desperate, the Spaniard used his influence to restrain the Slaughterman’s despotism.
While Jemal oversaw this evanescent Jerusalem, his colleague, Vice-Generalissimo Enver, lost 80,000 men in his inept Russian offensive. He and Talaat blamed their disasters on the Christian Armenians, who were systematically deported and killed. A million perished in a barbaric crime that would later encourage Hitler to begin the Holocaust: “No one now remembers the Armenians,” he reflected. Jemal claimed to disapprove of this massacre. Certainly he allowed refugees to settle in Jerusalem, and the number of Armenians there doubled during the war.
There were secret negotiations with the British: Jemal told Ballobar that London wanted him to assassinate his colleague Talaat Pasha. At some point, Jemal secretly approached the Allies, offering to march on Istanbul, overthrow Enver, save the Armenians and become hereditary sultan himself: as the Allies did not take him seriously, Jemal fought on. He hanged twelve Arabs in Jerusalem, their bodies displayed around the walls, while Enver toured the east to emphasize his Islamic credentials, intimidate Arab dissidents and keep an eye on his colleague. Wasif watched the Ottoman strongman drive into Jerusalem with Jemal. After visiting the Dome, David’s Tomb and the Church, and opening Jemal Pasha Street, Enver was entertained at the Fast Hotel by Mayor Hussein Husseini, accompanied by Jawhariyyeh who as usual arranged the party.
The two pashas set out for Mecca to see off any potential Arab rebellion. But Enver’s haj could not save Arabia for the Ottomans.9
a Ruhi Khalidi died of typhoid later that year and many were convinced that he had been poisoned by the Young Turks.
b Jemal loathed Jewish nationalism or anything that threatened Turkish dominance but at the same time, he tried to court Jewish support: he offered Henry Morganthau, U.S. ambassador to Istanbul, the chance to buy the Western Wall and repeated the offer to Jerusalem’s Jews.
c Leah Tennenbaum later married a Christian lawyer, Abcarius Bey, who built her a mansion, Villa Leah, in Talbieh; she was thirty years younger than him. She left him, but he rented the Villa Leah to the exiled Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Later the house belonged to Moshe Dayan.
CHAPTER 45
Arab Revolt, Balfour
Declaration
1916–1917
LAWRENCE AND THE SHERIF OF MECCA
Just before the Great War began, a young princeling from Mecca, Abdullah ibn Hussein, on his way back from Istanbul, visited Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the reigning British Agent in Cairo, to ask for military aid for his father.
Abdullah’s father was Hussein, the Sherif of Sherifs and the Amir of Mecca, the grandest potentate in Arabia, a Hashemite in direct descent from the Prophet. The family were traditionally amirs of Mecca but the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid had kept him in luxurious limbo in Istanbul for over fifteen years while appointing other members of the family. Then in 1908, the Young Turks, faced with a lack of other candidates, despatched him to Mecca (where his telephone number was Mecca 1). Faced with Enver Pasha’s aggressive Turkish nationalism and the rivalry of the Saudis and other Arabian chieftains, Hussein wished to prepare for either war in Arabia or revolt against Istanbul.
Abdullah proudly showed Kitchener a flesh wound gained fighting a southern Arabian sheikh, and Kitchener revealed his scars from the Sudan. “Your Lordship,” the squat Arabian told the towering Kitchener, “is a target that cannot be missed but, short as I am, a Bedouin hit me.” Despite Abdullah’s charm, Kitchener refused to arm the Sherifians.
A few months later, the start of the Great War changed everything. Kitchener returned to London to serve as secretary of state for war—and to launch the steely-eyed recruiting poster that read “Your Country Needs You”—but he remained Brita
in’s pre-eminent Eastern expert. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph declared jihad against the Allies, he remembered Hussein and proposed appointing him as Britain’s own caliph to launch an Arab revolt. He ordered Cairo to contact the Sherif.
At first there was no reply. Then suddenly, in August 1915, Sherif Hussein offered to lead an Arab revolt—in return for certain promises. The British, confronting the failure of their Gallipoli expedition, designed to break the Western Front stalemate by knocking the Ottomans out of the war, and the disastrous encirclement of an army at Kut in Iraq, were afraid that Jemal Pasha would conquer Egypt unless he was restrained by Arab unrest. London therefore ordered Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner in Egypt, to agree whatever necessary to keep the Arabs on side without promising anything that clashed with French and of course British ambitions.
Sherif Hussein, now over sixty, was described by no less an observer than Lawrence of Arabia as “conceited to a degree, greedy and stupid” and “pitifully unfit” to rule a state, but nonetheless “such an old dear” and at this point the British badly needed his help. Guided by his canny second son Abdullah, he now demanded a Hashemitea empire of all of Arabia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, an outrageously exorbitant gambit and an imperium on a scale that had not existed since the Abbasids. In return he would lead a revolt against the Ottomans not only in his native Arabia but also in Syria through the network of secret Arab nationalist societies such as al-Fatat and al-Ahd. None of this was quite true: he commanded only a few thousand warriors and did not even rule all of the Hejaz. Much of Arabia was controlled by rival chieftains like the Saudis and his position was precarious. The secret societies were tiny, with just a few hundred active members between them, and would soon be decimated by Jemal.
McMahon was unsure how much to concede to these “tragi-comic pretensions,” but, while he agonized, Hussein simultaneously offered the Three Pashas the chance to outbid the British, asking for hereditary possession of the Hejaz and an end to Jemal’s terror. The sherif sent his third son Faisal to negotiate with Jemal, but the tyrant forced him to attend the hangings of Arab nationalists.
The sherif had much more success with the British. London’s Eastern experts based in Cairo knew the contours of Palestine intimately through the espionage archaeology of the last century and Kitchener himself had photographed Jerusalem and mapped the country, sometimes in full Arab disguise. But many understood the clubs of Cairo better than the souks of Damascus: they were patronizing about the Arabs and prejudiced against the Jews whom they saw as behind every enemy conspiracy. While London ran one policy, negotiating with the sherif, the British viceroy of India ran his own quite different policy, backing the sherif’s enemy, the Saudis. Britain’s often amateurish experts found themselves living the real version of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle, adrift on the subtle, treacherous currents of Arab politics in the vast Ottoman sea.
Fortunately, McMahon had one officer who really did know Syria. The twenty-eight-year-old T. E. Lawrence, described by his fellow Arabist Gertrude Bell as “exceedingly intelligent,” was an eccentric outsider who hailed from the ambiguous heart of the British establishment and never quite reconciled his tormented allegiances to his two flawed masters—the empire and the Arabs. He was illegitimate: his father was Thomas Chapman, heir to a baronetcy who had left his wife to raise a new family with his mistress Sarah Lawrence and adopted her surname.
“As a boy, TE always thought he was going to do great things, both active and reflective and determined to achieve both.” He trained himself to improve his powers of physical endurance while writing his Oxford thesis on Crusader fortresses. Afterwards, he perfected his Arabic by travelling throughout Syria, and worked as an archaeologist at Hittite sites in Iraq, where his young Arab assistant Dahoum became his companion and perhaps the guiding passion of his life. His sexuality, like so much else about him, remains mysterious, but he mocked “our comic reproductive processes” and his friend Ronald Storrs said, “He was not a misogynist though he’d have kept his composure if he’d suddenly been informed he’d never see a woman again.” While in Iraq, he planned a book of “adventures” on Jerusalem and six other Arab cities which he would call The Seven Pillars of Wisdom after a verse in Proverbs. He never published this, but he later used the title for another book.
“A rather short, strongly built man with sandy complexion, a typical English face bronzed by the desert, remarkable blue eyes,” as an American later described him, Lawrence stood 5 foot 5 inches—Gertrude Bell called him the Imp. “My brain,” he wrote, “was quick and silent as a wild cat.” Super-sensitive to every human nuance, superb writer and keen observer, and abruptly rude to those he disliked, he suffered from “a craving to be famous,” he admitted, “and a horror of being known to like being known.” He did it all for “egotistical curiosity.” This believer in chivalry and justice was also a serpentine intriguer and self-mythologizer with what the journalist Lowell Thomas called “a genius for backing into the limelight.” Vanity competed with masochism: “I like the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downwards. There seemed a certainty in degradation.”
Now in Cairo, McMahon turned to this junior officer who became “a moving spirit in the negotiations with the sherif.” As Lawrence wrote his reports, he always found himself “thinking of Saladin and Abu Ubayda,” but he shared the view of many British Arabists that the desert Arabs were pure and noble—unlike those of Palestine. While he defined Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama as the Arab heartland of Syria, he did not recognize Jerusalem as really Arab—she was a “squalid town,” whose people, he wrote, “were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Questions of Arabs and their nationality are as far from them as bimetallism from the life of Texas.” Such places as Jerusalem or Beirut were “shop-soiled—as representative of Syria as Soho of the Home Counties.”
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.b 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.”
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