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 counter-attacked 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.”
In June 1917, a crestfallen Jemal met Falkenhayn at Jerusalem station and they posed awkwardly together on the steps of the Dome of the Rock. Falkenhayn set up his headquarters in the kaiserine Augusta Victoria. The cafés of the city were filled with German soldiers of the Asienkorps and their officers took over the Fast Hotel. “We were in the Holy Land,” wrote a typical young German soldier in the city, Rudolf Hoess.c “The old familiar names from religious history and the stories of the saints were all around us. And how different from my youthful dreams!” Austrian troops marched through the city; Jewish Austrian soldiers prayed at the Western Wall. Jemal Pasha left the city and governed his provinces from Damascus. The Kaiser finally controlled Jerusalem—but it was too late.
On 28 June, Sir Edmund Allenby arrived in Cairo as the new British commander. Just a week later, Lawrence and the Sherifians seized Aqaba. It took him just four days, riding camels, trains and ships, to reach Cairo and report his triumph to Allenby, who, despite being a bluffly conventional cavalryman, was immediately impressed by this gaunt Englishman dressed in Bedouin robes. Allenby ordered Lawrence and his Sherifian Camel Corps to serve as the maverick right wing of his army.
In Jerusalem, British aeroplanes bombed the Mount of Olives. Falkenhayn’s adjutant, Colonel Franz von Papen, arranged the defences and planned to counter-attack. The Germans underestimated Allenby and they were taken by surprise when on 31 October 1917, he launched his offensive to capture Jerusalem.11
LLOYD GEORGE, BALFOUR AND WEIZMANN
As Allenby massed his 75,000 infantry, 17,000 cavalry and a handful of new tanks, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, was negotiating a new policy with a Russian-born scientist named Dr. Chaim Weizmann. It is a remarkable story: a Russian immigrant, wandering around Whitehall and dropping into the offices of the most powerful statesmen in the world for romantic conversations on ancient Israel and the Bible, managed to win the backing of the British empire for a policy that would change Jerusalem as radically as any decision by Constantine or Saladin and define the Middle East to this day.
They had first met ten years earlier but their relationship was an unlikely one. Balfour was nicknamed Niminy Piminy and Pretty Fanny for his rosy cheeks and willowy limbs, but also Bloody Balfour for his harshness when chief secretary for Ireland. He was the scion of both Scottish mercantile wealth and English aristocracy—his mother being the sister of the Victorian prime minister, Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury. He had accompanied his uncle and Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and when he succeeded Salisbury in 1902, wits coined the expression “Bob’s your uncle!” A philosopher, poetaster and enthusiastic tennis-player, he was a foppish romantic who never married and a frivolous improviser whose favourite expression was “nothing matters much and very little matters at all.” David Lloyd George mused scathingly that history would remember Balfour “like the scent on a pocket-handkerchief” while, in fact, he is most definitely remembered for his relationship with Weizmann and the Declaration that bears his name.
The two could not have come from more alien worlds. Weizmann was a timber merchant’s son from a tiny Jewish village near Pinsk who had embraced Zionism as a boy and escaped Russia to study science in Germany and Switzerland. When he was thirty, he moved to Manchester to teach chemistry at the university.
Weizmann was simultaneously “Bohemian and aristocratic, patriarchal and sardonic, with the caustic and self-mocking wit of a Russian intellectual.” He “was one of nature’s aristocrats who was at home with kings and prime ministers” and managed to win the respect of men as different as Churchill, Lawrence and President Truman. His wife, Vera, being the daughter of one of the few Jewish officers in the tsarist army, regarded most Russian Jews as plebeian, preferred the company of English nobility and made sure her “Chaimchik” dressed like an Edwardian gentleman. Weizmann, this passionate Zionist, hater of tsarist Russia and despiser of anti-Zionist Jews, resembled “a well-nourished Lenin” and was sometimes mistaken for him. A “brilliant talker,” his perfect English was always spiced with a Russian accent and his “almost feminine charm [was] combined with feline deadliness of attack, burning enthusiasm and prophetic vision.”
The Old Etonian and the graduate of Pinsk chever first met in 1906. Their chat was short but unforgettable. “I remember Balfour sat in his usual pose, legs stretched out, an imperturbable expression.” It was Balfour, who as prime minister in 1903, had offered Uganda to the Zionists, but now he was out of power. Weizmann feared that his languid interest was just “a mask,” so he explained that if Moses had heard about Ugandaism “he would surely have broken the tablets again.” Balfour appeared bemused.
“Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?”
“But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London,” said Balfour.
“True, but we had Jerusalem,” replied Weizmann, “when London was a marsh.”
“Are there many Jews who think like you?”
“I speak the mind of millions of Jews.”
Balfour was impre
ssed but added, “Curious. The Jews I meet are quite different.”
“Mr. Balfour,” answered Weizmann, who knew that most Anglo-Jewish grandees scorned Zionism, “you meet the wrong kind of Jews.”
This conversation led nowhere, but Weizmann had met his first imperial statesman. Balfour lost the general election and spent years out of power. Meanwhile, Weizmann campaigned to build a Hebrew university in Jerusalem, which he visited for the first time shortly after meeting Balfour. The dynamic Zionist farms in Palestine thrilled him, but Weizmann was horrified by Jerusalem, “a city living on charity, a miserable ghetto,” where “we hadn’t a single decent building—all the world had a foothold in Jerusalem except the Jews. It depressed me and I left the city before nightfall.” Back in Manchester, Weizmann made his name as a chemist and became friends with C. P. Scott, editor–proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, a pro-Zionist who himself resembled a biblical prophet. “Now Dr. Weizmann,” Scott said in 1914, “tell me what you want me to do for you.”
At the start of the Great War, Weizmann was summoned to the Admiralty by the First Lord, “the brisk, fascinating, charming and energetic” Winston Churchill, who said: “Well, Dr. Weizmann, we need 30,000 tons of acetone.” Weizmann had discovered a new formula to manufacture acetone, the solvent used in the making of cordite explosives. “Can you make it?” asked Churchill. Weizmann could and did.
A few months later, in December 1914, C. P. Scott took Weizmann to a breakfast with Lloyd George, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, and his colleague Herbert Samuel. Weizmann noted how the ministers discussed the war with a flippant humour that concealed their deadly seriousness, but “I was terribly shy and suffered from suppressed excitement.” Weizmann was amazed to discover that the politicians were sympathetic to Zionism. Lloyd George admitted, “When Dr. Weizmann was talking of Palestine, he kept bringing up place-names more familiar to me than those on the Western Front,” and he offered to introduce him to Balfour—not realizing they had already met. Weizmann was wary of Samuel—an Anglo-Jewish banking scion related to the Rothschilds and Montefiores, and the first practising Jew to serve in a British cabinet—until he revealed that he was preparing a memorandum on the Jewish Return.
In January 1915, Samuel delivered his memorandum to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith: “There is already a stirring among the twelve million scattered,” wrote Samuel. “[There is] widespread sympathy with the idea of restoring the Hebrew people to their land.” Asquith mocked the idea that the Jews “could swarm back” and sneered “what an attractive community” they would be. As for Samuel, his memorandum “reads like a new edition of Tancred.d I’m not attracted by the proposal but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favourite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of HS.” Asquith was even more surprised to discover that “curiously enough, the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George and he doesn’t give a damn for the Jews but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession of ‘agnostic and atheistic’ France.” Asquith was right that Lloyd George wanted Jerusalem for Britain but wrong about his attitude to the Jews.
Lloyd George, a blue-eyed Welsh Baptist schoolmaster’s son and reckless womanizer whose shock of raffishly long white hair made him more resemble an artist than a statesman, cared greatly about the Jews, and had represented the Zionists as a lawyer ten years earlier. “I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews than about my own land,” said this silver-tongued orator and intuitive showman who had started as a radical reformer, anti-imperial pacifist and persecutor of dukes. Once the Great War had started, he mutated into a vigorous war minister and romantic imperialist, influenced by the Greek classics and the Bible.
Lloyd George reintroduced Weizmann to Balfour. “Weizmann needs no introduction,” scribbled Balfour. “I still remember our conversation in 1906.” He greeted the Zionist with, “Well, you haven’t changed much,” and then mused, almost misty-eyed, “You know, when the guns stop firing, you may get your Jerusalem. It’s a great cause you’re working for. You must come again and again.” They started to meet regularly, strolling around Whitehall by night and discussing how a Jewish homeland would serve, by the quirks of fate, the interests of historical justice and British power.
Science and Zionism overlapped even more because Balfour was now First Lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was minister of munitions, the two portfolios most concerned with Weizmann’s work on explosives. He found himself “caught up in a maze of personal relations” with the panjandrums of the world’s most expansive empire, prompting him to reflect on his humble background: “starting with nothing, I, Chaim Weizmann, a Yid from Motelle and only an almost professor at a provincial university!” To the panjandrums themselves, he was what they thought a Jew should be: “Just like an Old Testament prophet,” Churchill later remarked, though one dressed in a frock-coat and top hat. In his memoirs, Lloyd George frivolously claimed that his gratitude for Weizmann’s war work led to his support for the Jews, but actually there was strong Cabinet backing much earlier.
Once again, the Bible, Jerusalem’s book, influenced the city over two millennia after it was written. “Britain was a Biblical nation,” wrote Weizmann. “Those British statesmen of the old school were genuinely religious. They understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and their faith.” Along with America, “Bible-reading and Bible-thinking England,” noted one of Lloyd George’s aides, “was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland” was regarded “as a natural aspiration not to be denied.”
There was something more lurking in their attitude to the Jews: the British leaders were genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews, and tsarist repression had intensified during the war. The European upper classes had been dazzled by the fabulous wealth, exotic power and sumptuous palaces of Jewish plutocrats such as the Rothschilds. However this had confused them too, for they could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers. In an age of uninhibited theories of racial superiority, Balfour was convinced Jews were “the most gifted race mankind has known since fifth century BC Greece” and Churchill thought them “the most formidable and gifted race,” yet simultaneously he called them a “mystic and mysterious race chosen for the supreme manifestations both of the divine and the diabolical.” Lloyd George privately criticized Herbert Samuel for having “the worst characteristics of his race.” Yet all three were genuine philo-Semites. Weizmann appreciated that the line between racist conspiracy-theory and Christian Hebraism was a thin one: “we hate equally anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Both are degrading.”
Yet timing is everything in politics. In December 1916, Asquith’s government fell, Lloyd George became prime minister, and he appointed Balfour as foreign secretary. Lloyd George was described as the “greatest warleader since Chatham” and he and Balfour would do whatever was necessary to win the war. At this vital moment in a long and terrible struggle against Germany, their peculiar attitudes to the Jews and the special concatenation of circumstances of 1917 merged to convince Lloyd George and Balfour that Zionism was essential to help Britain achieve victory.
“IT’S A BOY, DR. WEIZMANN”: THE DECLARATION
In the spring of 1917, America entered the war and the Russian Revolution overthrew Emperor Nicholas II. “It’s clear Her Majesty’s Government were mainly concerned how Russia was to be kept in the ranks of the Allies,” explained one of the key British officials, and as for America, “it was supposed American opinion might be favourably influenced if the return of the Jews to Palestine became a purpose of British policy.” Balfour, about to visit America, told his colleagues that “the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America now appear favourable
to Zionism.” If Britain could make a pro-Zionist declaration, “we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.”
If Russia and America were not urgent enough, the British learned that the Germans were considering a Zionist declaration of their own: after all, Zionism was a German-Austrian idea and until 1914, the Zionists had been based in Berlin. When Jemal Pasha, the tyrant of Jerusalem, visited Berlin in August 1917, he met the German Zionists, and the Ottoman grand vizier, Talaat Pasha, reluctantly agreed to promote “a Jewish national home.” Meanwhile, on the borders of Palestine, General Allenby was secretly preparing his offensive.
These, not Weizmann’s charm, were the real reasons that Britain embraced Zionism and now time was of the essence. “I’m a Zionist,” declared Balfour and it may be that Zionism became the only true passion of his career. Lloyd George and Churchill, now munitions minister, became Zionists too and that effervescent gadfly, Sir Mark Sykes, now in the Cabinet Office, was suddenly convinced that Britain needed “the friendship of the Jews of the World” because “with Great Jewry against us, there’s no possibility of getting the thing through”—the thing being victory in the war.
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