Part 14 (1/2)

”At last!” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. ”We immediately broached intimate subjects. He told me that since he was talking with a Jewish patriot, he would entrust me with very secret matters-some of which were not even known to the Foreign Office.”

Sykes filled him in on his clandestine meeting with the British Zionist leaders at the London townhouse on February 7, as well as expounded on a new formula for Middle East peace he'd recently devised, a scheme that called for a grand alliance of the Jews, the Arabs, and the remnants of the Armenians. With such an alliance, Sykes confidently explained, the Arabs could be made compliant-they had to know that without Jewish and British support, their independence bid would fail-but would also gain the clout to defy the French. At the same time, such a pact would freeze out the grasping Italians, marginalize the Russians, create a pro-British buffer state in protection of Egypt and India, all while paying lip service to the anticolonial demands of Britain's newest ally, the United States. How the Arabophobic Aaronsohn responded to this dizzying graph-paper concoction-its complexity only surpa.s.sed by its absurdity-isn't known. Most likely, he simply listened in respectful silence; after all, he had pressing matters of his own to take up with Mark Sykes.

If other British officials had been too distracted to pay attention to the predicament of Jaffa's Jewish population, not so the War Cabinet's new a.s.sistant secretary. Instead, it appears Sykes instantly grasped the potential propaganda bonanza Aaronsohn's news provided, a way to propel those still noncommittal elements of international Jewry toward the Zionist-British cause. He quickly dispatched Aaronsohn to work up a memo on the Jaffa situation, and to meet with him again the next morning.

In writing on the plight of the Armenians five months earlier, Aaronsohn had paid grudging respect to Djemal Pasha, pointing out that despite his personality flaws and failures as an administrator, the Syrian governor had been resolute in trying to stop the Armenian ma.s.sacres and in alleviating the suffering of the survivors. The agronomist had also at times benefited from Djemal's changeable and oddly courteous nature, his personal appeals to him winning the release of Absalom Feinberg after his arrest as a potential spy, as well as the modification of an array of edicts injurious to Jewish settlers. As he sat down to write his account for Mark Sykes on the afternoon of April 27, however, Aaronsohn appreciated that here was a golden opportunity to advance the Zionist cause, and to fully capitalize on that opportunity meant creative license would have to be taken. The primary victim of that creativity was to be Djemal Pasha.

Reconvening with Mark Sykes at 9:15 the next morning, Aaronsohn handed over his memorandum on Jaffa. In quick order, Sykes fired off a top-secret cable to the Foreign Office asking them to get hold of Chaim Weizmann at the English Zionist Federation and deliver the following message: ”Aaron Aaronsohn asks me to inform you that Televiv [the Jewish enclave of Jaffa] has been sacked. 10,000 Palestinian Jews are now without home or food. Whole yeshuv [settlement] is threatened with destruction. Jemal [Pasha] has publicly stated that Armenian policy will now be applied to Jews. Pray inform [Jewish] centers without naming Aaron Aaronsohn or source of information.”

The first to heed the call was the Jewish Chronicle, Britain's preeminent Zionist newspaper. On May 4, under subheadlines ent.i.tled ”Grave Reports-Terrible Outrages-Threats of Wholesale Ma.s.sacre,” readers were informed, ”It is with profound sorrow and concern that the Jewish Chronicle learns, from an absolutely reliable source, the very gravest news of the Jews in Palestine.... Tel Aviv, the beautiful Garden City suburb of Jaffa, has been sacked and lies a mere heap of ruins, while similar wanton destruction has in all probability taken place in other specifically Jewish parts of Palestine.”

Taking up the fiction about statements made by the Syrian governor, the Chronicle continued, ”But even worse is threatened. For the Turkish Governor, Djemal Pasha, has proclaimed his intention of the authorities [sic] to wipe out mercilessly the Jewish population of Palestine, his public statement being that the Armenian policy of ma.s.sacre is to be applied to the Jews. If this dire and dastardly threat is carried into effect, it will mean not alone that thousands of Jews ... will be put to the sword in cold blood, but that in addition the whole of the work of Palestinian re-settlement will be utterly destroyed.”

Over the next few days, the grim news out of Palestine reverberated through Jewish communities in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, and drew anguished appeals to their governments that some kind of action be taken. In the case of the British Foreign Office leaders.h.i.+p, however, just what could be done was not at all clear. ”I regret,” one senior diplomat commented on the same day the Chronicle story appeared, ”that no action by us seems in any way feasible.”

But at least one British official saw in the Jaffa story the chance to take matters to an entirely new level, not just to sway international Jewish opinion but to bring pressure to bear on his own government. This was William Ormsby-Gore, the Conservative member of Parliament who had been so impressed by Aaron Aaronsohn during his time in Cairo at the Arab Bureau; in May 1917, Ormsby-Gore was back in London and working with Mark Sykes on the War Cabinet's Middle Eastern affairs desk. While Sykes had left Cairo for a brief trip to Arabia on April 30, thus falling out of easy communication, he found Ormsby-Gore's cable awaiting his return to Egypt on May 9.

”I think we ought to use pogroms in Palestine as propaganda,” Ormsby-Gore wrote. ”Any spicy tales of atrocity would be eagerly welcomed by the propaganda people here, and Aaron Aaronsohn could send some lurid stories to the Jewish papers.”

Sykes received no argument from Aaronsohn. The two had another long meeting on May 11, at which, the scientist reported, they ”discussed the question of American Jews and of the propaganda we could do there [sic] now in recruiting for the Palestine front. Sir Mark offered to forward any telegrams or letters which I might care to send.”

Perhaps mindful of his own growing reputation for exaggeration, Sykes had the foresight to send Aaronsohn's new and expanded missive out under the signature of High Commissioner Reginald Wingate. ”During Pa.s.sover,” Wingate's cable to London that same day read, ”the entire Jewish population of Jaffa expelled towards north. Homes, property ransacked, population in flight robbed with connivance of Turkish Authorities. Jews resisting [were] pillaged, hanged. Thousands wandering helplessly on roads, starving.” And now there was a frightening new development in the telling, an extending of the evacuations to the much larger Jewish population in Jerusalem. ”Ma.s.ses of young Jerusalem Jews deported, northward, destination unknown. Forcible evacuation of [Jerusalem Jewish] colony imminent.”

Under Wingate's signature, circulation of this cable wasn't limited to the Foreign Office leaders.h.i.+p; instead, it landed on the desks of the king, the prime minister, and the entire War Cabinet. At the same time, Aaronsohn gave Sykes a list of some fifty Zionist leaders throughout the world to be immediately notified. Now the Jaffa story went the 1917 version of viral. ”Cruelties to Jews Deported in Jaffa,” screamed a headline in the New York Times, ”Djemal Pasha Blamed,” while the American government, so recently enlisted to the war effort, joined an international chorus in denouncing this latest outrage by the Constantinople regime. Nowhere was that chorus louder than in Great Britain.

The Turks and their German allies might be forgiven for being slow to respond to this onslaught of condemnation; after all, the Jaffa evacuation had occurred in early April, and it was now mid-May. After initially refusing to dignify the charges with a response, Djemal Pasha finally flatly denied the accusations, pointing out that the entire population of Jaffa had been evacuated, not just its Jews, and that the process-unpleasant though it undoubtedly was for those affected-had been completed in an orderly and peaceful fas.h.i.+on; in fact, the governor had granted Jaffa's Jewish population special considerations during the operation denied others. As for the claims of Jews being ”deported” from Jerusalem, the Syrian governor countered, there had been no evacuations there at all. These a.s.sertions were seconded by the regimes in Constantinople and Berlin, and even by a collection of Jewish leaders in Palestine, including Jerusalem's chief rabbi.

But it was too little too late. In the minds of much of the international public, the ”pogrom” in Jaffa was already an established fact, the latest Central Powers atrocity to join the ”rape of Belgium” and the ma.s.sacres of the Armenians. It also alerted the Zionists and their British government allies to the tremendous tool they'd been handed. Coming so closely after the fall of the hated czar and the admission of the United States into the war, the Jaffa story helped accelerate a tectonic s.h.i.+ft taking place among international Jewry, the growing conviction that their future lay with the Entente.

Of more immediate impact, it played to the argument of the more radical Zionists that any accommodation or compromise with Turkey was no longer possible. In early June, with the Jaffa story still raging, Aaron Aaronsohn penned cables to some of the most prominent leaders in the American Jewish community, men who continued to be cautious about wholeheartedly embracing the Zionist cause and who in some cases still imagined the future of Jewish settlement in Palestine as best served by Ottoman rule. To lend further authority to Aaronsohn's message-among its recipients was a sitting Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, as well as a future one, Felix Frankfurter-Mark Sykes arranged for the cables to be routed through the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton for delivery. Typical was the cable received by Judge Mayer Sulzberger in Philadelphia: ”Turkish atrocities on Jewish populations in Palestine reported on reliable information,” Aaronsohn wrote. ”It is high time to abandon our previous forgiving att.i.tude towards Turks.... Now that Turks have committed those crimes, Jewish att.i.tude and American public opinion must undergo complete change. Only efficient way to quick release of Jewish populations from Turkish clutches is to attack latter thoroughly in the field and everywhere.... We must present a united front, and concentrate Jewish influence on wresting Palestine from Turkish hands.”

In that same month of June, a rather different version of the Jaffa story began to emerge. In response to Entente appeals, Spain, Sweden, and the Vatican, all neutral ent.i.ties in the conflict, sent envoys to investigate what had happened there. Both the Spanish and Vatican envoys quickly concluded that the reports of Jewish ma.s.sacres and persecutions were without foundation, while their Swedish counterpart went even further. ”In many ways,” he wrote, ”the Jewish community of Jaffa had fared far better-and certainly no worse-than the resident Moslem population in the evacuation.” Shortly afterward, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem also reported that the accounts of violence against the Jaffa Jews were ”grossly exaggerated.” Even Aaron Aaronsohn was ultimately forced to concede that the two Jewish men allegedly ”lynched” in Jaffa had actually been arrested on charges of looting, and evidently not hung after all.

It didn't matter, of course. In war, truth is whatever people can be led to believe, and Djemal Pasha had just handed his enemies a ”truth” that would change Middle Eastern history. The fiction of what happened in Jaffa in 1917-a fiction repeated as fact by most historians writing on the period since-would now become the ur-myth for the contention that the Jewish community in Palestine could never be safe under Muslim rule, that to survive it needed a state of its own.

ON APRIL 21, a British navy patrol boat put in to Wejh harbor with a cargo of intense interest to Captain T. E. Lawrence: eleven Turkish prisoners of war. Until the previous morning, the men had been part of the Turkish garrison defending Aqaba.

Acting on rumors that a German minelaying operation was under way in the vicinity of Aqaba, three British patrol boats had closed on the port just before dawn on April 20 and put ash.o.r.e a landing party, catching the tiny garrison off guard. The brief ensuing gun battle left two Turkish soldiers dead, eleven captured, and the rest-some fifty or sixty by best estimate-taken to the hills. Since six of the prisoners were Syrian draftees and expressed a desire to join with the rebel forces of Faisal ibn Hussein, one of the British patrol boats had brought them down to Wejh for questioning.

Over the course of that day, Lawrence interrogated each of the Syrians in turn. From them he learned that while the Aqaba garrison fluctuated in size, it rarely consisted of more than one hundred soldiers. Of even greater import considering the scheme he was hatching, the total number of Turkish soldiers billeted in the blockhouses along the sixty-mile Wadi Itm trail between Aqaba and Maan was at most just two hundred more. It meant that Lawrence's plan just might work; if he could raise an Arab force at the eastern terminus of that trail and launch a lightning advance over the mountains, he could sweep the isolated Turkish garrisons before him and fall on Aqaba practically unopposed.

But just because Lawrence saw the opportunity before him, it didn't necessarily follow that anyone else in the British military would. Still in effect was Gilbert Clayton's March 8 directive that the Arabs not move on Aqaba. Instead, all attention was to remain focused on attacking the Hejaz Railway to block the Turkish garrison's withdrawal from Medina (it would still be some weeks before the British realized the Turks had no intention of leaving Medina), an imperative that allowed for no side adventures.

Of course, the best way to avoid having one's ideas shot down is to never explicitly voice them. Rather than take his proposal up with Clayton directly, Lawrence chose to engage the two other British officers then based in Wejh in a generalized discourse about the insights into guerrilla warfare he had gained during his convalescence in Wadi Ais. In particular, he would later claim, he expounded on the foolishness of trying to take Medina from the Turks, and the unfeasibility of trying to organize the Arabs into a blocking force on the Hejaz Railway. Instead, he suggested, they needed to spread the Turks thin by expanding the war front as much as possible. Among other things, that meant going north with ”a highly mobile, highly equipped striking force of the smallest size, and use it successively at distributed points of the Turkish line.”

To Lawrence's listeners in Wejh, both career military men, it may have all sounded intriguing, but also like little more than a distraction to the mission at hand. This was a reaction that Lawrence was rather counting on. ”Everyone was too busy with his own work to give me specific authority to launch out on mine,” he would recount. ”All I gained was a hearing, and a qualified admission that my counter-offensive [idea] might be a useful diversion.”

It's hard to imagine how his fellow officers might have lent Lawrence ”specific authority” for his scheme, since it's clear from their own field reports that he never indicated that this diversionary force might make for Aqaba. Lawrence adopted an even more oblique manner in his approach to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah, informing his superior that Auda Abu Tayi would soon be taking a raiding party toward Maan, and that Lawrence was considering accompanying the party to ensure their actions complemented Britain's current military objectives. Wilson concurred, reporting to Clayton on May 1 that ”Auda is to travel north, probably accompanied by Lawrence, with their first aim to disrupt the railway around Maan.” Omitted was any mention of what their second aim might be.

In Seven Pillars, a book rife with self-justifications, Lawrence would offer a truly breathtaking one to explain his decision to strike out on his own: ”The element I would withdraw from the railway scheme was only my single self and, in the circ.u.mstances, this amount was negligible, since I felt so strongly against it that my help there would have been half-hearted. So I decided to go my own way, with or without orders.”

In other words, as Lawrence no longer saw the point in trying to shut down the railway, it was really best for all concerned that he go find something else to do. Small wonder why so many of his military superiors found the Oxford scholar infuriating.

Underlying this, though, was an even grander psychological rationalization for the action Lawrence was contemplating. In his mind, upholding the promises made to the Arabs truly would serve Great Britain's long-term interests, not just as a point of honor but as a way to minimize the influence of other European powers-allies today, perhaps, but surely compet.i.tors again tomorrow-throughout the region. A vital first step in this campaign was to allow the Arabs to take their revolution into Syria, and thus steal that land away from France. The core problem, in Lawrence's estimation, was that Great Britain had yet to grasp what was best for her, and he simply didn't have time to explain.

BEFORE SETTING OUT for Aqaba, Lawrence was to have one more fateful meeting in Wejh. It came on the morning of May 7, when a British destroyer briefly put into the harbor. On board was Mark Sykes.

The two had first met during Sykes's fact-finding mission to Egypt in 1915, and despite their vast differences in personality-Sykes gregarious and charming, Lawrence taciturn and painfully shy-had reportedly gotten along quite well. That didn't last long. As with most everyone else in the Cairo military intelligence office, Lawrence's opinion of the diplomat had rapidly soured once details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement became known to them in the spring of 1916. Certainly, Sykes's continuing fondness for firing off fatuous memos proposing neat solutions to the region's problems-proposals often in direct opposition to those he had advocated weeks or even days earlier-had done nothing to rehabilitate his image in Lawrence's eyes in the year since. In his view, Sykes fairly epitomized that vexing feature of Edwardian England, the aristocratic gadfly, a man who could gain a hearing for his reckless ideas by virtue of his pedigree and the breezy confidence with which he voiced them.

In their meeting on May 7, however, Lawrence was to discover something else about the man; for want of a more decorous term, Mark Sykes was also a liar.

Indeed, that the two were meeting in Wejh at all that day was a by-product of Sykes having been caught out in his latest round of trickery. The diplomat was just returning from an audience with King Hussein, an encounter Sykes had wished to avoid but which had been forced on him by the resident agent in Jeddah, Colonel Cyril Wilson.

For all his stiff-necked priggishness, the swagger-stick-toting Wilson had gradually emerged as the voice of conscience for British policy in the Middle East. In the long debate of late 1916 over whether a British brigade should be deployed in the Hejaz, Wilson had initially been among its fiercest advocates, and had been tasked by his superior, Reginald Wingate, to compel King Hussein to that view. Over the course of numerous meetings with Hussein, however, it had gradually occurred to the resident agent that perhaps the old man in Mecca knew his subjects and the politics of western Arabia better than the Allied advisors newly arrived to the scene. Ultimately, when Wingate had once again ordered his underling to lean on Hussein over the matter, Wilson, heretofore regarded as something of a Wingate yes-man, had essentially refused to do so and been instrumental in seeing the proposal finally shelved.

Wilson had had a far more visceral reaction upon learning of Sykes's scheme to avoid Hussein in favor of his sham negotiations with the Syrian ”delegates” in Cairo. In late March he had sent a long and anguished letter to Clayton enumerating both the problems inevitably to come from this act of deception and the benefits to be derived by being honest with Hussein. ”We now have a chance, which is not likely to occur again, of winning the grat.i.tude of millions of Moslems of the [British] Empire,” he wrote. ”For Heaven's sake, let us be straight with the old man; I am convinced it will pay us in the end.”

While that appeal had been in vain, it seemed the good colonel in Jeddah was quite capable of backroom maneuvers of his own. At his next meeting with Hussein, he urged the king to formally request a meeting with Mark Sykes. When Wilson forwarded that request to Reginald Wingate, another man who, despite his interventionist impulses, held to the British tradition of fair play, it quickly became an invitation Sykes couldn't refuse. On April 30, with his and Picot's conferences with the Syrian ”delegates” in Cairo concluded, Sykes had boarded the British destroyer in Port Suez and set off for Jeddah.

Even for a supremely self-confident man, it must have been a stressful voyage. It was one thing to bamboozle a few preselected functionaries in Cairo with no knowledge of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence; it would surely be quite another to fool one of its actual authors. But then, Sykes had other cards to play. Chief among them was his ability to control the flow of information. Just as he had arranged to have a first meeting with the Syrians in Cairo without Picot present, so now he would be meeting alone with Hussein. As a result, should any future dispute arise over what had or had not been discussed, it would be the word of a highly respected British envoy against that of a mercurial desert chieftain long known for forgetfulness and willful misinterpretation.

It might have all worked out just fine-at least for the time being, which was all Mark Sykes could reasonably hope for-if he hadn't decided to stop off in Wejh en route to confer with Faisal. By chance, Lawrence was away on a brief reconnaissance trip when Sykes called on May 2, but he got a full report from Faisal on what had transpired upon his return to Wejh two days later. By then, Sykes was already on his way to Jeddah and his meeting with King Hussein.

Judging by the report he sent to Reginald Wingate on the evening of May 5, Sykes's foray into shuttle diplomacy could scarcely have gone better: ”On 2nd May, I saw Sherif Faisal at Wejh and explained to him the principle of the Anglo-French agreement in regard to an Arab confederation; after much argument he accepted the principle and seemed satisfied.” That success had presaged one even more remarkable, for that very afternoon Sykes had met with King Hussein. ”In accordance with my instructions, I explained the principle of the [Anglo-French] agreement as regards an Arab confederation or State.... I impressed upon the King the importance of Franco-Arab friends.h.i.+p and I at least got him to admit that it was essential to Arab development in Syria, but this after a very lengthy argument.”

A close reader of that May 5 report might have been disquieted by the peculiar symmetry of these two meetings-forthrightness by Sykes in outlining French-British designs in the region, followed by Arab argument, followed ultimately by Arab acceptance-while the truly cynical might have concluded that, with his emphasis on the quarreling involved, Sykes was already laying in his defense should there be future disagreement with Faisal and Hussein over what had been said or agreed to. In the interim, though, the trip was a triumph of diplomacy, a crucial first step toward resolving the nettlesome issues that stood between Britain and France and their Arab allies.

”Please tell Monsieur Picot,” Sykes ended his May 5 cable to Wingate, ”that I am satisfied with my interview with Faisal and the King, as they both now stand at the same point as was reached at our last joint meeting with the 3 Syrian delegates in Cairo.”

What Mark Sykes didn't know, of course, was that in Faisal ibn Hussein he had been speaking with a man quite aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement-courtesy of T. E. Lawrence-and in no way did Sykes's vague and generalized discussion of that pact on May 2 match up with what the Arab leader already knew. Nevertheless, whether hewing to the Arab negotiating tradition of not tipping one's hand until absolutely necessary, or worried that Lawrence would be exposed as his source, Faisal had not confronted the diplomat over his obfuscations at the time.

Not that he was in any better position to do so when Sykes stopped back by on May 7. Faisal's knowledge of the true framework of Sykes-Picot, as opposed to the b.a.s.t.a.r.dized version Sykes had chosen to tell him, was the great and dangerous secret that he and Lawrence shared, and to reveal it now could only invite disaster: for Faisal, estrangement and perhaps abandonment by his British benefactors; for Lawrence, immediate transfer and probable court-martial.

On the other hand, Lawrence did have sanctioned knowledge of Sykes-Picot, which meant he on his own could confront Sykes over the sanitized version told to Faisal-and, presumably, to Hussein. All indications are that Lawrence provoked just such a confrontation. Neither man was to make record of their meeting in Wejh, but it appears to have been a highly contentious one. From that day on, Lawrence's att.i.tude toward Sykes would be hostile. For his part, Sykes would miss few chances to try to denigrate or marginalize Lawrence in any way he could.

On a more personal level, it seems that encounter with Sykes in Wejh came to simultaneously haunt Lawrence and to provide a certain kind of relief. He stood vindicated in not trusting in the honor of his government, and in imparting to Faisal its secret plan to betray the Arab cause. To whatever degree his conscience had been bothered by that decision, in the slippery schemes of Mark Sykes it was now cleansed.

At the same time, he appreciated that in his countryman was a particularly formidable rival. By comparison, edouard Bremond was easy, his various schemes made predictable by his singular pursuit of French hegemony. Mark Sykes, by contrast, was a man ruled by whim, who didn't feel bound by-perhaps at times didn't even remember-the myriad promises that tripped so easily from his lips. He was able to stay ahead of it all by a talent for deceit, but since he was in a position of power, pulling the levers from Jeddah to London and all points in between, at the end of the day there would probably be no final appeal to British ideals of honor or justice, all would be sacrificed to convenience. The only recourse for the Arabs, then, was to try to change the facts on the ground, to strike a blow that might upend the plans of the dealmakers.

It was with such thoughts that, two days later, Lawrence set out on the long and dangerous trek toward Aqaba. For what would soon become one of the most audacious and celebrated military exploits of World War I, his accompanying ”army” consisted of fewer than forty-five Arab warriors.

Chapter 13.

Aqaba Never doubt Great Britain's word. She is wise and trustworthy; have no fear.