Jerusalem. The Biography

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, backingthe 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 hisreports, 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