Jerusalem. The Biography

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 counterattacked 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 theyclaimed 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. * ‘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 thisgaunt 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