Soon after arriving in the Holy City, he called in a delegation of Arabs suspected of nationalist beliefs. He studiously ignored them as they grew paler and paler. Finally he asked, ‘Do you appreciate the gravity of your crimes?’ He cut off their answer: ‘SILENCE! Do you know the punishment? Execution! Execution!’ He waited as they quaked, then added quietly: ‘But I shall content myself with exiling you and your families to Anatolia.’ When the terrified Arabs had trooped out, Jemal turned laughing to this adjutant: ‘What can one do? That’s how we get things done here.’ When he needed new roads built, he told the engineer, ‘If the road isn’t finished in time, I shall have you executed at the point when the last stones have been laid!’ He would sigh rather proudly: ‘Everywhere there are people groaning because of me.’
As Jemal mustered his forces, commanded mainly by German officers, for his offensive against British Egypt, he found that Syria was seething with intrigue, and Jerusalem, ‘a nest of spies’. The pasha’s policy was simple: ‘For Palestine, deportation; for Syria, terrorization; for the Hejaz, the army.’ In Jerusalem his approach was to line up ‘patriarchs, princes and sheikhs in rows, and to hang Notables and deputies’. As his secret police tracked down traitors, he deported anyone suspected of nationalist agitation. He commandeered Christian sites such as St Anne’s Church and started to expel the Christian hierarchs while he prepared to attack Egypt.
The pasha paraded his 20,000 men through Jerusalem on the way to the front. ‘We’ll meet on the other side of the [Suez] Canal or in Heaven!’ he boasted, but Count Ballobar noticed an Ottoman soldier pushing his water rations in a stolen pram, surely not the mark of a daunting military machine. Jemal, on the other hand, travelled with ‘magnificent tents, hat stands, commodes’. On 1 February 1915, Jemal, moved by hearing his men singing ‘The Red Flag Flies over Cairo’, attacked the Canal with 12,000 troops; they were easily repelled. He claimed that the attack had only been a reconnaissance in force, but he failed again in the summer. Military defeat, Western blockade and Jemal’s growing repression brought desperate suffering and wild hedonism to Jerusalem. It was not long before the killing started.8
TERROR AND DEATH: JEMAL THE SLAUGHTERMAN
Within a month of Jemal’s arrival, Wasif Jawhariyyeh saw the body of an Arab in a white cloak hanging from a tree outside the Jaffa Gate. On 30 March 1915, the pasha executed two Arab soldiers at the Damascus Gate as ‘British spies’, and then executed the Mufti of Gaza and his son, whose hanging at the Jaffa Gate was watched by a full crowd in respectful silence. Hangings were staged at the Damascus and Jaffa Gates after Friday prayers to ensure the largest audience. Soon the gates seemed to be permanently festooned with swaying cadavers, deliberately left for days on Jemal’s orders. On one occasion, Wasif was horrified by the sadistic incompetence:
The hanging process was not studied scientifically or medically enough so that the victim stayed alive, suffering a lot and we watched but couldn’t say or do anything. An officer ordered a soldier to climb up and hang on the victim but this extra weight made the victim’s eyes bulge out of his face. This was the cruelty of Jemal Pasha. My heart cries out from the memory of this sight.
In August 1915, after uncovering evidence of Arab nationalist plots, ‘I decided’, wrote Jemal, ‘to take ruthless action against the traitors.’ He hanged fifteen prominent Arabs near Beirut (including a Nashashibi from Jerusalem), and then, in May 1916, another twenty-one in Damascus and Beirut, winning the soubriquet the Slaughterman. He joked to the Spaniard Ballobar that he could hang him too.
Jemal also suspected the Zionists of treason. Yet Ben-Gurion, sporting a tarboush, was recruiting Jewish soldiers for the Ottomans. Jemal had not quite given up on charm: in December 1915 he sponsored two unique meetings between the Husseinis and Zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion, to rally support for a joint homeland under the Ottomans. But afterwards, Jemal deported 500 foreign Jews, arrested Zionist leaders and banned their symbols. The deportations provoked uproar in the German and Austrian newspapers, whereupon Jemal called in the Zionists to warn against any sabotage: ‘You can choose. I am prepared to deport you as was done with the Armenians. Anyone who lays a finger on a single orange, I shall execute. But if you want the second option, the entire Vienna and Berlin press must be silent!’ Later, he ranted: ‘I’ve no trust in your loyalty. Had you no conspiratorial designs you wouldn’t have come to live here in this desolate land among Arabs who hate you. We deem Zionists deserving of hanging but I’m tired of hangings. [Instead] we’ll disperse you around the Turkish state.’*
Ben-Gurion was deported, switching his hopes to the Allies. Arabs were conscripted into the army; Jews and Christians were forced into labour battalions to build roads, many of them perishing from hunger and exposure. Then came disease, insects and starvation. ‘The locusts were thick as clouds,’ remembered Wasif, mocking Jemal’s attempts to solve the plague ‘by ordering every person over 12 to bring 3 kilos of locust eggs’, since this simply led to an absurd trade in locust eggs.
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 [Ottom
an] 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.* 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
45
ARAB REVOLT, BALFOUR DECLARATION
1916–17
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 Britain’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 Hashemite* 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 perfe
cted 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.’