Lawrence in Arabia – review | Books | The Guardian
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Lawrence in Arabia – review
A natural leader with glorious irreverence and a tortured sexuality.
But Scott Anderson's book also explores how TE Lawrence
contributed to the making of the modern Middle East
Christopher de Bellaigue
The Guardian, Friday 14 March 2014 08.30 GMT
Stature and pathos … Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Over the next four years of commemoration, as our opinions of the first world war alter
subtly under the influence of new facts, one reputation seems unassailable. The nimble
and humane approach that TE Lawrence took to war in the Middle East is a cherished
contrast to the dunderheaded monomania that we have come to associate with the
generals of the western front. Lawrence embodies the committed "easterner", not only
because he viewed the Ottoman empire's Arab provinces as a vital theatre of war, or
even because he identified so strongly with their
Lawrence in Arabia:
War, Deceit,
Imperial Folly and
the Making of the
Modern Middle East
inhabitants, but because he calls to mind something other than
Flanders mud – the light and dust of the Levant.
His reputation in the territories where he did his work is more
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Lawrence in Arabia – review | Books | The Guardian
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18/05/2014 20:59
complicated. Even now he is loathed by Turkish patriots because
in 1916 he instigated a revolt that cost them their Arab
possessions and boxed them into Asia Minor. Many modern
Arabs regard Lawrence as well-intentioned but thwarted, and
perhaps even complicit in his own thwarting, for while he was the
representative of an empire that had promised them
independence, all they actually got was a stunted, truncated and
imperially supervised condominium with a Jewish homeland –
Israel in embryo – sticking out of its belly.
The ironic subtitle of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's
account of his role in the Arab revolt, is "A Triumph". Its
climactic passages of abasement and lost honour show that in
Lawrence's estimation even the Arabs' victorious entry into
Damascus, in September 1917, was spoiled by the impending
British betrayal. He hated his part in the deception.
Lawrence "of Arabia" has been done almost to death by biographers, military historians
and filmmakers. They have been drawn to his genius as a leader and the ill-fitting
components of that genius – his misgivings as an imperialist, his tortured sexuality, and
that compound of arrogance and self-effacement ("backing into the limelight", as
someone put it, allegedly Churchill) that has kept his soul satisfyingly open to
interpretation.
In his new book, Scott Anderson expands and contextualises the familiar Lawrence
story – as his title, Lawrence in Arabia, suggests. Rather than depict a hero in isolation,
he puts Lawrence alongside three spooks who rubbed shoulders with him in the Middle
East: Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish colonist in Palestine, who spied for Britain as a way of
furthering Zionism; Carl Prufer, a German diplomat who dreamed of fomenting jihad
against the British; and William Yale, a well-connected oil man (his great-great-uncle
founded Yale University) who became, in August 1917, the state department's "special
agent" for the Middle East.
Anderson's supporting characters are colourful, even if none approaches Lawrence in
stature and pathos. Prufer was a brilliant linguist and an energetic lothario – his many
girlfriends included Minna "Fanny" Weizmann, whose brother Chaim was Europe's
most prominent Zionist and went on to become Israel's first president. His vision of the
Middle East was, however, narrowed by the usual ethnic blinkers (cowardly Arabs,
docile Jews), and he ended the war scheming irrelevantly.
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Yale at least finished up on the winning side, but America had yet to become involved in
the Middle East, and he contributed little. Mercenary, priggish and inept, even he was
shocked when the US government called him to the 1919 peace conference at Versailles
"as an expert on Arabian affairs".
By far the most intriguing – and significant – of Anderson's trio is Aaronsohn. "A
towering man given to portliness … brilliant and arrogant, passionate and combative",
in 1915 this celebrated agronomist was trusted enough by the Ottomans to be placed in
charge of a campaign to suppress a plague of locusts. But 1915 was also the year of the
Armenian genocide; Aaronsohn feared that the Jewish colonists of Palestine would be
next. By 1917 he had overcome British suspicions to establish a spy ring, including his
sister, Sarah, that passed on information about the Turks in Palestine. In October of that
year, Sarah was captured by the Ottomans, whom she defied, first by withstanding
brutal treatment, then by killing herself. Her brother was in London conferring with
Chaim Weizmann at the time. No longer were the Aaronsohns interested solely in selfdefence; the new goal, as articulated by Weizmann, was a Jewish Palestine "under
British protection".
Anderson is a bleak but fair-minded historian, alive to the cynicism and prejudice that
decided actions on all sides. He shows, for example, how the British war effort was
hampered by an ill-advised contempt for Ottoman abilities – evidenced during the
disastrous Gallipoli campaign when the allies landed on the very shoreline where the
Turks were strongest.
Aaronsohn and his fellow agents felt a similar revulsion for their Arab neighbours in
Palestine. The agents' dishonest depiction of the Turks' evacuation of the port city of
Jaffa in 1917 as a vicious anti-Jewish pogrom was "one of the most consequential
disinformation campaigns" of the war, for it was accepted unquestioningly in the west
and hardened the opinion of world Jewry in favour of Zionism.
Crucial to the Zionist effort was broadening its appeal to western policymakers,
prominent among whom was a breed of well-heeled British romantics who floated
around the Middle East offering solutions of breathtaking (and often contradictory)
simplicity to problems that even now are considered intractable. The Yorkshire
landowner Sir Mark Sykes was the nonpareil of these meddlesome amateurs; in 1916 he
carved up the Middle East in a secret deal with France, only to propose an alliance of
Jews, Arabs and Armenians that would freeze the French out. Sykes's Christian faith
was cheered by the idea of a Jewish return to the Holy Land; he adopted Zionism and
became an ally of Aaronsohn. It was Sykes who announced the British cabinet's decision
to endorse a "Jewish national home" with the immortal words – to its future first
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18/05/2014 20:59
president – "Dr Weizmann, it's a boy!"
Not far away, ducking behind Turkish lines to blow up railway tracks and stiffen Arab
morale, TE Lawrence did not hide his dismay at the moral and political "hole" Sykes was
digging for him. Lawrence loved the fractious, headstrong and thoroughly
unhousetrained Arab tribes, and was proud of having championed their commander in
the field, Emir Faisal, a scion of the Hashemites, the hereditary custodians of Mecca.
Whatever the exploits of Faisal and his men in trouncing the Turks, however, after the
war they would be unable to resist the Anglo-French desire for overall control of the
region – as well as the political acumen of the Zionists, as the Jewish state edged closer
to realisation.
Lawrence was among the first to predict that it would not all be plain sailing for the
Jews in their new home, telling Yale in 1917 that "if a Jewish state is to be created in
Palestine, it will have to be done by force of arms amid an overwhelmingly hostile
population". As for Faisal, he was kicked out of Syria by the French in 1920 and the Iraqi
monarchy he later founded under British auspices lasted until 1958, when it was
overthrown in a republican revolution. Nowadays, Hashemite power survives only in the
tiny state of Jordan. For all his heartfelt Arabism, Lawrence himself was a failed
kingmaker.
So why does his finely grained character continue to impress on our vision of the Middle
East – and on Anderson's intelligent and original, if somewhat unevenly written, group
portrait? One reason is his glorious irreverence, disappearing into the desert to avoid
unwelcome orders, exulting in his ignorance of the protocols of the commissariat. Also,
he was right in many things, recognising before the Gallipoli debacle what subsequent
military historians have tended to confirm: that the port of Alexandretta, on Turkey's
exposed underside, would have been a preferable launch pad for an assault. Needless to
say, his recommendations to that effect were not acted on.
And yet for all Lawrence's outsider status and unconventional views, Britain's military
machine in the Middle East contained enough sound men for him to thrive – and to
emerge from the war one of the most admired men in Britain. In his well-constructed
demolition of Britain's "amateurs", Anderson neglects the paradox that Lawrence, an
archaeologist who never received a day's military training, a scholar and an aesthete
amid the blood and guts, was the greatest amateur of them all.
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