In short, the title deed to a joint Arab-Jewish Palestine was conditional on the Arabs’ getting an independent Arab state in Syria with Damascus as its capital, and including Lebanon and its ports, without which any such state would have been strangled at birth. Indeed Feisal had already remarked that Syria without Lebanon would be “of no use to him.” It was already clear to both Feisal and Lawrence that this was not likely to happen; so, as idealistic as the agreement with Weizmann may seem, it can also be read as a bold attempt to win Jewish support (and particularly AmericanJewish support) for Feisal’s claim to Syria, as well as Jewish financing for the Arab state. Lawrence was, at the time, steeped in realpolitik. He would later write to his comrade in arms Alan Dawnay that Feisal didn’t need financing from France: “ ‘He’ll say that he doesn’t want their money, because by then the Zionists will have a centre in Jerusalem, and for their concessions they will finance him (this is all in writing, and fixed, but don’t put it in the press for God’s sake).’ … Lawrence went on to say that the Zionists are not a Government, and not British, and their action does not infringe the Sykes-Picot Agreement…. ‘They will finance the whole East, I hope, Syria and Mesopotamia alike. High Jews are unwilling to put much cash into Palestine only, since that country offers nothing but a sentimental return. They want 6%.’ ”

Thus the price for unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine was to be Jewish financial assistance, and Jewish support for Feisal’s claim to Syria. Like Balfour, Lloyd George, and many other people in Britain, Lawrence hugely overestimated the influence and wealth of the Jews, in

America and elsewhere. Within less than fourteen years, most of Europe and America would turn a blind eye to the fate of the Jews. Even Weizmann, of all people, understood the Jews’ lack of power. The importance of Zionism was not symbolic; the pressure that made Jews in Poland, Russia, and eastern Europe consider seriously the prospect of resettling in a strange, distant, and hostile land and climate was a product of poverty, intense discrimination, and fear. Rich philanthropists like Lord Rothschild might make the Zionist settlements in Palestine possible, but those who undertook the long journey there were for the most part poor and desperate.

In the end, neither the Arabs nor the Zionists would have much effect on the Paris Peace Conference. In the long memorandum to Balfour, which Lawrence had drafted, Feisal ended by begging “the Great Powers … to lay aside the thought of individual profits, and their old jealousies” and to think of the Arabs “as one potential people, jealous of their language and liberty, [who] ask that no step be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.” The “Great Powers,” of course, did nothing of the sort, and instead shared the Arab lands between themselves, with frontiers rough-hewn by European bureaucrats and statesmen. The effect was, more or less, to guarantee that there would never be “one sovereign power” in the Middle East.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the largest, most ambitious, and most comprehensive attempt to remake the world in the history of mankind. It began on January 18, 1919, and continued for more than a year, during which Paris was filled with the huge staffs of more than thirty national delegations, as well as thousands of people from all over the world lobbying for every imaginable cause. The Peace Conference took on itself such matters as the international regulation of air travel (then still in its infancy) and the attempt to define fishing rights in the open seas, still a subject of fierce controversy between nations today; but its two major challenges were to remake Europe in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to deal with the former possessions of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

The Peace Conference was under siege, from the very beginning, by an incredible array of issues, some of them defying any rational solution or compromise, and by demands for justice from every possible national, racial, or linguistic group. None presented themselves with more dignity or with a better-prepared case than the Arabs, led by Feisal in his robes as an emir and a sharif, and Lawrence omnipresent beside him, either in British uniform with an Arab headdress or, on more formal occasions, in white robes, with his curved gold dagger. From the outset, the French Foreign Office made difficulties. Feisal was left off the list of official delegates until the British protested on his behalf, and even then he was allowed to represent only the Hejaz. In addition, his mail was opened and his cables were intercepted and deciphered by the British, and every possible obstacle was placed in his path by the French.

The British delegates were housed in three hotels: the Majestic and the Astoria, with the overflow relegated to the Hotel Continental, a thirty-minute walk away from the other two. Lawrence was allocated a small room there, which, in the tradition of French hotels of the day that were not in the grand luxeclass, had no bath. Having to use the one bathroom on his floor of the hotel was always a trial to Lawrence, whose only self-indulgence was taking long, very hot baths. By inference, his room had no telephone, either—Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, CBE, DSO, Lawrence’s rival as a daring intelligence officer, had the room below Lawrence’s at the Continental (with a bath), and reported that when Lawrence wished to communicate with him at night, he would thump on the floor to alert Meinertzhagen, then lower a message or a sheaf of manuscript on a string to Meinertzhagen’s window. When Meinertzhagen wished to communicate with Lawrence at night, he would thump on the ceiling—not such a problem for Meinertzhagen, since he was very tall. According to Meinertzhagen, Lawrence continued to wear the badges of a full colonel on his uniform, even though that rank had been given to him only for the duration of his trip home in 1918. When

Lawrence asked if he could take a bath in Meinertzhagen’s room late one night, there were “red weals on his ribs, standing out like tattoo marks,” presumably where the Turkish bey at Deraa had plunged and twisted a bayonet between Lawrence’s ribs.

Meinertzhagen and Lawrence had what might best be described as a wary relationship, and the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s diaries, which he revised, edited, and retyped later in life, is not necessarily to be relied on, though some of his account rings true. He referred to Lawrence affectionately as “little Lawrence,” and Lawrence described him as “a silent, masterful man, who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest,” which is what a lot of people said or thought about Lawrence. Meinertzhagen claimed to be the inventor of the famous “haversack ruse”: he had ridden close to the Turkish lines in 1917, pretended to be wounded, and galloped away, dropping his haversack, which contained Ј20, faked love letters, and a falsified map and war diaries, all intended to persuade the Turks that Allenby’s attack would be aimed at Gaza. Meinertzhagen’s role at the Peace Conference was, in some ways, analogous to Lawrence’s—though not Jewish, he was the expert on, the true believer in, and the spokesman for Zionist aspirations, as Lawrence was for the Arabs (a street in Jerusalem is now named after Meinertzhagen). He was wealthy and well connected; was a cousin of Beatrice Webb (a cofounder of the London School of Economics); had attended Harrow with Winston Churchill; and had once shot and killed the leader of a Kenyan tribal uprising while shaking his hand at a meeting to negotiate a truce.

Meinertzhagen, though his own nature was overbearing—his sheer size and his reputation for killing prisoners by smashing their heads in with his knobkerrie alarmed most people—seems to have understood and liked Lawrence very much. His analysis of Lawrence’s character is at once sympathetic and penetrating: “his mind,” he wrote, “was pure as gold. Indelicacy, indecency, any form of coarseness or vulgarity repelled him physically…. He had perfect manners if consideration for others counts and he expected good manners from others…. The war shattered his sensitive nature. He was shaken off his balance by the stresses, hardships and responsibilities of his campaign. These all went to accentuate and develop any little eccentricities of his youth.”