Gilbert, who plans to back up his myth-challenging claim in his next book, declared last week that TE Lawrence, long regarded as the unrivalled prototype of the British Arabist, "had a sort of contempt for the Arabs, actually. He felt that only with a Jewish state would the Arabs make anything of themselves".

The British-Jewish historian made front-page news here when he told the Jerusalem Post: "The most interesting thing from an Israeli perspective is about Lawrence of Arabia. The great Arabist, right? The man who supported the Arabs and pushed for Arab nationhood in the 1920s. He is always pictured wearing Arab robes.

What is so astonishing . . .

which you'll see in my next book, Churchill and the Jews . . .is that he was a serious Zionist."

Gilbert has said nothing about the archival evidence he hinted at having uncovered in his research and has eluded efforts to question him about it since then, no doubt preferring to leave whatever scoops he has for nearer the time of publication.

But while the claim, if vindicated, would overturn many popular assumptions about Lawrence, it has come as much less of a surprise to prominent historians here.

Norman Rose of the Hebrew University, a leading expert on the history of Zionism in Britain, leaves little room for doubt about Lawrence's admiration for Chaim Weizmann in his biography of the Belarus-born Zionist who was the first president of Israel.

The biography quotes Lawrence as telling the Archbishop of Jerusalem, a sceptic about Weizmann, that the Zionist leader "is a great man whose boots neither you nor I are fit to black".

Rose said last week: "I haven't read Martin's interview and I am not going to comment on it. I am not an expert on TE Lawrence, but this was a time when many people did not see a contradiction between a Jewish National Home and Arab independence."