BOOK REVIEW: THE BIRTH OF MIDDLE EAST STRIFE VIEWED THROUGH THE CONFLICT OF TWO MEN
By Michael Kenney
Boston Globe, MA
July 31 2007
Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds
of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, By Ronald Florence, Viking, 512 pp.,
illustrated,, $27.95
T.E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, and Aaron Aaronsohn,
a Palestinian Jewish agronomist, met only a few times, meetings
that were invariably brief and hostile — "devoid of amenity," wrote
Aaronsohn in his diary after one of those meetings.
But out of those encounters during the final years of World War I,
Ronald Florence, an independent historian who lives in Providence,
has created a revealing narrative about the territorial conflicts in
the Middle East.
Of the first meeting, in February 1917 in a hallway of the Savoy
Hotel in Cairo that was serving as the British Army’s Middle East
headquarters, Florence writes "[that] by then their separate plans to
reshape the Middle East were already in motion. And the two ambitious
and strong-willed men would discover that the fortunes they had
planned for Palestine were on a collision course."
With those few meetings to go on, Florence’s narrative in "Lawrence
and Aaronsohn" becomes one of alternating accounts. And with Lawrence
such familiar territory — if only from the Peter O’Toole portrayal —
the reader will be tempted to skim through those chapters. But with
Aaronsohn there is the freshness of discovery.
In 1917, Aaronsohn was 41 — two years older than Lawrence — and
already a person of some international distinction. Growing up in
Palestine, he had become an expert on the region’s ecology, with his
discovery of a potentially valuable strain of wheat bringing him to
the attention of American Jewish leaders.
And from years spent exploring the region, usually on horseback, he
had information of great value to British intelligence services —
the likely sources of underground water, deduced from the ruins of
ancient cities, and the disposition of Turkish forces.
While frequently rebuffed by the British, Aaronsohn, with knowledge
of the treatment of Armenians by the Turks, believed that a British
victory was vital for the future of Jews in Palestine.
As a spy, Aaronsohn had an equal in his younger sister, Sarah. She
was, writes Florence, "a beautiful and sensuous woman" who was also
"a fearless and adventurous horsewoman." Forced into a joyless
and loveless marriage with a Constantinople merchant, at the first
opportunity she returned to Palestine.
With her brother on military missions in Cairo and London, she soon
took over the espionage operations of NILI — the Hebrew initials for
"The glory of Israel does not deceive" — an underground group made
up of recruits from her brother’s agricultural research station.
Later, when Turkish forces threatened the espionage operation, she
was in Palestine, and refused to join her brother in Cairo. "I want
to be with the others in the place of danger at the time of danger."
Within weeks, she and other NILI agents had been arrested. Sarah
was beaten, then brutally tortured. Eluding her guards with a ruse,
she killed herself with a gun that she had hidden.
"Nili," writes Florence, became a popular name for girls in Israel.
Her brother also died tragically. Like Lawrence, he was in Paris
during the Peace Conference in 1919. Seeking material to buttress
his proposals for a Jewish Palestine, he went briefly to London.
Returning to Paris on a foggy morning in May 1919, he died when the
mail plane in which he was the sole passenger crashed in the English
Channel.
Both he and Lawrence had prepared maps outlining their rival
territorial proposals for Palestine (both are printed in this book).
Lawrence’s proposed borders created a narrow coastal Palestine, wedged
in front of expansive Arab desert kingdoms. But, writes Florence,
its straight-line borders, "[ignored the] terrain, resources,
cultivation patterns, economic development issues, and history,"
which defined Aaronsohn’s Palestine.
As it turned out, neither Lawrence’s "righteous passion" nor
Aaronsohn’s "precise science" prevailed, and the region was carved up
between the British and the French. Their legacies, Florence suggests,
are more political than territorial. For Lawrence it was "legitimation
of Arab nationalism"; and for Aaronsohn, a demonstration that "the land
. . . could support the increased population" of modern-day Israel.