Lawrence and Aaronsohn - T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence, Viking, 480 pages, $27.95
Aaronsohn's Maps - the Untold Story of the Man Who Might have Created Peace in the Middle East, by Patricia Goldstone, Harcourt, 352 pages, $26
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ll wars, messy things, leave mysteries in their wake. One of the smaller ones left over by World War I is the identity of "S.A.," to whom T.E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - dedicated "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," his memoir of the Hijazi Arab Revolt of 1916-1918. Lawrence, who had advised and in part directed the small camel-mounted Bedouin army on its way north from Yenbo through Aqaba to Damascus, died in a motorcycle accident in an English country lane in 1935 without ever revealing the name.
"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars ...," he wrote in the poem that accompanies the dedication. "Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near / and saw you waiting ... and took you apart: / Into his quietness."
One theory had it that the dedicatee was Sarah Aaronsohn, the operational head of the NILI spy ring that had worked for British intelligence during the war. In October 1917 she was captured and tortured by the Turks (Florence Goldstone gives a detailed, blood-curdling description), and committed suicide.
Could she have been "S.A."? The 20-year-old Lawrence, a student of Crusader architecture, passed through Atlit, where Sarah worked, and perhaps nearby Zikhron Ya'akov, the Aaronsohns' village, in 1909. He could have met the ?(reportedly beautiful?) 18-year-old then; or perhaps in 1917, when British officers sailed with the boats from Egypt that serviced the ring. But most historians discount such a meeting. Goldstone argues that Aaronsohn may still have been "S.A." Lawrence had heard the NILI story and may have wanted to pay tribute to the martyred spy, with whom he identified (he later claimed also to have undergone torture and rape at Turkish hands, in Deraa, at about the same time).
What is certain is that the paths of Lawrence and Aaron Aaronsohn, Sarah's brother and the organizer of NILI (the name is a Hebrew acronym of the words meaning "the eternity of Israel does not lie," a quote from I Samuel 15), crossed repeatedly, in Cairo, London and Paris, during 1916-1919. No love seems to have been lost.
Aaronsohn referred to the petit, idiosyncratic Briton as "a little snot" and "anti-Semitic." What Lawrence thought of him is unclear.
The two men represented two of the national movements that thrust into the international limelight in the wake of World War I. They could not have been more different. Aaronsohn was tall and broad, Prussian-looking, down to earth and systematic; Lawrence, scrawny and short, flighty and depressive. Aaronsohn, the son of Orthodox Romanian Zionists, grew up in Zikhron Ya'akov in Ottoman Palestine. Lawrence was the illegitimate son of Anglo-Irish gentry - Sir Thomas Chapman and a governess, Sara Maden - and grew up in the Welsh countryside and Oxford.
But the two had curiously parallel lives. Both began their careers as researchers - Aaronsohn, of Palestine botany, geology, hydrology; Lawrence, of Crusader castles and archaeology; within years, they drifted, or were sucked, into Allied espionage; and both - Lawrence far more than Aaronsohn - managed to ascend from ground-level operational activity into the international political arena, as advocates of national movements when the victors set about re-arranging the post-war Middle East. Lastly, both, in short order, dropped off the world stage, Aaronsohn dying in a plane crash in May 1919 and Lawrence, after a brief interlude in the Colonial Office, slinking off into grey anonymity in the military, eventually dying in a senseless accident.
Ronald Florence's book is a straightforward political biography of the two men, with interspersed chapters focusing on each protagonist. The focus of Goldstone's book is really Aaronsohn, but Lawrence weaves in and out of the story with great frequency (he enjoys twice as many index entries as Sarah).
Joining the two men is both natural and artificial. Natural in that Lawrence and Aaronsohn were in the Middle East arena at the same time, sometimes in the same Cairo hotel, coffee shop and office, and both attended the Paris peace conference afterward, trying to influence its denouement.
But a certain artificiality hangs over the enterprise. Lawrence's is the tale of an intensely interesting man who, through force of will and in bloody and intrigue-laden circumstances, actually helped shape the geopolitical contours of the modern Middle East. It's a world-class story. The story of Aaronsohn, who did not have Lawrence's self-promoting talents or enjoy the later services of popularizing biographers, is about a rather dour, quarrelsome man, the embattled Jewish community in Palestine, and their interaction with the American and British Zionists and governments. These are complementary but very different tales. One suspects that both Florence ?(a historian and novelist who earlier published a book on the Damascus blood libel affair), and Goldstone (an American journalist and playwright) set out to write about Aaronsohn and were told by their publishers that, without Lawrence, their books wouldn't fly. But, still, there is a point to the counterpoint.
Aaronsohn decides to act
Zionist settlers had begun to make the Land of Israel/Palestine bloom and hoped to turn it into a Jewish state. But they were few and poor, and were surrounded by an inimical Arab population. And Palestine was ruled by the unfriendly Ottoman Empire. Then war broke out, and there were repression and chaos and Ottoman depredations that threatened to uproot the Zionist enterprise.
Aaron Aaronsohn, a first-class agronomist, who discovered a new, formidable strain of wheat and helped curb locust attacks, decided to act. He wanted a British victory and Jewish statehood, chaperoned by London. Using friends and siblings, and his experimental Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit as a base, he set up NILI to provide the British with intelligence. He then traveled to Cairo to service the ring and to Britain and the U.S. to muster political and economic support for the Yishuv (Israel's pre-state Jewish community). He won over some hearts and minds and, in a small way, contributed to the passage of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which Britain committed to supporting the establishment in Palestine of a "Jewish national home." Meanwhile - and Florence and Goldstone exaggerate in this respect, like most writers on the subject - NILI marginally contributed to the British victory in Palestine in autumn-winter 1917 over the Turks.
But all of this - Zionism, Palestine, NILI - to be quite frank (though neither Florence nor Goldstone see this), was a sideshow of a sideshow (as Lawrence once defined the Arab Revolt) in the context of World War I. By 1917, millions had died in Flanders fields and in the western marches of the Russian empire, to little profit. The British sought an alternative - and obsessed about locating the "soft underbelly" of the Central Powers, a cheap way to victory. Their sights focused on the Ottoman Empire.
The first try, in 1915 at Gallipoli, ended in a bloody nose. The Turks proved resolute and hardy. But perhaps there was another, subtler path. The idea of raising an Arab revolt behind Turkish lines gradually matured. There was a ready princeling in the wings, Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif, that is, ruler, of Mecca. He and his allied tribes would march − for a heavy price in gold sovereigns and assurances of booty. In the letter from Henry MacMahon, the high commissioner in Egypt, to the sharif, of October 24, 1915, the British, in hedged terms, also promised the Arabs, if the Allies won, "independence" and statehood in most of the Arab-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire.
In steps young Lawrence, who is sent to scope out the Hijazi tribesmen. He wins Arab favor, talks the talk (a rarity, a British intelligence officer who speaks Arabic) and walks the walk, and is soon riding camels with the best of them, derailing troop trains and leading the charge on Aqaba. As chief international adviser to Faisal, Hussein's son and the commander of the rebel troops, Lawrence reformats the revolt (initially in dispatches to Cairo, later in "Seven Pillars") into an epic of Arab national liberation, even though most Arabs - in Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Jerusalem - remain loyal to the Muslim empire, fight for the Turks, and prefer to see the (infidel) Allies defeated.
As Faisal's troops lackadaisically push northward, no general Arab rising materializes. (Lawrence was keenly aware of the real situation: "There is no national feeling" among the Arabs, he wrote, of Syria, in 1915. "Their idea of nationality is the independence of tribes and parishes, and their idea of national union is episodic combined resistance to an intruder." Lawrence admired his Bedouin fighters. But they were "entirely tribal." In 1916 he reported from Basra that the local nationalist party was "about twelve strong.")
Christian, not Muslim
No, whatever Palestinian historian George Antonius was later to claim in "The Arab Awakening" ?(1939?), the liberation of the populated Arab lands from the Turkish yoke was actually carried out, in 1917-1918, by General Edmund Allenby's (Christian) troops driving through Palestine and Syria and by generals Frederick Stanley Maude and William Marshall's (largely Christian and Hindu) columns driving up from Basra through Baghdad toward Mosul (much as the liberation of modern-day Iraqis from the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein was effected by Christians). In October 1918, Allenby allowed Faisal to enter Damascus before him. But this was diplomacy and symbolism, not reality.
The Turks threw in the towel and the scene shifted to Paris, where the victors had to rearrange the Middle East. The British had given three major promises in the course of the fighting: Palestine or a part thereof was to go to the Zionists (the Balfour Declaration); the Arab lands, sans some of the Mediterranean coastal areas, were to go to Hussein (MacMahon's letter); and, in accordance with the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, the Lebanese-Syrian-Alexandretta coastline was to be ruled by France, with a French zone of influence over Syria and Mosul. The core of Palestine, according to Sykes-Picot, was to be ruled by "international administration" - that is, France and Britain conjointly - and the British were to enjoy influence over Transjordan and direct control over the provinces of Basra and Baghdad.
But there were contradictions between the three promises, principally between Sykes-Picot and the MacMahon letter to Hussein. The areas encompassing modern-day Iraq, Syria and Transjordan (and perhaps Israel/Palestine) had been earmarked both for Arab sovereignty and British and French direct or indirect control. By the end of 1918, British prime minister Lloyd George had managed to persuade French premier Georges Clemenceau to give up French claims on Palestine and Mosul. But that still left the dual promises relating to Iraq and Syria-Transjordan ?(and, as the Arabs were to interpret things, Palestine?).
The Arabs, henceforward, were continuously to scream "perfidious Albion." Whitehall - prodded and manipulated by Lawrence - tried to square the circle: It installed Faisal in Damascus and Abdullah, Faisal's brother, in Amman, and when the French conquered Syria in July 1920, found Faisal another, honorable perch, as King of Iraq. But, of course, it wasn't real "independence." Lebanon and Syria; and Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, were placed under French and British mandates, respectively; Hussein was left with an independent Hijaz.
Lawrence's role in Paris - as chief adviser, in flowing white robes, to Faisal and as promoter of Arab claims - is well known. And, in line with Faisal's strategy in 1919, he soft-pedaled Arab claims to Palestine. Indeed, he - and Faisal - were veritably duplicitous.
Lawrence drew a map of "Palestine" - destined for British rule, with Jewish immigration but without Jewish independence - that included Jabl Amal (southern Lebanon south of the Litani River) and the first chain of hills east of the Jordan River, from the Golan southwards through the hills of Gilead, Moab and Edom, with the whole of the Dead Sea incorporated in Palestine, though without the Negev.
Lawrence had a sneaking admiration for the Zionist pioneers. In 1909 he wrote: "The sooner the Jews farm it all, the better: Their colonies are bright spots in a desert." But he shared his class and time's distastes. He wrote that German Jews were "unable to endure contact with others not of their race ... the most foreign and uncharitable part of the whole [of Palestine's] population." During the Paris conference he prepared a draft memorandum for Faisal stating: "If the views of the radical Zionists [i.e., those advocating Jewish sovereignty] ... should prevail, the result will be ferment, chronic unrest, and sooner or later civil war in Palestine ... We Arabs have none of the racial or religious animosity against the Jews which unfortunately prevail in many other regions ... But the ... new [Zionist] colonists almost without exception have come in an imperialistic spirit. They say that too long we [Arabs] have been in control of their homeland taken from them by brute force ... but that now under the new world order we must clear out [of Palestine] ... [that] is the fiat of the civilized world."
Of course, this wasn't the face Faisal presented at the Council of Four. He believed that he needed Zionist goodwill and support in advancing Arab claims in the rest of the Middle East. In January 1919 he even signed an agreement favoring Jewish immigration to Palestine "on a large scale" and implicitly recognizing the Zionist claim to sovereignty there. In March, Faisal, in a letter drafted by Lawrence, wrote to American Zionist Felix Frankfurter: "We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home ... We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not Imperialist, and there is room in Syria for both of us...."
But by early 1920, with Paris behind him, Faisal had changed his tune. He denounced Zionism and crowned himself "King of Syria and Palestine."
Mapping Palestine
Aaronson's role in Paris is less well known, and here lies the innovation of these two books. While continuously bickering with Chaim Weizmann, the uncrowned leader of world Zionism, Aaronsohn arrived in Paris in late November 1918 as a junior member of the British delegation. He strongly advocated Armenian rights and self-determination. But his key contribution - urged on him by British officials and Zionist leaders - was to cartographically define "Palestine."
The map that Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow submitted to the Council of Four in February 1919 was essentially Aaronsohn's creation. His Palestine ran from a west-east line along the Qassimiya River, between Sidon and the Litani, to the outskirts of Damascus, incorporating Mount Hermon, and then south along a line just west of the Hijaz railway, Deraa, Amman and Ma'an, down to Aqba and then northwestwards to the Mediterranean coast just east of Port Said. Aaronsohn's Palestine incorporated Jabl Amal, the Golan, Gilead, Moab and Edom, and much of northern Sinai. It was based on geographical realities and economic needs. Above all, the northern and northeastern boundaries were determined by the country's agricultural and hydrological needs (as perceived by Aaronsohn), and included the Litani basin, the snow-capped Hermon, the springs of the Jordan, and the fertile Jordan Valley east of the river.
This was the map the Zionist movement was to stick to into the early 1920s. But it was overridden by French and British interests. The frontiers between British-ruled Palestine and French-ruled Lebanon and Syria, which greatly reduced the reach of northern Palestine, were finalized in the Anglo-French negotiations of 1923. And these frontiers were re-endorsed in the Israeli-Lebanese and Israeli-Syrian armistice agreements of 1949, both of which the Syrians today refuse to acknowledge?.
Patricia Goldstone tries to portray Aaronsohn as a modern-day liberal on the Arab question. It won't wash. The man wanted all of historic Palestine, and then some, for Jewish statehood. He was no binationalist and he had a boundless contempt for the Arabs. Goldstone's implicit claim (via the book's subtitle), that had Aaronsohn's map been translated into reality, peace would now prevail between Israel and the Arabs - is completely nonsensical.
But she is right about one thing: Water might eventually become a major existential issue, and source of conflict, between Israel and its neighbors.
Ronald Florence's book is a reasonable, readable history, though it evidences little real archival work; almost everything is based on published books. And the author's grasp of Palestine geography is quirky (he places Atlit and Zikhron, both of which are south of Haifa, in the "coastal Galilee").
Goldstone's, however, is an appalling book. The prose is overheated, occasionally hysterical and ungrammatical. Often, the author meanders into gossip. (Aaronsohn is repeatedly described as ogling this or that hotel chambermaid. Who cares?)
More significantly, the book is littered with errors of fact. No, the Anschluss did not occur in 1936; the Capitulations were not "a series of trade agreements enacted by Europe"; the British did not conquer Egypt in "the 1870s"; Herzl did not have a "socialist agenda"; "Castellum Peregrinorum" in Haifa is not "the northernmost Crusader castle in Palestine"; "the height of the Dreyfus Affair" was not in 1893, etc.
And her historical judgment is commensurately skewed. Take this passage: "The maximum boundary for which he [Aaronsohn] fought before his death in 1919 became the basis for all subsequent Zionist territorial demands ... up to the present day. It is, in fact, the rock on which the 1990s peace process initiated by Bill Clinton foundered. Aaron's maps make it possible to understand why Israel and Syria cannot agree on the Golan Heights [and] how their disagreement led to war with Iraq [?!?]" − and so on.
Benny Morris is professor of history at Ben-Gurion University. His books include "Righteous Victims:
A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001,"
and "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" ?(2004?)
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
