Ronald Florence's LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN reviewed in Reform Judaism Magazine

Ronald Florence recreates the Middle East in the First World War. by Bonny V. Fetterman

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
by Ronald Florence (Viking, 512 pp., $27.95)

For anyone who thinks the Arab-Israeli conflict started with Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Ronald Florence’s history of the Middle East during World War I is an important corrective. It takes us back to a time when none of the borders we now recognize on the map existed—only a vast region called “Arabia” held by the Ottoman Turks. Florence tells this story through the biographies of two men who tried to help the British wrest this area from Turkey and win the war.

T. E. Lawrence (later known as “Lawrence of Arabia”), an Oxford-trained archaeologist, was a young second lieutenant attached to the British intelligence desk in Cairo. In the spring of 1917 he tried to organize the army of Bedouin irregulars (called the Army of the Arab Revolt) under the Hashemite Emir Faisal for a raid against Turkey at Aqaba. Faisal’s father, Sherif Hussein, the religious ruler of the Hejaz (which included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina) envisioned a new Arab caliphate on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; Faisal himself had eyes on an extensive kingdom based in Damascus. Lawrence hoped that a successful raid on Aqaba would serve their political aspirations, despite British colonial designs in the region and wartime agreements with the French.

Meanwhile, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jew and an internationally known agronomist (his parents were among the founders of Zichron Ya’akov when they came from Romania in 1882), was convinced that the Jews of Palestine would fare better under Britain than Turkey. Fearing that Jews would suffer the same fate as the Armenians under the Turks, he offered his considerable skills to the British. Giving up his scientific career, he converted his research institute in Athlit, the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station, into a spy ring for the British (called NILI). Aaronsohn knew every inch of Palestine, having served Turkish commander Djemal Pasha as a scientific consultant during the locust invasion (a crop-destroying insect infestation); he recommended the plan of attack through Beersheva that General Allenby ultimately used to take Jerusalem in December 1917. At the war’s end, Aaronsohn drafted a map of Palestine—not based on arbitrary borders, but on topographical features that would permit the development of a viable state. He carried this map with him when his plane went down in the English Channel on his way to the Paris Peace Conference.

This gripping narrative captures so many facets of this history that suspense remains high even though we know the outcome. The victors of the Great War shaped the Middle East even as their conflicting promises shaped its political future. The stories of Lawrence and Aaronsohn remind us of a time of flux between the waning of the Otto­man Empire and the birth of the modern Middle East.

Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.

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