Documentary based on Ronald Florence's THE PERFECT MACHINE to air on PBS

"The Journey to Palomar," a documentary based on Florence's book The Perfect Machine (HarperCollins), will be broadcast nationally on PBS stations on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 10 pm. Be sure to check your local PBS station listings! To view a trailer, visit www.JourneyToPalomar.org.

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.

For the full article, click here.

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn Reviewed in Harvard Magazine

Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
From Harvard Magazine, September/October 2007

Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence, Ph.D. ’69 (Viking, $27.95). Two colleagues in British intelligence had conflicting obsessions that presaged the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the Ottoman empire faltered, one of the two (an archaeologist from Oxfordshire, later Lawrence of Arabia) promoted Arab nationalism. The other (a Jewish agronomist from Palestine) hoped for a new Jewish state. Each was cocksure. Historian and novelist Florence tells their story well.

For the other books reviewed in this article, please click here.

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn in the New Yorker

The New Yorker, October 29, 2007
Books Briefly Noted

Lawrence and Aaronsohn
by Ronald Florence (Viking; $27.95)

Florence chronicles the birth of the modern Middle East by narrating the intersecting lives of two remarkable men. The portrait of T. E. Lawrence—a deeply British romantic who, despite his talent as a tactician, was unable to deliver on his promises to the Arab fighters he had led during the First World War—is persuasive if not particularly original. Florence is clearly much more taken with the less celebrated Aaron Aaronsohn, a brilliant agronomist instrumental to the survival of early Zionist settlements in Palestine. He became a spy for the British, at great risk to himself and his family. (His sister was tortured by Turkish officers who suspected her, correctly, of assisting in the espionage.) Florence skillfully blends geopolitical history and cloak-and-dagger tales but, regrettably, includes no detailed portrait of any Arab figure; the Arabs serve, instead, to inspire or frustrate the designs of others, whether British, Jewish, or Turkish. ♦

For the article, please click here.

Ronald Florence's LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN in the Providence Journal

The roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict
BY EDWARD J. RENEHAN JR., The Providence Journal, Sunday, August 19, 2007

LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Ronald Florence. Viking. 528 pages. $27.95.

"Florence does a superb job of contrasting these two fascinating characters. The flamboyant, romantic Lawrence who was so attracted by the free life of tribal randomness seems the polar opposite of the methodical, scientific Aaronsohn who was so dedicated to the creation of a Jewish homeland. In crafting complex and absorbing portraits of his two protagonists, Florence has produced a singular and important book that does much to illuminate the roots of today’s debate over borders and birthrights in the troubled Middle East."

For the complete review, please click here.

Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn Reviewed in Boston Globe

The birth of Middle East strife viewed through the conflict of two men
By Michael Kenney | July 31, 2007
Boston Globe

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.

For more please click here.