Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict - Hardcover

Florence, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670063517 ISBN 13: 9780670063512

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2007

Synopsis

Traces the efforts of Lawrence of Arabia and a Jewish agronomist from Palestine to map the land and conflicts of the modern Middle East, documenting their audacious imaginings of the Arab and Jewish nations in the aftermath of World War I and establishment of a secret spy network.

About this title

About the Author:

Ronald Florence is a historian and novelist, and the author of The Gypsy Man, The Perfect Machine and Blood Libel. This is his ninth book.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this dual biography of two key figures in Middle Eastern history, Florence (Blood Libel) grounds the clash of Arab and Jewish nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire's collapse during WWI. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) was a flamboyant British officer and romantic partisan of a mythologized Arab people, who cobbled together an anti-Turkish revolt out of fractious Bedouin clans. Aaron Aaronsohn, a Palestinian Jew and an agronomist who pioneered the Zionist effort to make the desert bloom, organized a spy ring to feed intelligence on Ottoman defenses in Palestine to the British. There's suspense and pathos in Florence's saga of the war-torn Middle East—Aaronsohn's sister, also a spy, was tortured by the Turks and committed suicide—along with eye-glazing diplomatic wrangling as Aaronsohn and Lawrence try to influence British policy toward conquered Ottoman lands. Florence's portraits of his protagonists color his account of the competing political claims. His depiction of Aaronsohn makes Zionism the more authentic nation-building project, deeply rooted in the careful stewardship of a soil watered with Zionist blood, while Arab nationalism comes off as largely a shallow, alien conceit imported by an eccentric Englishman to Bedouin more interested in booty than independence. (See alsoAaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East, reviewed on p. 44.) Photos. (Aug. 20)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0670063517
• ISBN 13: 9780670063512
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 528