Aaronsohn's Maps: The Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Modern Middle East - Softcover

Goldstone, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619025590 ISBN 13: 9781619025592

Publisher: Catapult, 2015

Synopsis

Aaron Aaronsohn was one of the most extraordinary figures in the early struggle to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Brought to Palestine at age five, as a young man Aaronsohn was a rugged adventurer who became convinced during years of solo explorations that water should govern the region's fate. He compiled both the area’s first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestine’s national borders that predicted and in its insistence on partnership between Arabs and Jews might have prevented the decades of conflict to come.
In World War I, he ran a spy network with his sister, Sarah, that enabled the British to capture Jerusalem but also made him the rival of his colleague T.E. Lawrence. There is evidence that beautiful, rebellious Sarah, who died tragically in 1917, was the only woman the enigmatic Lawrence ever loved.
Ultimately, Aaron Aaronsohn also paid for his devotion to the new nation with his life. A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohn’s Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohn’s key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohn’s maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Scientist, diplomat, and spy, Aaron Aaronsohn was one of the most extraordinary figures in the early struggle to create a homeland for the Jews. He was born to Jewish settlers in Palestine. During World War I, he ran a network of spies with his sister, Sarah, that enabled the British to capture Jerusalem and made Aaron T.E. Lawrence's rival in an astonishing triangle: there is evidence that beautiful, rebellious Sarah, who died tragically in 1917, was the only woman Lawrence ever loved.

A rugged adventurer, Aaronsohn became convinced during his explorations of the Middle East that water would govern the region's fate. He compiled both the area's first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestine's national borders that predicted and?in its insistence on partnership between Arabs and Jews?might have prevented the decades of conflict to come. If Aaron had lived to carry out his vision, the course of modern history might have been very different. But the will to power that drew him from science to politics led him to a premature and mysterious death in 1919. His maps were lost, his library - and for many years, even his memory - destroyed.

A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohn's Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohn's key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohn's maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

From the Back Cover

From AARONSOHN'S MAPS:
Aaron Aaronsohn was a warrior-intellectual of prodigious energy and talent and the one man who might have engineered a workable solution to the thorny issue of Palestine's boundaries. What this superman wanted was an independent Palestine free from debt and Great Powers ? and grounded in an egalitarian working relationship between Jews and Arabs. The unique geological maps of Palestine he had created out of many years of youthful exploration defined Aaron's maximum boundary, the largest territory for the new Palestine being presented in Paris in 1919. Where Winston Churchill and others saw oil as the defining commodity of the twentieth century, Aaron saw beyond them into the twenty-first, when water would become the most critical resource. In the maps and plans he carried with him from London were the outlines of a venture that, had it succeeded, would have altered the course of modern history. But Aaron, so brilliant in so many ways, had the fatal flaw that makes the tragic hero. . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1619025590
• ISBN 13: 9781619025592
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 334