Gail Shirazi: I'm Gail Shirazi.
On behalf of the Hebraic Section of the African and Middle East Division
of the Library of Congress and the Hebrew Language Table,
I would like to welcome you to today's program
by Professor Ronald Florence: "T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn
and the Seeds of the Israeli-Arab Conflict."
Dr. Florence is a historian and a novelist,
the author of eight previous books including, The Gypsy Man,
The Perfect Machine and Blood Libel, which he lectured on at the Library
about two years ago, about the blood libel in Damascus
of 1848 -- wonderful lecture.
He was educated at the University of California-Berkeley,
and at Harvard University where he received his Ph.D.
in European History.
He's traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East to research
and explore the locations of his books.
Before moving to Providence, Rhode Island where he lives with his wife,
who's also here today, he taught at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College
and the State University of New York.
And I think now it's most appropriate,
in this time of Mid-East peace negotiations,
that we understand a little bit about the seeds of the conflict
so we can move forward, hopefully for a true peace in the region.
I'd like to thank Dr. Peggy Perlstein,
head of the Hebraic Section for cosponsoring the event,
and of course Dr. Florence for coming.
And before I begin, there are a few more events that I have listed
on these sheets of paper that I will pass out.
It's a tentative schedule.
Please check our Web site, www.loc.gov,
and you'll see the final updates on the events.
Now, Dr. Florence, please.
[applause] Dr. Ronald Florence: Thank you, Gail.
I'm just going to plunge right into the story.
In the early spring of 1917, two men met in the Savoy Hotel in Cairo.
This was the British General Headquarters
and it was the beginning of the third year of the First World War.
The two men took an instant dislike to one another.
One man was imposing; a tall man with blond hair and blue eyes.
He was the kind of man who drew attention
when he walked into the room.   He wore a suit.
It was rumpled, but nonetheless well tailored.
The other man was short, even among the British officers he stood
out for being so short, had an enormous head,
was dressed rather casually with sort of trousers that came
to his ankles, like a schoolboy who's outgrown his pants.
One man was famous on four continents.
He had met with and mesmerized political, scientific, industrial
and financial leaders with the breadth and depth of his knowledge
of what was then called the Near East.
The other man had been too short to enlist in the British Army,
got a position as a civilian map maker and was posted to Cairo
because the British were desperate for intelligence agents.
Both men considered themselves experts on Palestine;
one because of his near fluency in Arabic, his experience
in an archaeological dig near the Turkish-Syrian border,
and because he had taken a single trip
as a student to Palestine and Syria.
The other man had studied Palestine more extensively than anyone alive.
He had surveyed the flora, the fauna, the geology, the hydrology
and the terrain from the Galilee to Sinai.
He even knew the positions, preparations, training and order
of battle of the Turkish Army.
The short man with the large head and trousers that came
to his ankles was T.E. Lawrence, who later became known
by the iconic name Lawrence of Arabia.
In the spring of 1917 he was hardly known,
outside of British headquarters.
The tall, handsome, blue eyed blond man with a reputation
on four continents, the friend of Presidents, scientists,
Supreme Court jurists and financiers was Aaron Aaronsohn,
a Jewish agronomist who had grown up in Palestine.
Why do we care about these men?
The Arab-Israeli conflict is perhaps the longest standing
and most dangerous of conflicts in the political world today.
It seems so intractable that pundits and experts have come
up with an astounding list of explanations,
from stretched metaphors to blatant bombast.
The conflict has been explained by many as,
"the unsettled sibling rivalry of Isaac and Ishmael,
the sons of Abraham," or if you prefer, Ibrahim.
As patriarchs of two tribes who later became the Israelites
and the Arabs, they somehow began a conflict which never ended.
It's been explained as a proxy war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.,
and then later between the U.S. and either Iran or Arab Islamists.
It's been explained as a necessary Armageddon
between Judeo-Christian inevitability
and the resurgent Islamic threat,
and this of course is an explanation preferred by evangelicals,
who see the second coming and the gathering
of the Jews as its precedent.
It's been explained as an inevitable consequence of the colonialism
of the French and the British, and later of Israel
and the U.S. It's been explained as a struggle against Israeli
and Western imperialism that, as some would argue,
seeks to exploit the resources of Palestine
with no regard for the rightful owners.
It's been called a battle for water, for oil,
for control of the Suez Canal, for control of the land bridge
between Africa and Asia, and finally it has been called
by some a rebellion against an alleged fiendish, Jewish master plot
that orchestrated Zionism with a cabal of European financiers,
created a foothold for the Jews in Palestine,
then masterminded the Holocaust to build sympathy for the Jews
in Europe and America, and finally created the State of Israel
to appropriate the rightful land of the Arabs.
Well, there may be touches of truth in the less extreme
of these explanations, but I'm not persuaded that any
of them really tell us very much about the origins
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
To me, we can better understand that conflict if we go back to its seeds,
and we look particularly at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
and the actions of the British, the French and other nations
who established or tried
to establish footholds in that tilled soil.
Let me read an epigraph which was written more than a century ago.
This was written in 1905 by an Arab named Nagib Azouri, living in Paris,
1905: Two important phenomena of the same nature, though opposed,
to which nobody has drawn attention, manifest themselves
at this moment in Asiatic Turkey.
They are the awakening of the Arab nation, and the hidden efforts
of the Jews to reconstruct, on a very large scale,
the ancient monarchy of Israel.
These two movements are destined to combat each other continually
until one of them takes it -- --
and "it" here refers to Palestine -- -- from the other.
It's a very prescient, and in my mind extremely accurate prediction
or observation.
More than a century later, we're still watching the conflict
that is the collision of those two forces; Arab nationalism
and the effort to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
But in 1905 both of those efforts were extremely improbable.
There was no state, and nothing resembling the institutions
of a modern state in the Arab world in 1905.
Arab nationalism was cafe talk of a few intellectuals in Damascus
and in Cairo, and by various estimates they numbered
about a dozen.
Ten years after that there was an Arab international conference held
in Paris.
They got up to a count of 14 because two students who happened to walk
by the building were recruited to bring up the numbers.
A Jewish State, the revival of the ancient Hebrew kingdom,
had been an age-old dream, but in 1904 at the death of Hertzel,
it was widely believed that the land of Palestine was too arid
and infertile to support the population necessary
for a viable state.
This was of course the period when alternatives were being discussed
in Europe, such as Uganda.
Well, Lawrence and Aaronsohn were not the fathers of Arab nationalism
or of the State of Israel, but they were crucial midwives.
Lawrence took the dream of Arab nationalism from those obscure cafes
in Damascus and Cairo and put it on the world stage.
He used the Arab revolt, the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire
by Arab forces led by Hussein, king of the Vijas [spelled phonetically],
and his son Faisal, to showcase the potential might
of what had been a fragmented minority.
His role in the Arab revolt, ostensibly on behalf
of the British war effort, granted legitimacy and recognition
to this hitherto obscure idea of Arab nationalism.
Aaron Aaronsohn, a scientist who knew how to draw on history,
demonstrated to skeptical British and American policymakers
and to potential supporters that with the right techniques the land
of Palestine could support a substantial population
and a modern industry; a rich and powerful enough economic power
to sustain a viable state.
The First World War provided the perfect seedbed for his
and Lawrence's ambitions; a forum and battlefield for two driven,
brilliant and staggeringly self-confident men.
They were destined to collide, and the conflict of their visions
and personalities is a preview of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
I'd like to read a brief passage.   This takes place in August of 1917;
this is the middle of the First World War.
The two men are these two gents who met
in the opening remarks of my comment.
When I said "staggeringly self-confident," that's kind
of an understatement for either Aaronsohn --
they were the sort of men whom other people would call arrogant,
and their friends would call self-confident.
They met again in the halls of the Savoy Hotel.
And remember, they are both working for the British,
but listen to the kind of conversation that could take place.
In late August 1917, before he left Egypt for London, Aaronsohn wrote
in his diary, "I had a chat with Captain Lawrence this morning."
Lawrence and Aaronsohn were both flushed with self-confidence.
The British were finally listening to Aaronsohn,
accepting the intelligence from his group
at Aflite [spelled phonetically].
Lawrence, fresh from the victory at Akabo
with Amir Faisal's army had become a hero at General Headquarters.
Their first encounter months before had been hostile.
Their sudden ascents within GHQ only accentuated their competitiveness.
Their meeting was again at the Savoy Hotel, where both men had offices.
From a letter Lawrence drafted after the meeting,
it seems that Aaronsohn had told him that "the Jews intended
to acquire the land rights to all of Palestine, from Gaza to Haifa,
and have practical autonomy therein."
Lawrence answered by lecturing Aaronsohn on Palestine,
telling him about the mentalits of the people,
the feelings of the Arabs.
"Nothing can be done in Judea and Samaria
where Faisal will never gain access," he told Aaronsohn,
"but there might be something to do in Galilee."
Lawrence promised he would conduct an investigation by his own methods
in order to learn the mentalit of the Jews
in Galilee and the colonies.
Now, let me explain for a second what's going on here.
Aaron Aaronsohn has studied Palestine more than anyone alive.
He knows this country from one end to the other.
He has surveyed the land.   He has surveyed the terrain.
He has become famous on four continents
by discovering an early Biblical wheat there.
He literally has a map of Palestine in his mind.
Lawrence has been in Palestine once as a student,
and he is lecturing Aaron Aaronsohn on Palestine.
The discussion was heated.
Aaronsohn had studied Palestine more than anyone alive.
He had discovered wild wheat in the exact area of the Galilee
on which Lawrence was pretending to be an expert,
and he had seldom been a gracious listener
to those he considered ignorant: "As I was listening to him,"
Aaronsohn wrote, "I could almost imagine I was attending a conference
by a scientific anti-Semitic Prussian speaking English.
I'm afraid that the German spirit has taken deeper root in the minds
of pastors and archaeologists."
Well, eight years before, Lawrence had tramped
through northern Palestine as a student.
He'd written home, "The sooner the Jews farm it, the better.
Their colonies are bright spots in a desert."
He'd spent almost no time in the Galilee since,
had never done serious research on the people or terrain,
did not speak Hebrew, Turkish or Yiddish.
Indeed, he'd paid scant attention to Palestine since writing his report
"Syria, the Raw Material," in 1915.
But lecturing an expert on his own subject and ending conversations
with provocative, even outrageous utterances was vintage Lawrence,
usually when he felt himself an outsider.
Probably with a pause for dramatic emphasis, Lawrence told Aaronsohn
that the Jews of the Galilee would have no choice
but to accept their fate.
"If they're in favor of the Arabs, they shall be spared.
Otherwise, they shall have their throats cut."
Aaronsohn saved his contempt for his diary:
"Our interview was devoid of amenity," he wrote.
"[Lawrence] has been too successful at an early age,
and is infatuated with himself.
He is still at the age where people do not doubt themselves;
happy young man.   He is plainly hostile to us.
He must be of missionary breed."
After almost a year in London and Cairo, living alongside
and dealing daily with the scarcely concealed anti-Semitism of much
of the British Officer Corps, Aaronsohn was not surprised
or shocked by Lawrence's remark.
Once he blew off his rage and contempt in his diary,
he seemed to forget the encounter.
Well, Lawrence did not forget the encounter.
Lawrence was quite agitated afterward,
and he contacted Mark Sikes, whose name you know of course
from the Sikes-Picot Agreement.
And basically what he asked Mark Sikes is,
"How are the Jews going to get all of this land?
Are they just going to buy it?   Is it the Jewish influence
in European finance that will enable this?"
Well, when you read enough on the Middle East,
you start to learn these code words.
"The Jewish influence in European finance" is a very long way
of saying Rothschild, and basically what Lawrence is suggesting here is
that there's this grand cabal of Jewish financiers and wealthy people
in America and England who are literally going to buy all
of Palestine and ignore all of the rights of their population there.
I suspect by now the language of both of these men starts
to sound rather familiar to you.   Who were these men?
We really think we know Lawrence.
And most of us, our image comes from David Lean's indelible film,
but his film is more 1960s romance and fantasy
than fact, at least in part.   Lawrence was not tall.
He was not blond.   He was not very handsome.
He did not have blue eyes,
and he really did not look like Peter O'Toole.
And he was almost certainly not gay.
But he is different enough from the typical heroic trajectory
to make a very challenging subject.
We have to ask, what would make a Christian, English soldier slide
so far toward joining the Arab revolt, not as an advisor
and liaison, which he is supposed to be,
but as a man serving two masters, Arab and British?
The answer, I suspect, comes from Lawrence's self perception
He was an uncommonly short man.
He was a middle son, and he was the only one of his brothers to realize
that they were illegitimate.
We don't even use that term anymore today.
It's kind of forgotten, but in a post-Victorian England,
to be illegitimate was a brand.
It was a permanent condemnation to life at the edges of proper society,
and Lawrence took that identification, took that lack
of belonging with a vengeance.
He holed himself up, typically in a bungalow.
He would line the walls with green felt so it would be quiet
and totally dark, turn on his lamp and read, and read and read.
He would brag about how many books he had processed in a day
or in a week or in a month.
He claimed that he had read pretty much all of this library
and that library, and it's probably close to true.
He imagined for himself an escape, and his escape was in sagas,
particularly the sagas of the Crusades.
He dreamt of writing, and like so many wannabe authors,
he first picked his titles.
And so he had the title Seven Pillars
of Wisdom long before he had a subject for the book.
Indeed, he had a whole list of titles that he was going to use,
and then would set about writing the books.
Well, the problem with having an ambition for sagas is
that it either takes an extraordinary imagination
or an extraordinary life to write a saga.
Lawrence was a brilliant man and an eloquent man.
He did not have an imagination to invent a saga,
so he chose the alternate course; to live a life
that in some measure had the dimensions of a saga,
which would then enable him to write about it.
He did not command the Arab Army, as sometimes is portrayed.
His efforts in actual combat for the most part were disastrous;
in his first battle he shot his own camel out from underneath himself.
But he lived with the Arabs.   He negotiated with them.
He cajoled them.   He paid them enormous sums of money,
and he lived with the Arab Army, a grand story.
He wasn't the first author to first live his story
and then write about it.
Aaron Aaronsohn is perhaps the most famous man most
of us have never heard of.
He became famous because as an agronomist and unemployed,
he was surveying plant stocks in Palestine
when he discovered a very primitive form of emmer,
which he quickly identified as the wheat of the Bible.
There's only one reference to emmer in the Bible,
but there's a great number of references to wheat --
emmer's a primitive form of wheat --
and using some evidence from Egyptian tombs,
he was able to demonstrate that the particular variety discovered was
unchanged for several thousand years; that this was Ur wheat
if you want, Biblical wheat.
And at the turn of the last century, this was an enormous discovery
because wheat was just the world's most important crop.
Wheat yields everywhere in the world were declining; in Argentina,
in America, in Canada, in Russia, Prussia, even France.
The yields from wheat each year were less than the yield before,
and the great agronomist analyzed the problem by saying, "Well,
we've interbred wheat for too long, and what we need is pure wheat
to breed back to the wheat."
And so when Aaron Aaronsohn discovered Ur wheat,
wheat that was pure for at least 2,000 years,
especially the German agronomists
who led the world proclaimed, "This is the answer."
Well, it was not the answer.   Emmer is a very poor crop.
It's still grown the same way today.
It's called faro, and you can buy it in health-food stores in pasta.
It doesn't help wheat crops,
but that didn't mean it didn't make Aaron Aaronsohn a famous man.
Shortly after his discovery he was instantly famous on four continents,
was being sought for speeches and seminars and visits in Africa,
in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas.
He was invited to visit the United States by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, who wanted him exclusively for several years.
He came, not speaking a single word of English.
The story of his first days here are rather remarkable.
He came, showed up, had a brief chat in German
with David Fairchild at the USDA.
By the end of the week he was heard giving lectures in the hallways
of the USDA in kind of patched together English.
By the end of the month he was giving formal lectures in English,
and then was invited to draft articles
for their most prestigious journal in English.
That he already knew French and Hebrew, his mother tongues, Yiddish,
German, Turkish and a bit of Arabic probably didn't hurt,
but nonetheless it's an achievement
to have learned a language that quickly.
He had never gone to college.
He was a very bright young man growing up,
worked on an agriculture enterprise owned by the Rothschilds.
When he was a teenager they discovered how bright he was
and brought him to France to study
at a French agricultural institute for a year.
That was the sole formal training that he had,
but he was a voracious reader and quickly became a world-famous
and world respected agronomist.
As he came to the United States, people heard about him
and would come to see him, to hear him speak.
He was a dazzling speaker.
He was the kind of man who could put together Roman texts, geology,
history, botany, [audio skip] about Palestine and begin
to make these phenomenal observations.
He would say that, "Well, there's water here,
although you have only primitive desert agriculture."
And people would say, "How do you know that?"
And he would explain that, "Well, the Roman city
of Caesarea had a population this large.
This was the transport available.
You couldn't move food from anywhere else to Caesarea
in the quantities needed.
Therefore, there had to be fertile ground nearby, and if you look
at the geological structure and hydrology,
here's where the wells must have been."
And people would at first sort of say, "What?"
And after a while it became dazzling,
because he proved almost every time correct in his observations.
And so in the United States before long he was being dragged around
and introduced and having an enormous influence.
He met Louis Brandeis, then perhaps the most famous lawyer in America.
Louis Brandeis later explained
that the reason he became a Zionist is he concluded that,
"If Palestine can produce people like Aaron Aaronsohn,
I know there's a future for a Jewish nation there,"
and he constantly spoke about Aaronsohn.
He met Felix Frankfurter.
He met Julius Rosenthal, the President of Sears Roebuck.
He met Cyrus Adler, who was then the President of Dropsie University.
And each time he would sort of wow these people.
Before he went back to Palestine,
these various extremely wealthy people got together in New York
and formed a little institution which was
to be called the Jewish Agricultural Research Station.
The one proviso was that Aaron Aaronsohn had to be its Director,
and they put up the money, formed an American corporation,
and he established in Palestine a small research institute.
He very quickly began to grow crops that no one had ever dreamt of.
He would take even figs or bananas, which had been grown
in Palestine before, and produce unbelievable quantities of them.
He would do the same with truck vegetables, with wheat,
with whatever crop he played with.
A lot of the techniques he invented we use today,
like drip irrigation or lithic mulching.
But more than that, Aaronsohn, by running this institute
and producing these enormous crops demonstrated
that there was an alternative to the primitive subsistence agriculture
of the Arabs; that in fact it was possible
to have a productive export agriculture; to produce enough food
for a nation of millions, enough to support a modern State.
Well, the crucial opportunity for both of these men, Lawrence
and Aaronsohn, was the war.
For Lawrence it was the chance to live and make history;
to hitch his fortunes to Amir Hussein,
Prince Faisal, the Vijasi troops.
For Aaronsohn, the Turkish requisitions and levies --
remember, the Turks are ruling Palestine.
They are defending the country against Britain and France.
The Turkish had an interesting way of feeding their army.
They would supply them with uniforms and weapons and say,
"Find your food where you can."
And of course, the Turkish military knew
that the most productive farms were the Jewish farms,
and so they would go and clean them out.
Under the guise of a requisition, they would take everything.
I've looked at some of the requisition lists.
It's kind of remarkable the Army would make requisitions
for women's negligees, for obstetric instruments.
Somehow they found a reason to take every tool,
every draft animal, every trained person.
They took all the fence posts.   No fence post means no fences.
No fences means that wild animals
or domestic animals come and eat your crops.
So Aaronsohn, seeing this, concluded gradually that there was no choice
for the Jews of Palestine but to resist the Turks,
and to resist the Turks meant to side
with the enemy; that is the British.
It's hard to describe how daring this is, under a Turkish government,
the only government the Jews had ever known,
and suddenly he is starting to talk about resisting them.
His first opportunity comes when the locust plagues
of 1915 come to Palestine.
This was the worst plague anyone in Palestine could remember.
The locusts literally ate everything.
The Turkish attitude was, it's the will of Allah,
in a sort of resignation.
The Jews on the farms did try and fight back,
and did whatever they could.
They would throw dirt at the locusts.
They would bang drums.
They would try and bury them, would wave sheets, whatever they could,
but in a true locust plague, the sort of plague that blocks
out the sun, this was all futile.
The Pasha was terribly worried about the plague,
not because the Jewish farms were being eaten,
but because the future supply of food for his army was being eaten.
If the Jewish farms lost their crops,
what would his troops requisition the next year?
So in desperation, he went to the American and Italian ambassadors
and said, "Do you know anything I could do?"
And they both said, "Yes, there's one man who knows what to do."
And they sent him to Aaron Aaronsohn,
and so we have a remarkable scene
of the Pasha asking this Jewish scientist
to somehow save Palestine from this plague.
Aaronsohn agrees to do it, but makes some terms.
He said, "You must allow me and my people total access
to go anywhere we want in Palestine.
You must let us use the railroads, the roads,
even those that are closed for war purposes.
You must let us use the post office," which had been shut
down except for the government and military, "and you must simply turn
over the military to us; that is, let us on every military base
so we can explain techniques to these people."
He then recruited 50 young people, all energetic,
all of whom knew either Arabic or Turkish, or in some cases German,
trained them in locust eradication techniques and sent them
out to every military facility in Palestine.
Many facilities they didn't know about, but they said, "Well,
we have to go here, have to go there," got on their camels
and horses and went there.
And they did train the Turkish troops,
but in the process they discovered where the troops were,
how well-trained they were, how well equipped they were,
and because they knew Turkish or Arabic or German, they could discuss
with the troops, and in some cases with their German officers,
the level of morale, of preparation, of will to fight,
which was incredibly valuable information for the British.
The next step for Aaronsohn was to communicate this information
to the British, and there he discovered
that just knowing information is not enough.
The person to whom you're giving information has to trust you
and want your information, and in 1916, 17,
the British attitude toward Zionists was not one of total trust.
In the U.K., Haim Weissman [spelled phonetically] was being more
than tolerated, even encouraged, but that was because they had a debt
to Weissman through his invention or synthesis of acetone,
which is used for explosives, and because they thought
that inspiring Zionism would help create more interest in America
and in Russia for pursuing the war against the Turks.
But to ask someone in or to listen to someone
from Palestine was another matter, and so the first efforts
that Aaronsohn made to communicate with the British were rejected.
In one case he sent his brother to Cairo.
His brother gave a colleague of Lawrence a whole list of,
"This is the information we can supply."
And the answer was, "Okay.   What do you want for it?"
This is a traditional question in the Middle East.
You're offering, what's the price?
And the brother said, "Well, we don't want anything.
We just want to help," and they threw him out and wouldn't listen
to him after that, on the grounds that if he was offering it
for nothing, he was either a counter spy or a provocateur or something.
This had to be a phony effort.
Well, ultimately having tried that and several other ways
of communicating with the British, Aaronsohn concluded
that only he was famous enough to get the British to listen.
And he made a seven-month, incredibly dramatic journey
from Palestine through Germany, Austria, across enemy lines
to neutral Denmark, then got himself on a ship and had to arrange for him
to be taken off the ship in Britain.   It was an entire scam set-up
in which he was basically fooling the Turks, the Austrians,
the Germans, the Swedes, the Danes and to some degree the Brits,
but he got himself to London, talked his way to Cairo
where he could begin to coordinate the flow of information
from his spy ring in Israel.
It was this information that enabled General Allenby
to conquer Palestine.   Well, so we have a story of two men
with passionately held conflicting views of the future.
These are not ordinary men.   They're driven.
They are arrogant, and they are in a world
which has a fluidity that we have long lost.
This was a world where a diplomat like Mark Sikes,
who was an enthusiastic amateur, and Georges Picot, who was an old hand
for the French, could divvy up the Middle East
in the famed Sikes-Picot Agreement, pretty much the way you carved
up your pies at Thanksgiving: "We'll have two slices here for Russia,
two for France, two for Britain, and these crumbs can be for the Arabs
and maybe even for the Zionists."
In this atmosphere of utter fluidity, of possibility,
of the arrogance of seizing what was not yours,
but which you could get away with, promises could be made
and then you'd discover that you couldn't abide by the promise,
and so the British philosophy
in that situation was, make another promise.
And if you made enough conflicting promises,
you could say to all the parties involved,
"Well, look, it was war time.   We did what we had to do."
And by the end of it, you had Lloyd George saying after the war,
"Let me be frank with you.
During the war we gave the Arabs and Jews conflicting assurances.
We sold the same horse twice."
And that's exactly what the British did during the First World War.
And if you look at the documents that the two sides
of this conflict have used to support their claims --
and these claims go back more than 100 years now, and yet they continue
to be cited again and again -- each side has documents and agreements
that prove they're right.
The Arabs are often citing the Mach Mahone [spelled phonetically]
correspondence in which great,
huge expansive promises were made to the Arabs.
Lawrence did much to help draft the Mach Mahone correspondence.
He secured help for the Arabs and their side of those negotiations,
and when the British made those agreements,
they thought they were making vague promises; that this was a way
to get the war effort along: "If we promise you this, you'll help us
in the war and we'll all win, and afterwards it will be great."
By the same token the Balfour Declaration,
for which Aaronsohn deserves a great deal of credit
because he was the one who had convinced Britain
that you could have a self-supporting nation in Palestine,
was also a British effort not to lay a legal basis for a Jewish state,
but to influence in America and Russia, in the hope that --
the British believed that the Jews were extremely powerful
in both Russia and America, and if they could get the Jews in both
of those countries on their side, it would, one,
bring America into the war, and two, keep Russia in the war;
hence the Balfour Declaration.
The thought that almost a century later these two documents are the
basis of legal claims by Arab nationalists,
or cited as the legal basis for the State
of Israel would have been inconceivable in wartime,
colonial or foreign offices.   Let me wrap up.
The Palestine campaign was, in Lawrence's words,
"a sideshow of a sideshow."
In the movie that line is appropriated and given
to General Allenby, but it's a good movie anyway.
It was especially a sideshow to the great powers of Europe,
because when they got to Paris
for the peace conference there was really no foundation
for dealing with Palestine.
Woodrow Wilson came to Paris with his principles, lots of principles.
He wanted self-determination.
He wanted open treaties, openly agreed upon.
These were all concepts that sounded terrific in a speech,
and indeed they sound great
in the textbooks we were all given in grammar school.
But they had no connection to the realities of the Middle East,
in the middle of the war.
How could you determine the will of a people who had never been involved
in a political process, who had never known political institutions?
He wanted no secret agreements, but there were
so many secret agreements already made about the Middle East
that the British could hardly keep track of them.
They had made agreements with the Zionists.
They had made agreements with the Arabs.
They had made an agreement with Hussein of Mecca.
They had made agreement with the French,
and they even made an agreement with the Russians,
which of course the Russians spilled as soon
as they had the Russian Revolution.
The entire region had already been carved
up in mutually contradictory borders.
You could make a series of overlays
that would give you a terrible headache, because each chunk
of land had already been assigned to three or four different recipients,
and to sort this out was the kind of situation that made you simply want
to throw your hands up, which is pretty much what the conference
in Paris did.
The Zionists and Faisal were each allowed a single presentation
Faisal made his presentation with Lawrence translating
into both English and French, which was a dazzling performance,
but in fact, people were watching Lawrence
and his dazzling performance and not listening to the words.
Aaronsohn wrote most of the Jewish presentation, which was again,
received more with controversy and, "When can we get back
to the important issues?"   than with serious attention.
The peace conference wanted to talk about Germany and reparations.
But there were two men at the Paris Peace Conference who were
so invested, dedicated and relentlessly brilliant
that they wouldn't let go of this issue.
Lawrence, having done this extraordinary translation
of Faisal's remarks, began to campaign privately to get someone
to continue to listen to the Arabs.   He was tired of politics.
He was eager to get busy on this epic novel, and in fact,
in Paris he stayed at a different hotel from the rest
of the British delegation so he'd have quiet to write,
and would only interrupt his writing --
he tended to write about 18 hours a day --
to attend a few sessions of the conference, where he was admitted.
Actually, there's a wonderful story in all of this.
He had one person, a man named Meinershagen [spelled phonetically],
who he allowed to read the chapters,
and Meinershagen's room was downstairs in the hotel,
so Lawrence would tie a string around the newest pages
and lower them out the window, and Meinershagen would pull them in
and read them, pull them back up,
and that was to avoid leaving his room and disrupting his writing.
Aaronsohn was the sort of man who was --
I'll be generous and say he was intolerant of those
who did not know as much as he did.
He sort of took the kind of attitude that, "I'll explain to this once.
If you don't understand it, you're an idiot."
He tried to set the British, the French and the council straight,
and what he was trying to do was to propose boundaries
for Palestine based not on politics, not on demands of people,
but on naturally based frontiers, as he saw it; for example, a watershed.
If you have a ridgeline and the water on one side flows one way
and the water on the other flows the other way,
this to Aaronsohn was a natural boundary; people won't fight
about water because the water on their side and the water
on the other side are demarked by this watershed.
He worried about transport and access to seaports, and to make sure
that neither of these was a cause for war or dispute later on.
He wanted to make sure that the fertility
of the soils was distributed.   He wanted to make sure that fauna
and flora were not endangered by the kind of borders.
It was a very idealistic program.
It was something he worked on with incredible dedication.
Indeed, he died bringing his last version of a map
of Palestine back to Paris.
It would be very nice to conclude this by saying that if Aaronsohn
and Lawrence had lived, if we'd followed their ideas,
we would have peace today in the Middle East.
I don't think so.
Their ideas were, first off, mutually contradictory;
in the case of Aaronsohn, far too idealistic, and in the case
of Lawrence, far too nave.
Instead, I hope that in exploring the dramatic lives of these men --
and they were remarkable men -- I've helped to explain the origin
of these two determining visions of Palestine; one as a Jewish state,
and second as part of a great Arab nation,
because 90 years later those mutually exclusive ideas are still
being contested here in Annapolis, and wherever the future
of this dispute carries on.   Thank you.
[applause] [end of transcript] LOC - 071203ame1200 2 5/14/10 Prepared
by National Capitol Captioning 2820 Washington Blvd #2 (703) 243-9696