The birth of Middle East strife viewed through the conflict of two men

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.

Of the first meeting, in February 1917 in a hallway of the Savoy Hotel in Cairo that was serving as the British Army's Middle East headquarters, Florence writes "[that] by then their separate plans to reshape the Middle East were already in motion. And the two ambitious and strong-willed men would discover that the fortunes they had planned for Palestine were on a collision course."

With those few meetings to go on, Florence's narrative in "Lawrence and Aaronsohn" becomes one of alternating accounts. And with Lawrence such familiar territory -- if only from the Peter O'Toole portrayal -- the reader will be tempted to skim through those chapters. But with Aaronsohn there is the freshness of discovery.

In 1917, Aaronsohn was 41 -- two years older than Lawrence -- and already a person of some international distinction. Growing up in Palestine, he had become an expert on the region's ecology, with his discovery of a potentially valuable strain of wheat bringing him to the attention of American Jewish leaders.

And from years spent exploring the region, usually on horseback, he had information of great value to British intelligence services -- the likely sources of underground water, deduced from the ruins of ancient cities, and the disposition of Turkish forces.

While frequently rebuffed by the British, Aaronsohn, with knowledge of the treatment of Armenians by the Turks, believed that a British victory was vital for the future of Jews in Palestine.

As a spy, Aaronsohn had an equal in his younger sister, Sarah. She was, writes Florence, "a beautiful and sensuous woman" who was also "a fearless and adventurous horsewoman." Forced into a joyless and loveless marriage with a Constantinople merchant, at the first opportunity she returned to Palestine.

With her brother on military missions in Cairo and London, she soon took over the espionage operations of NILI -- the Hebrew initials for "The glory of Israel does not deceive" -- an underground group made up of recruits from her brother's agricultural research station.

Later, when Turkish forces threatened the espionage operation, she was in Palestine, and refused to join her brother in Cairo. "I want to be with the others in the place of danger at the time of danger."

Within weeks, she and other NILI agents had been arrested. Sarah was beaten, then brutally tortured. Eluding her guards with a ruse, she killed herself with a gun that she had hidden.

"Nili," writes Florence, became a popular name for girls in Israel.

Her brother also died tragically. Like Lawrence, he was in Paris during the Peace Conference in 1919. Seeking material to buttress his proposals for a Jewish Palestine, he went briefly to London. Returning to Paris on a foggy morning in May 1919, he died when the mail plane in which he was the sole passenger crashed in the English Channel.

Both he and Lawrence had prepared maps outlining their rival territorial proposals for Palestine (both are printed in this book).

Lawrence's proposed borders created a narrow coastal Palestine, wedged in front of expansive Arab desert kingdoms. But, writes Florence, its straight-line borders, "[ignored the] terrain, resources, cultivation patterns, economic development issues, and history," which defined Aaronsohn's Palestine.

As it turned out, neither Lawrence's "righteous passion" nor Aaronsohn's "precise science" prevailed, and the region was carved up between the British and the French. Their legacies, Florence suggests, are more political than territorial. For Lawrence it was "legitimation of Arab nationalism"; and for Aaronsohn, a demonstration that "the land . . . could support the increased population" of modern-day Israel.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.