Lawrence
in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern
Middle East
by Scott Anderson
New York: Doubleday, 2013. 577 pp. $28.95 ($17.95, paper).
Reviewed by Raymond Stock
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T.E.
Lawrence: Pro-Zionist or Pro-Arab?
American novelist and foreign correspondent Anderson intertwines T.E.
Lawrence's well-worn, but never boring, story with those of three other
intriguing personalities—Curt Prüfer, a German Orientalist and spy;
William Yale, an American patrician, oilman, and spy; and Aaron
Aaronsohn, a Jewish agronomist of pre-Mandate Palestine and spymaster.
The result is a highly original and absorbing—but also troubling—account
of an extremely familiar subject. Anderson likewise delves into imperial
rivalries—British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian
(as well as the bungling, neophyte Americans)—and their tragic
consequences during and after World War I.
Anderson is not the first scholar to link Lawrence and Aaronsohn.
Ronald Florence's T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict[1]
thoroughly covered the rather scanty—and mutually rude—relations between
the British Arabist and the Romanian-born Jew who laid the scientific
basis for the "desert bloom" of Palestine. Similarly,
correspondence between Lawrence and Yale has been noted both by Florence
and by Harold Orlans in T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero[2] although their fleeting,
sporadic, but still momentous interactions are handled much more
substantively here.
It is the inclusion, however, of Curt Prüfer, the polyglot Near East
intriguer, German soldier and airman, that is Anderson's most original
contribution and one of the major strokes that makes the work such
worthwhile reading. Prüfer was in more ways than one the perfect
anti-Lawrence: He was an early Western student of the traditional shadow
plays of Cairo's slums whereas Lawrence scorned the urban squalor of
Egypt. The German diplomat was a Turkophile and an anti-Semite; Lawrence
loathed the Turks and admired the Jews. Prüfer was a passionate agitator
for pan-Islamic jihad against the British while Lawrence avoided direct
appeals to religion. Prüfer also championed Egypt's deposed khedive,
Abbas Hilmi II, who vainly hoped Kaiser Wilhelm II would restore him to
his throne; Lawrence, for his part, actually put two sons of the ousted
king of the Hejaz on the thrones of Iraq and Transjordan, two countries
he and Winston Churchill carved out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire.
Both the folly and the deceit of the book's subtitle are ironically
illustrated through what the author calls "the reverse symmetry of
Prüfer's and Lawrence's wartime experiences." Anderson writes,
During the first two years of the war,
army captain Lawrence spent most of his time deskbound in the mapping
room of the Arab Bureau in Cairo while Prüfer seemed to be everywhere:
launching sabotage and spying missions against British Egypt,
participating in two major offensives, unmasking potential enemies of the
Ottoman and German cause throughout Syria. Yet by the end of 1916, it was
Lawrence who was in the field while Prüfer idled away his days in a
mapping room in Berlin.
Much of the book's overall portrait of Lawrence is so correct, and the
work so well-written, that it is painful to quibble with any part of it.
Yet, there is a major area in which it seems to seriously err.
One of the larger goals of the author—to cast Lawrence of Arabia as an
anti-imperialist hero—becomes enmeshed in a misplaced appraisal of
Lawrence's attitude toward and actions on behalf of the British role in
the Zionist enterprise. Certainly, Lawrence labored famously against
Britain's (alleged) betrayal of its Arab allies epitomized in the secret
Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. But it is a dubious contention at best
that Lawrence, as part of this effort, publicly offered only limited,
even disingenuous support to Zionism (and then primarily for tactical
purposes) while urging its frustration and defeat to his superiors in
London in private.
Lawrence loathed the Turks and
admired the Jews but avoided direct appeals to religion.
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Thus, in describing Lawrence's early encounters with Zionism, Anderson
offers a sardonic assessment of a meeting between Lawrence and Chaim
Weizmann in Aqaba in June 1918. Weizmann at this time was head of the
Zionist Commission sent to Palestine by the British to advise on the
future development of the country. Anderson describes the meeting as
"one schemer sitting across the table from another," adding
that although Lawrence had an "apparent conversion to Zionism, there
was a marked limit to that conversion." But the evidence for this
equivocation is both scanty and contradicted by Lawrence's later public
statements on behalf of Zionism.
Anderson contends that Lawrence "saw a potentially pivotal role
the Zionists might play in postwar Syria" in an effort to rescue
Britain's client Faisal. Anderson quotes a secret report submitted to the
Foreign Office by Lawrence on June 16, 1918, which states that "the
effendi [landowner] class, the educated class, the Christians, and the
foreign elements will turn against [Faisal]." According to Anderson,
Lawrence, nevertheless, advised that, in Anderson's words, "the
Arabs should never seek nor accept Zionist aid, nor should Weizmann be
given the meeting he urgently sought—an audience with [Faisal's father]
King Hussein." However, Jeremy Wilson's Lawrence of Arabia: The
Authorized Biography[3]
notes that Lawrence dictated a contrary appraisal regarding the potential
for Arab-Zionist cooperation—especially in the postwar period—to writer
G.S. Symes at the Aboukir aerodrome in mid-June 1918 for Symes' book, Tour
of Duty.[4]
Wilson also quotes G.F. Clayton, head of the British intelligence unit
in Cairo, who wrote at that time, "Weizmann … has done very well
with Faisal and at least has established excellent personal relations. He
has also had long discussions with Lawrence, and they seem quite agreed
on main principles."[5]
But Anderson, who argues that Lawrence would not have shared Clayton's
optimistic expectations from the Weizmann-Faisal relationship, omits this
report as well.
Lawrence was actually a Zionist as
well as an Arab nationalist.
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Moreover, if Lawrence were purely cynical and had strictly utilitarian
views of Zionism, why not characterize Faisal and Weizmann in the same
fashion? Speaking of the joint declaration the two issued on the eve of
the postwar Paris peace conference of 1919, in which Zionist support for
Syrian independence would be rewarded with Hashemite backing for the
creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Anderson casts it, quite
accurately, as a "mutually beneficial relationship," without
the stain of opportunism he applies to Lawrence.
More troubling is the author's omission of strong and available
evidence that contradicts his view that Lawrence's embrace of Zionism was
false and expedient. In his 2009 article, "Lawrence of Judea,"
Sir Martin Gilbert appears to prove that Lawrence was actually a Zionist
as well as an Arab nationalist[6]—especially
as seen in his writings and statements from shortly after the time
Anderson's narrative on this issue ends. Why then did Anderson stop
there, omitting critical later material that undermines one of his
central findings about Lawrence?
Gilbert summons numerous sources, both public and private, to prove
his point. An important one, for example, is a 1920 essay
Lawrence published in the influential British periodical Round Table
assessing the Zionist project in Palestine: "The success of [the
Zionists' settlement plan] … will involve inevitably the raising of the present
Arab population to their own material level, only a little after
themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest
importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source
of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and
in that case, the new confederation might become a formidable element of
world power."
One can hardly be more pro-Zionist than that—and arguably, no more
pro-Arab, either. By placing Lawrence—a champion of both causes—essentially
on just one side of that tragic divide, at least in his heart of hearts,
Anderson has rendered his adventurous and eloquent inquiry into a less
than reliable narrative. That is a pity, for the complex—and
balanced—message of this enduringly enigmatic figure has great value both
for his time, and our own.
Raymond Stock is a
Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and senior
analyst at Wikistrat.
[1] New
York: Viking, 2007.
[2]
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002.
[3] New
York: Atheneum Books, 1990.
[4]
London: Collins, 1946.
[5] G.
F. Clayton to G. A. Lloyd 18.6.1918, Lloyd papers, GLLD 9/3, Churchill
College, Cambridge.
[6] Sir
Martin Gilbert, "Lawrence of Judea:
The champion of the Arab cause and his little-known romance with
Zionism," Azure, Autumn 2009, reprinted at aish.com,
Jerusalem, July 9, 2011.
Related
Topics: History, Israel & Zionism
| Raymond Stock
| Spring 2015 MEQ
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