It also provoked a furious backlash. In both Europe and the United States, many Jewish leaders—perhaps most—saw Zionism as a dangerous instrument that would isolate Jews from the nations of their birth, and provide fuel to the long-repeated accusation of Jews harboring a divided loyalty; some even suspected Zionism to be an anti-Semitic plot. For the anti-Zionists, the answer to the “Jewish Question” was not Israel but assimilation, full political and economic participation in the nations of their births, a goal finally coming within reach in much of Europe through the spread of democracy.
The “assimilationists” also appeared to have a powerful practical argument in their favor. Already by the early 1900s, some sixty thousand Jews lived in the Holy Land, and the great majority of them were either desperately poor or subsisting on subscriptions raised by their religious brethren abroad. Considering this, how could the wastelands of Palestine possibly sustain any significant percentage of the some ten million Jews then scattered about the globe?
It was in retort to this question that Aaron Aaronsohn—not just an agronomist, but an amateur archaeologist and an avid reader of history—could pose a compelling one of his own. What had sustained the Romans and the Babylonians and the Assyrians? From both archaeological excavations and old histories, it was clear that Palestine had once supported populations much greater than the estimated 700,000 inhabitants of the early 1900s, and it wasn’t as if the water sources or soil beds that sustained those civilizations had simply vanished. Rather, they had been lost to time, and were waiting to be rediscovered, retapped. Aaronsohn also had a persuasive modern example to point to. During his travels in the American West, he had made a special study of California, a place with very similar climate and soil conditions to Palestine. With water diverted from the Sierra Nevada, California’s Central Valley was already becoming the agricultural breadbasket of America and bringing in a flood of new settlers. The very same, Aaronsohn argued, could be achieved in Palestine, and with his unrivaled knowledge of the region, he was the man to do it.
In the face of such optimism, not to say arrogance, an expanding circle of wealthy American Jews warmed to Aaronsohn’s vision of a restored Israel. Before he left the United States in the autumn of 1909, a consortium of these businessmen and philanthropists had raised some $20,000 toward the creation of the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station in Palestine, a modern research center that Aaronsohn would oversee and that he vowed would become the preeminent such scientific facility in all the Middle East.
For his new venture, Aaronsohn set up operations on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean some eight miles north of Zichron Yaakov, a place named Athlit. Over the next several years, he laid in fields of experimental seedbeds and orchards, built a complex of greenhouses and laboratories. He also saw to the construction of a large two-story building, housing for the facility’s library and permanent workers, with a commanding view of the sea just one mile away. With a lack of sufficiently educated locals, Aaronsohn drew most of those permanent workers from among his own family—at various times all five of his siblings would be employed at Athlit—and it was they who oversaw its day-to-day operations, including supervising the field workers drawn from nearby Arab villages. “Before long,” biographer Ronald Florence noted, “the experimental plots at the research center were producing more wheat, barley and oats per dunam [about one thousand square meters] than long-established farms on much better soils.”
In light of his growing role as a recruiter for Zionism, it’s somewhat curious that Aaronsohn appeared to have spent very little time thinking through its social or political ramifications. He could put more Jews on the ground in Palestine, of that he was certain, but what it meant or what form their governance might take was all rather vague.
But this same vagueness extended to the Zionist movement itself. Among “social” and religious Zionists, the goal was quite modest: increased Jewish immigration to Palestine for those who wished to go, with no upsetting of the existing local political framework. Indeed, many of the businessmen who had donated to Aaronsohn’s research station considered themselves anti-Zionists, somehow imagining their involvement as apolitical, akin to helping rebuild a synagogue.
Even among those who embraced the idea of a “Jewish state,” there was very little agreement on its definition. In 1901, Theodor Herzl had met with the Ottoman sultan in hopes of actually purchasing Palestine. When that overture went nowhere, most successive Zionist leaders had advocated an incremental approach, of Jewish financiers gradually buying up land in Palestine for settlement, while simultaneously negotiating with Constantinople—negotiations that might take the form of bribes or the paying off of a portion of the Ottomans’ crushing foreign debt—to ensure Ottoman acceptance and protection of the new settlers. Whether such a scheme could ever lead to the kind of demographic shift allowing for Jewish majority rule was highly doubtful, however, given that Palestine’s existing non-Jewish population outnumbered Jews by ten to one. By the time of Aaronsohn’s luncheon with Teddy Roosevelt in 1913, however, a new, more promising prospect had presented itself. With the Ottoman Empire being torn at from all sides, its final collapse suddenly appeared imminent. If that fall did come and a European power took control of Palestine, the Zionists might be able to establish themselves under their protection. Both the most likely and most desirable such patron, in Aaronsohn’s estimation, was Great Britain.
STEWART NEWCOMBE WAS a legendary figure in the Near East, although not in a uniformly positive way. At the age of thirty-five, the Boer War veteran had already surveyed and mapped vast tracts of Egypt and the Sudan for the British government, and had gained the reputation of being an indefatigable explorer, capable of the work of ten ordinary men. That was part of the problem. Due to his habit of driving others as hard as he drove himself, the Arabs who worked with him in the coming war would say of Captain Stewart Newcombe that “he was like fire, burning both his friends and enemies.”
Not surprisingly then, Newcombe had been in a rather black mood as he left his camp in the Zin Desert on the morning of January 8 and made for Beersheva, a day’s camel ride away. He was going there to meet up with the two eminent archaeologists, lately working on a dig in northern Syria, who had been assigned to his mission in southern Palestine. Although he fully appreciated the need for the archaeologists—they were the political cover that would allow his five military mapping teams to do their clandestine work—this operation was designed to be a fast-moving one over an unspeakably harsh landscape, and tending to the needs of two Oxford scholars was the last thing Newcombe needed. He had earlier sent ten camels to meet their boat in Gaza to transport their gear—archaeologists always had lots of gear—and he was coming out of the desert with more to handle the inevitable overflow.
A very pleasant surprise awaited him in Beersheva. “I expected to meet two somewhat elderly people; [instead] I found C. L. Woolley and T. E. Lawrence, who looked about twenty-four years of age and eighteen respectively.… My letters to them arranging for their reception had clearly been too polite. Undue deference ceased forthwith.”
Far from needing a small camel caravan to haul their equipment, when Lawrence and Woolley had come off the boat in Gaza, accompanied by Lawrence’s young assistant Dahoum, all their possessions had fit neatly onto the back of one small donkey. That had now been expanded somewhat by the purchase of camping and photographic supplies, but clearly the two young archaeologists appreciated the need for traveling light on the brutal terrain they were about to enter.
That evening, Newcombe spelled out to the men from Syria both what they were expected to do and the sub rosa purpose of the expedition. On this latter aspect, Lawrence had already pretty well figured things out. “We are obviously only meant as red herrings,” he had written his parents en route to Palestine, “to give an archaeological colour to a political job.”
That political job arose from a problem that Great Britain had largely brought upon itself. As the European power most dependent
on control of the seas, Britain had been the driving force behind the construction of the Suez Canal in Egypt in the 1870s, seeing the linking of the Mediterranean to the Red Sea as a vital military and commercial shortcut in keeping its far-flung empire knitted together. So vital did it deem the canal that Britain had been willing to sacrifice its long-standing good relations with the Ottoman Empire in order to take possession of it outright, a feat accomplished by its 1882 invasion of Egypt under the pretext of quelling local unrest. That had delivered up the west bank of the Suez Canal, Egypt’s de facto frontier, but it left the now hostile Ottomans still hovering on its east bank in the Sinai Peninsula. This problem was soon resolved; in 1906, Britain had capitalized on a minor diplomatic dispute to grab that territory also. The end result was something of a trade-off. The British now had their canal, along with the 120-mile-wide buffer zone of the Sinai Peninsula separating Egypt from the heavily settled Palestine region of southwest Syria. On the flip side, they had won the undying resentment of the Ottomans.
That was a small price to pay in 1882 and 1906, perhaps, but a rather different story by the beginning of 1914. With Europe stumbling ever closer toward a continent-wide war, the British were suddenly quite concerned by the sorry state of British-Ottoman relations, and by ominous signs that Constantinople was sliding into the orbit of Britain’s avowed enemy, Germany. If the war everyone expected did come, the Suez Canal would be the crucial passageway for bringing British territorial troops from India and Australia to Europe; of course, if Turkey joined with Germany in that war, they would undoubtedly target the canal for this same reason. Britain’s problems wouldn’t end there. In the event that the enemy succeeded in crossing the canal and getting into Egypt itself, it was very likely to spark an anti-British insurrection by a population that thoroughly despised them, tying up British soldiers who would be needed for the fight in Europe.
In contemplating this scenario the British belatedly came to appreciate the downside to their Sinai buffer zone, one inherent to the very concept of buffer zones: how to know what lies on the other side? The British had a very good idea of what lay at the Sinai’s northeastern tip—the populous and long-cultivated region of the Palestine coast—but they knew virtually nothing of the desert frontier that ran southeast from that coast to the Gulf of Aqaba, one hundred miles away. Were there roads there, water wells that might sustain an invasion force?
The person most preoccupied with finding out was Egypt’s de facto ruler, the British agent and consul general, Horatio Herbert Kitchener. By 1914, Lord Kitchener was Britain’s preeminent living war hero—he had crushed a native revolt in the Sudan during the Mahdi War in 1898, then led British forces to victory in the Boer War in 1902—but by one of those peculiar happenstances of history, as a young man Kitchener had been a geographical surveyor, and his crowning achievement was the mapping of Palestine. The one corner of Palestine that Kitchener and his cosurveyors had skipped over was the desolate wastelands of Zin—essentially the triangle-shaped lower half of modern-day Israel—the survey sponsors figuring there was simply no political or economic reason to include it. But it was precisely this unmapped triangle that now lay on the other side of the Sinai buffer zone.
Considering the enmity that had developed between the two empires, Kitchener had shown remarkable chutzpah in 1913 when “offering” the Ottomans the services of the British Royal Engineers to conduct a survey of Zin; unsurprisingly, Constantinople quickly turned the offer down. By happy coincidence, however, Zin also figured prominently in the biblical Book of Exodus, the region that Moses and the Israelites passed through at the end of their forty-year flight out of Egypt. This provided a handy theological and historical explanation for why a Christian nation might want to explore the region, and when the British tried this tack on Constantinople—repackaging their earlier offer so that it was now to be an archaeological survey of biblical sites under the auspices of the respected Palestine Exploration Fund—the ploy actually worked. It was this ruse that had brought Lawrence and Woolley to Beersheva, and that gave Newcombe the necessary cover for his military mapping teams.
Very quickly, whatever initial reservations Newcombe may have harbored at being saddled with the two archaeologists were erased. In Lawrence especially, he seemed to find a kindred spirit, a man so indifferent to creature comforts and possessed of such astounding endurance that it bordered on the masochistic.
He also detected a curious quirk in Lawrence’s personality, a tendency to rise out of his core shyness in response to those who would obfuscate or stand in his way. An early example of this was his verbal torturing of the poor American oilmen in Beersheva. Most shy people tend to become more so when faced with a potentially confrontational situation, but with Lawrence and the Americans it had been precisely the opposite, the young archaeologist turning the encounter into a game of cat-and-mouse, with himself playing the cat. It indicated a streak of gamesmanship in Lawrence, a quality that would stand him in good stead as he faced off with the petty Ottoman officials who, Newcombe was sure, would try to obstruct their every move.
But in fact, far more than the Ottomans, it was the “Wilderness” of Zin itself that posed the greatest challenges to Lawrence and Woolley. Operating independently of the military survey teams, although frequently checked in on by Newcombe, they maintained a relentless pace over the bleak terrain, driving their camels and small team of camp orderlies to the point of ruin. At least these locals were accustomed to the region; coming from the more temperate climes of northern Syria, Lawrence and Woolley suffered terribly in the parched and sunbaked land.
These discomforts might have been partially offset if they’d found what they came to look for. They didn’t. Instead, other than a few ruins dating from the Byzantine period or later, they found very few structures at all in the region—and certainly nothing suggesting an Exodus-era settlement.
But then there had always been something of a built-in fallacy to the Zin project, one the Ottomans might have deduced if they’d pondered matters a bit longer. In a landscape so inhospitable that even the hardy Bedouin nomads abandoned it in summer, why would Moses and the Israelites—forty years wandering in the desert and presumably eager to finally get somewhere nice—have lingered in this hellhole any longer than necessary? This was a point Lawrence touched on in a somewhat arch letter to his parents: “The Palestine Fund, of course, wants to find sites illustrating the Exodus, which is supposed to have passed this way. But of course a people 40 years out of Egypt could hardly leave much trace of themselves in their later camping grounds.”
· · ·
ON THE MORNING of November 12, 1913, Curt Prüfer made a most painful decision. For a brief time it had appeared that he might finally attain the respect and status he had always sought—as a scholar, as a sterling example of the new Germany—but then it had all turned to ash. Actually, it was worse than that, for in the bitter struggle waged over his candidacy to a prestigious position in the Egyptian power structure, Prüfer’s British enemies had not only made sure he was denied the post, but professionally destroyed him in the process. On that morning, Prüfer sat at his desk in the German embassy and composed a terse letter of resignation from the foreign ministry, the institution that had been his home for the previous seven years. A few days later, the now former embassy official left for Jerusalem, there to await the arrival of his artist friend Richard von Below for their extended journey up the Nile.
In one of the more curious features of the European imperialist era, the dueling European powers often employed an intricate division-of-spoils system in their colonial realms with their imperial rivals, a way both to secure acceptance of their claims to hegemony and reduce those rivals’ incentive for stirring local unrest.
From the standpoint of scholarly prestige, few foreigner-allotted positions in Cairo were more coveted than that of director of the khedival library. Since the signing of a bilateral accord in 1906, that post was reserved for a German. In late 1911, with the sitting Ger
man director slated for retirement, the German embassy put forward the name of Dr. Curt Prüfer as his replacement.
Its innocuous-sounding title notwithstanding, the post was a very sensitive one. In Ottoman times, the khedive had been the designated Egyptian head of state, and for the British to maintain the fiction that they had somehow been acting as a guarantor of Ottoman rule by their 1882 invasion, they had kept the khedive on as a figurehead. Since 1892, this had been Abbas Hilmi II. While Abbas was understandably never a big supporter of British rule to begin with, his dissatisfaction had dramatically deepened with Lord Kitchener’s arrival on the scene in 1911. As the new British agent to Egypt, Kitchener had quickly grown so tired of Abbas—or as he preferred to call him, “this wicked little khedive”—that he’d begun stripping him of even his purely ceremonial duties. In response, Abbas had increasingly taken to using the offices of his “library” to stay in quiet contact with a host of Egyptian dissidents opposed to British rule.
Of course, what was bad for Britain was good for Germany, and by their control of the library directorship the Germans enjoyed the perfect cover to cultivate and maintain their own contacts with the anti-British Egyptian community. This was precisely what the outgoing German director had done, and in late 1911 the British had every expectation that Dr. Curt Prüfer, now promoted from dragoman to Oriental secretary at the German embassy, would uphold the tradition.
Lawrence in Arabia Page 8
