Aaronsohn's Maps : The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East

by Goldstone, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780151011698
• ISBN10: 0151011699
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-10
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Scientist, diplomat, and spy, Aaron Aaronsohn was one of the most extraordinary figures in the early struggle to create a homeland for the Jews. Born to Jewish settlers in Palestine, he ran a spy network that enabled the British to capture Jerusalem during World War I and made him the rival of his contemporary, T. E. Lawrence who may also have been his flamboyant sister Sarah s lover. A rugged adventurer, Aaronsohn became convinced during his explorations of the Middle East that water would govern the regions fate. He compiled both the areas first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestines national borders that predicted and in its insistence on partnership between Arabs and Jews might have prevented the decades of conflict to come. And he paid for his devotion to the new nation with his life. A history that speaks directly to the present, Aaronsohns Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohns key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohns maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

Author Biography

PATRICIA GOLDSTONE has been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and has written for the Washington Post, Maclean’s, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, among others. She is the author of Making the World Safe for Tourism. She lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 1
The jew in the bathchair	p. 11
The spies of moses	p. 28
Flying the zionist kite in america	p. 55
Minuet	p. 76
The locust hunter	p. 95
Felix krull, confidence man	p. 118
He who writes the dispatches	p. 147
“Our people”	p. 169
The sacrifice	p. 201
Icarus falls from the sky	p. 226
Inconvenient heroes	p. 260
Aaronsohn’s road map	p. 285
Acknowledgments	p. 321
Select bibliography on source notes	p. 323
Index	p. 337
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1. The Jew in the BathchairThe Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. But if you're on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little whitefaced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world right now and he has his knife in the empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps In the autumn of 1882, a tattered delegation of Romanian Jews arrived in Constantinople and landed in front of the American minister, Lew Wallace, a Civil War general famous as the author of Ben Hur. They were led by an Englishman, Laurence Oliphant, a gentile Zionist who petitioned Wallace to intercede with the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II to allow the Jews to settle in that part of Abdul Hamids empire called Palestine. Among the convoy were Ephraim Fischel Aaronsohn, an entrepreneurial farmer from Falticeni, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, and his pious young wife, Malkah. Eager for a home that would allow them to realize their ambitions, they had made the long, dangerous journey by train, diligence, and ferry with their only child, a robust and curious six-year-old boy named Aaron. The Aaronsohns journey was set in motion by the great turning point in the modern history of the Jews, the pogroms of 1881. Imperial Russias revival and extension of the Ignatieff Decrees, stifling Jewish economic activities in the Pale, created a tidal wave that sent Russian Jews spilling over the border into Romania, Romanian Jews pouring into Austria, and Jews from all parts of Eastern Europe crowding into the slums of the cities of the West. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in the isthmus of Europe between the Black Sea and the Baltic were driven from areas they had inhabited for years by Romanian and Serbian nationalist peasant leaders engorged with new liberties and power as their provinces slipped away from Ottoman control. The Aaronsohns became part of the wave of predominantly bourgeois Zionists who came to the Holy Land before 1885 that was known as the First Aliyah. Like the word haj in Arabic, aliyah means pilgrimage. Unique among the arrivals of the First Aliyah, Ephraim Fischel was not only skilled at agriculture but modestly knowledgeable about hydrology as well. In his native Romania, he had parlayed his success as a farmer into owning a prosperous inn and had managed the holdings of a number of great landowners before his prosperity invited persecution. The pious Malkah was a beauty, not without a streak of coquetry, and her upwardly mobile husband was inordinately proud of her. Malkah could claim a lineage going back to King David. Her revered father, Rabbi Samuel Galatzanu (who fled Russia for Falticeni, which lies close to the Russian border), had been tortured by the Romanian authorities when a Christian chi

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Excerpted from Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East by Patricia Goldstone
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