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

Patricia Goldstone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2007

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 region’s fate. He compiled both the area’s first detailed water maps and a plan for Palestine’s 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, Aaronsohn’s Maps reveals for the first time Aaronsohn’s key role in establishing Israel and the enduring importance of Aaronsohn’s maps in Middle Eastern politics today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Goldstone (Making the World Safe for Tourism) puts scarce Mideastern water resources front and center in this flawed biography of Aaron Aaronsohn (1876–1919), a founder of NILI, a group that spied for the British in Palestine during WWI, and a pioneering agronomist and hydrologist. Goldstone is best at depicting British diplomacy and intra-Jewish politics leading up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine—a British declaration influenced, she shows, by a 1916 memo from Aaronsohn on Palestine's potential to absorb million of Jews. Goldstone makes errors (such as stating that Israel lost the Sinai Peninsula in the 1973 Yom Kippur War) and offers the tendentious, unsourced claim that in 2003, right-wing Jewish lobbyists hoped that a defeated Iraq would be used as a haven for persecuted Palestinians run out of Israel. Above all, she never makes a case for her thesis that Aaronsohn's plan for regional sharing of water resources could have prevented the longstanding Arab-Israeli conflict. (For another account of Aaronsohn's life, see Lawrence and Aaronsohn, reviewed on p. 46.) 8 pages of b&w photos. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

PRAISE FOR MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR TOURISM

 

"Original and fascinating."--Dennis Judd, coauthor of The Tourist City

 

"[A] creative, witty, and insightful look at the ruthless underpinnings of international tourism."--Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

 

"Aaron Aaronsohn''s fascinating story will come as a major surprise to most students of Middle Eastern history... a tour de force."

(Winnipeg Free Press )

"[A] well-researched, resourceful, politically balanced... account of the life of the man who made the fatal mistake of taking issue with the leaders of the Zionist movement... Hers is the first true biography."

(H.V.F. Winstone, author of THE ILLICIT ADVENTURE )

"[A] spry scholarly detective story... Goldstone honors both Aaronsohns, closing with notes on how Aaron''s plans for equitable water rights in Palestine might have led to peace today."

(Kirkus Reviews )

"[O]ffers the intriguing notion that, had Aaronsohn lived, his unique survey of Palestinian water sources could eventually have facilitated a peaceful boundary with Lebanon and Syria."

(Library Journal )

"How we got to the Middle East of today is at the heart and soul of "Aaronsohn''s Maps" by Patricia Goldstone. Goldstone has dug deep to come up with the bio of the agronomist, diplomat and spy who helped found Israel. There''s more than a touch of T.E. Lawrence in this child of Jewish settlers in Palestine: Aaron Aaronsohn''s spy network helped the British take Jerusalem in World War I; he compiled the first maps of water in the arid region; his sister, also a spy and possibly Lawrence''s lover, was captured and tortured to death. Aaronsohn died in a plane crash in 1919; his vision for a peaceful Middle East died as well."

(San Diego Union Tribune )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (September 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151011699
• ISBN-13: 978-0151011698
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,263,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Aaronsohn's memory besmirched, September 7, 2007

By 

F. Brauer (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (Hardcover)

Aaronson's Maps" is a misleading and confusing book. It claims to be a biography of an unsung hero of the Zionist revolution in the Land of Israel - Aaron Aaronsohn. A brilliant and versatile man, he won worldwide fame as a discoverer of wild wheat. During WWI, convinced that the British victory over the Turkish army was vital for the Jewish future in Palestine, Aaronsohn organized the NILI group, a spy ring which provided the British army with important information facilitating British victory over the Turks. In 1919 Aaronson joined the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference where the case for Jewish independence in Palestine was presented to "The Big Four". He died in a plane crash on his way to Paris to present maps of the future Jewish state. His arguments, used by the Zionist delegation, convinced the world that Palestine had enough water resources to sustain large Jewish and Arabs communities. Unfortunately, "Aaronsohn's maps" fails the memory of Aaronsohn and lets down many in Israel who sincerely cooperated with Patricia Goldstone providing her with documents about Aaronsohn and the NILI group. The author, not being a professional historian, displays a cavalier attitude toward historical facts. She reshuffles them with dexterity of a gossip columnist ill-prepared to deal with complex historical situations. The heroic image of Aaronsohn is besmirched by unfounded conclusions. His dreams and ideas of the Jewish revival in the Land of Israel are corrupted by insinuations of Zionist intrigues which allegedly precipitated WWI in Europe and, later, the intervention of the USA in that war. Goldstone fails to present her main claim that Aaronsohn is "a man who might have created peace in the Middle East". Instead she is rehashing the current events in the Middle East trying to prove that the wars between Arabs and Jews are about sharing water resources, not about the attempts of Islam to eliminate the state of Israel. The reader who is interested in an intellectually honest book on Aaronsohn and his times should read "Lawrence and Aaronsohn" - a compelling account written by professional historian Ronald Florence.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A deeply flawed and confusing book., October 27, 2009

By 

Daniel Abraham "falconwhit" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (Hardcover)

I had previously read three other books related to the Aaronsohn story so I expected to be on familiar territory when I picked up this book.

The very beginning held great promises - I actually felt it would be a 5 star book. Unfortunately, as I read on, my initial impression gave way to bafflement, and after finishing this book, I was more willing to give it a half star...

Presented as a serious work of research, it is actually more of a sensationalist collection of unsubstantiated claims, theories that don't add up and, overall, a most confusing text.

Threads are started to be abandonned without conclusions, theories are built based on muddled logic, unsubstantiated claims are presented as facts, while in some cases Goldstone simply seems to contradict herself. (For instance, she seems to question that the Armenian massacre ever happened, then towards the end of the book seems to accept it as a fact.)

Even the title of the book is misleading - the author only devotes a few pages towards the end to Aaron's proposed maps for Palestine, spending more time trying to prove - inconclusively - that Sarah was Lawrence of Arabia's one and true love.

I have never read a book with so many factual errors, which is surprising as Goldstone has clearly done a lot of research. However, it seems that some of it was shoddy, while in other cases she got confused, and yet in other cases she decided to reinterpret the facts to fit her conclusions.


Here are some of the errors I have found which show a lack of historical and cultural knowledge on her subject:

- p 74: Aaron Aaronsohn is described as "first Sabra" ("Aaron, by now too accustomed to his leading role as first sabra" - however he was born in Romania. By definition, a Sabra meanse a native-born Israeli Jew

- p 84, Goldstone makes the opposite mistake: "Absalom Feinberg was a biluim, one of an early group of Russian Marxists who emigrated in the Second Aliyah and set up an agricultural colony at Gadera"

However, Avshalom Feinberg was not a "biluim" - his parents were. He was actually a sabra, having been born in Gedera in 1889 - He is considered by many to have been the first sabra.

Also, It's Gedera or Gederah, not Gadera - Goldstone probably confused it with Hadera, another Israeli town

- p 90: "Hashomer was one of the building blocks of Irgun"
Hashomer, a Socialist Zionist self-defense organisation, ceased to operate in 1920, whereas Irgun, a right wing group which resorted to terrorism, was founded in 1931.

- p.195: Goldstone confuses "Moshava" and "Moshav" - calling Moshava a farming cooperative.
A simple wikipedia search would have showed her that moshava and moshav are two very different things: a moshav is indeed a farming cooperative, however a moshava is simply a small settlement, a small village - where all the land and property are privately-owned.

- p12: "Aliyah" is translated as the equivallent of the Arabic "haj" - pilgrimage. Aliyah really means "ascension" - coming up to the torah in the synagogue, and by extension to immigrate to Zion.


A baffling decision by Patricia Goldstone was to change two Jewish names to make them sound Arabic: Sarah's last lover, Yoseph Lishtanksy, is now called "Yussuf Lishtansky", while Haim Abraham, Sarah's husband - who was also the brother of my grandfather - has his last name changed to the more Arabic-sounding Haim "Abrahim".

(Harcourt: did this book even get edited? Wouldn't anyone seeing "Yussuf Lishtansky" find that combination quite improbable? Can the author justify this affectation?)

The author also gets the caption wrong for the photo of the Aaronsohn family which has been used in every single Aaronsohn-related book: Sarah's husband, Haim Abraham, is confused with one of her brothers, Tzvi Aaronsohn. This type of error will probably bother few readers, however I couldn't help but wonder how such errors were possible from someone who clearly had access to the Aaronsohn archives in Zichron, where this photo is blown up on the main wall.

Basically a confusing mess with way too many errors to be read for anything more than amateurish ramblings.

Readers interested in the Aaronsohn story should read instead "The Aaronsohn Saga" by Shmuel Katz or "Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T. E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict" by Ronald Florence

Avoid.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Greatly disappointing, May 4, 2009

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (Hardcover)

Unfortunately, I must agree with F. Brauer that this book is a sad disappointment. The title attracted me, as I wanted to learn more of Aaron Aaronsohn, without whom the British and their allies could never have prevailed in World War I. He and his sister Sarah (another key figure in this war) believed British victory in their fight against the Ottoman Empire was critical for the Jewish people in Israel, or what was then known by the ancient Roman name of Palestine. The Aaronsohns based their opinion in large measure on gross Ottoman mistreatment of the Jewish and Armenian populations prior to and during World War I, when thousands were deported and starved, as recorded by David Fromkin and Samuel Katz, among others.

Aaron formed a group of spies (NILI) to give the British army data critical to their war effort, and following their victory, in 1919 was scheduled to attend the Paris Peace Conference with the Zionist delegation to help present the Jewish case for Jewish independence in Palestine to Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. He died in a flight that crashed en route to Paris, possibly because the pilot was shot by someone in another plane that ALSO crashed, but whose passenger and pilot both survived. Aaronsohn's maps of the proposed state of Israel were also lost, most probably intentionally destroyed.

The Jewish contingent to the Peace Conference successfully leveraged Aaronsohn's central point---that Israel had enough water to support large Jewish and Arab communities---to support a Jewish state. But as previously noted by the above-mentioned reviewer, Patricia Goldstone's account seriously defames Aaronsohn's memory.

While the author provides a bibliography of titles she supposedly consulted to prepare each chapter, the volume contains no footnotes whatsoever, and it's impossible to know which sources she actually used. In many instances, there is no historical record I know of backing her presumptions. She claims, for example, that Aaronsohn wanted the Jewish homeland to extend all the way to the Euphrates, a nonsensical idea commonly employed to defame the Jewish people by rabid anti-Zionists such as the Shi'ite fanatics running Iran's Radio Islam. She furthermore insinuates that the Jewish people in general, and Aaronsohn in particular, somehow instigated World War I, another preposterous notion seriously harbored only by the most hateful of people.

Goldstone also constantly contradicts herself. Aaronsohn wanted the Jewish state to extend northward up to and including the Litani River, and to include the headwaters of the Jordan River, and the Banias. Goldstone implies that this plan could somehow have produced peace, although she does not exactly explain how.

On the other hand, Goldstone goes to great lengths to falsely accuse Israel of trying to steal water from other states, which like Israel ultimately resulted from the same League of Nations and Paris Peace Conference that eventually birthed the Jewish state. After falsely accusing Israel of war-mongering to steal water, moreover, Goldstone blames Israel for creating all the Middle East's current-day problems.

Uum, excuse me? Number one, including the Litani River and Jordan headwaters in the National Homeland for the Jewish people could have created peace, according to Goldstone. Yet Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan resulted from the same flawed process that eventually created Israel. So how does Goldstone conclude that Israel alone is to blame for all current-day problems?

Obviously, Goldstone arrived at these absurd conclusions since she was predisposed against Israel in the first place. Her anti-Israel bias grows ever-more blatant as one reads on. She accuses Israel of launching the 2006 Lebanon war to claim the Litani River. In reality, Hezbollah initiated the war when it breached Israel's northern border and then indiscriminately and heavily bombed civilian areas of northern Israel and Haifa.

In the initial attack, moreover, Hezbollah terrorists killed several Israeli border guards on the Israeli side, and kidnapped two others --- whose corpses, after leading Jerusalem to believe the men were alive --- Hezbollah only years later returned in exchange for 1,000 terrorist prisoners.

Goldstone undeniably proves her anti-Jewish predilection through the sources she considers "reliable." These include anti-Israel propagandist Patrick Seale, the rabidly anti-Israel Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and, Goldstone's piece de resistance, Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha, who during the 2006 Hezbollah-instigated war (which Hezbollah fought with weapons smuggled from Iran via Syria) appeared nightly on CNN to condemn Israel, with the most blatant anti-Jewish hatred I'd theretofore seen on any news broadcasts. Moreover, Moustapha serially repeated obvious and outrageous lies. None of these are objective, much less trustworthy, sources.

Yet when it comes to Israeli sources, anyone who might explain Israel's genuine defensive motives, Goldstone dismisses as "right wing" nuts. To her, Israel's need for water (no different than the needs of Arab states) somehow constitute "crimes against humanity," while Arab efforts to control water sources, according to her, are not.

Clearly Goldstone has read widely. The book is extremely well written and has much interesting detail. Yet Goldstone cannot bring herself to discard her basic anti-Israel bias long enough to consider actual facts --- including her own point that "In 1878, Palestine had 340,000 inhabitants; in 1915, 722,000, including Arabs attracted by the promise of new regional prosperity."

The Arab population more than doubled in little more than 30 years --- also through immigration --- precisely thanks to the "promise" created by Jewish immigration and development. Since Jewish development created enough prosperity to attract so many Arab immigrants, how exactly do Israel's creation and demand for water constitute a crime against humanity?

Aaronsohn's maps undoubtedly did prove there was enough water in the Middle East to sustain large Jewish and Arab populations, and we can see today that these populations are sustained by that water.

But after pretending that Aaronsohn wanted to claim virtually all of the Middle East, Goldstone intentionally misleads readers, purporting that the Arab conflict with the Jewish people concerns only water.

No, the perennial Arab war against Israel is, first and last, an Islamic jihad to defeat the existence of ANY non-Muslim state, especially a Jewish one, in any land once conquered and ruled by Muslims. The conflict long predated modern Zionism, as is aptly proven by the genuine historical scholarship in books like Bat Ye'or's Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam and The Dhimmi, as well as Dr. Andrew Bostom's Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Legacy of Jihad.

I, too, strongly recommend Ronald Florence's Lawrence and Aaronsohn, which details the relationship of T. E. Lawrence with Aaron Aaronsohn and more accurately describes "the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict."

---Alyssa A. Lappen