The British officer
Lawrence--a pan-Arabist nationalist and a Zionist--played a key role in the
Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire army in the Middle East war theater.
Lawrence wrote in 1909 about the then Ottomann-controlled Palestine: “The
sooner the Jews farm it the better: their colonies are bright spots in a
desert.”
In a rarely noted 1920 article titled “The Changing East,” Lawrence wrote of
the Jewish biblical connection to Israel. For Lawrence, “the Jewish experiment”
to create a homeland was “a conscious effort, on the part of the least European
people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once
more to the Orient from which they came.”
T.E. Lawrence, the British
military officer whose famous liaison role in the Middle East in the First
World War earned him the nickname "Lawrence of Arabia," was one of
the early Gentile visionaries to realize the importance the newly reborn Nation
of Israel had to play in the region.
On November 28, 1918, a year after the Balfour Declaration, Lawrence wrote to
the British newspaper "The Jewish Guardian," cited in Martin
Gilbert's "Churchill and the Jews," that “Speaking entirely as a
non-Jew, I look on the Jews as the natural importers of Western leaven so
necessary for countries of the Near East.”Lawrence, who despite being born out of wedlock,
had parents who were devout Christians – members of the St. Aldate’s Church,
which preached an evangelical type of Christianity. He studied the Holy Land in
Sunday school, starting him out on the path to a long love for the Middle East
and its history - and later, helping determine its future.
An expert on Crusader castles already in
university, Lawrence took his knowledge to the Middle East, working in
archeology and a map surveying, learning the local languages and customs in the
years just prior to the Great War breaking out.
Returning to in the region during the war,
Lawrence made well-known his desire for the Arab population to gain
independence, but he also made clear that Zionist dreams were meant to flourish
as well.
"His relationship to the Zionist movement
was a very positive one, in spite of the fact that he was strongly pro-Arab and
he has been mistakenly represented as anti-Zionist," wrote Zionist leader
and Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, in his autobiography "Trial
and Error."
Lawrence had interpreted a meeting between
Weizmann and Prince Faisal, where Weizmann told the Arab emir that a future
Jewish state would not encroach on the "ownership rights of Arab
peasantry.”
Gilbert, Winston Churchill's biographer, wrote
that Lawrence's presence at the Cairo Conference in 1921, which would decide on
the future of the Middle East was of "inestimable benefit to [British
Colonial Secretary Winston] Churchill in his desire to help establish a Jewish
National Home in Palestine."
But the real desire to see the Jewish People
succeed may have gone back to his days of learning the about the Kingdom of
Israel in Sunday school.
"It is a conscious effort, on the part of
the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the
ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came," Lawrence
wrote in a 1920 article called "The Great East."
“The colonists will take back with them to the
land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of
all the knowledge and technique of Europe."
But the Jewish Nation would not just be
returning home, they would be returning the Holy Land – a wasteland for almost
2,000 years – to its glory days.
"Palestine was a decent country then, and
could so easily be made so again," he wrote in a letter during his early
years in the region, cited in "The Letters of T.E. Lawrence," edited
by David Garnett
"The sooner the Jews
farm it all the better: Their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”
To learn
more about Jewish-Christian relations, and the building of the modern State of
Israel as envisaged by the prophets of the Bible check us out at
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