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.)
