Tuesday, April 12, 2016

TE Lawrence: Jews Occupied Land; Propose to Settle

T.E. Lawrence meant that in a very positive sense:

...The Jewish experiment is in another class. 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. 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. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arabic-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organised as a European state. The success of their scheme will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power. However, such a contingency will not be for the first or even for the second generation, but it must be borne in mind in any laying out of foundations of empire in Western Asia. 

From his article, 'The Changing East', published in The Round Table, September 1920.

And then there's this:


From David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938, p. 71.)

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2 comments:

Shadowstands said...

This is a really good article..I always thought he was an Arab Supremacist to the denigration of all other Peoples.

Eliyahu m'Tsiyon said...

Mara, the fact that what you knew about Lawrence did not include the fact that he was in fact a Zionist sympathizer is another demonstration of how there has been a systematic endeavor, at least in the UK and USA, to keep that fact and similar information from the ordinary reader.