Lawrence has been a known Zionist sympathizer for nearly a century. Shortly after Lawrence died in 1935, Chaim Weizmann wrote that "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 mistakenly been represented as anti-Zionist." Lawrence's attitude was not confined to a particularly propitious moment, after the Balfour Declaration and before the first riots, when Weizmann was holding friendly talks with Emir Faisal in 1919 and everything seemed possible.
In 1909, Lawrence, then an archeologist, wrote to his mother while pottering around in Turkish-ruled Galilee, that in Roman times "the country was well peopled and well watered artificially... Palestine was a decent country then, and could so easily be made so again. The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert."
And this is just part of the long-published evidence of Lawrence's sympathies. Nor is it so surprising that an archeologist associated with the Palestine Exploration Fund, whose founders were Zionist before the word was invented, should be supportive of Jews' as well as Arabs'
self-determination in their ancestral homelands.
The creed of the British government of the day in 1919 was, after all, "Armenia for the Armenians, Arabia for the Arabs and Judea for the Jews." Lawrence subscribed to all three propositions
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