Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Sarah’s fears mingled with surprise. It was clear that the Turks knew very little about the NILI spies, and they were certainly wrong to suspect her father of being the mastermind. Ephraim had known about the NILI ring that his eldest son Aaron had founded in 1915 and that Sarah, his most loved elder daughter, was now directing. Although her father was in his sixties, thirty-five years of grinding labor in the fields of Zichron Ya’akov had taken its toll; the death of his beloved wife Malkah two years earlier had left him sad and withdrawn. While he had been deliberately kept from knowing the details of the NILI operations, he was aware of the peril to his family and stubborn enough to keep silent.

  Summoning some of his old dignity, Ephraim tried to deal with the judge by assuring him that he had always had correct dealings with the Ottoman officials in Haifa, that there had to be some terrible mistake. His oldest son, Aaron, was away pursuing his scientific studies; another son, Alexander, now lived in Cyprus. He did not know where other people were that were named to him. He had never heard the word NILI before. There were no British spies in Zichron Ya’akov.

  When the judge coldly called him a liar, Ephraim managed a weak smile and a shrug; he could say no more than what he had said. Sarah felt a brief surge of pride at her father’s bravery, but she was very much afraid at what would happen next. Djamal Pasha, the Ottoman’s ruling authority over all Syria–Palestine, had come in 1915 fresh from directing the start of the genocide of Turkey’s Armenian population. More recently he had ordered the execution of hundreds of Arab leaders who were merely suspected of sympathizing with the revolt against Turkish rule that had begun among the Arab desert tribes to the south. Torture had preceded nearly all of those executions. With Colonel Aziz Bek as his enforcer, other Ottoman officials had learned at their own peril to be merciless.

  At his nod the Turkish soldiers moved with practiced ease. Ephraim was forced to kneel on a chair and securely tied in place. While the sergeant forcibly held her father’s head erect so he was forced to stare into the eyes of his inquisitors, the two soldiers began to beat the soles of his bare feet with supple canes. They measured each stroke to alternate the pain and they continued even after the swelling had burst blood vessels on his soles and sent Ephraim into a cycle of screaming and fainting that would be revived by each new stroke. Known as bastinado, the Turks by legend used this form of torture as a first stage in interrogation because while the pain was unendurable it kept subjects alive for more intense interrogation later.

  To her horror, Sarah was forced to watch while her broken father had ceased to cry for mercy and had lapsed into mumbling prayers for deliverance in the Romanian Yiddish he had foresworn forty years earlier when, like most new settlers, he had pledged to speak only in the pure Hebrew of the new Israel.

  Finally, the magistrate and police chief rose from their chairs as Ephraim was dragged past Sarah and dropped into one of the rooms to the rear. The magistrate announced that the two officials would go to the hotel for needed refreshment, but when they returned they expected the information they required from the newest Jewish spy who had been brought to them. Coldly he turned to look at Sarah before they left and she knew her turn was next.

  She must hold out. She had determined that nothing be revealed. She alone knew all of the inner workings of the NILI organization and the identities of the more than sixty people who provided it with its flow of critical intelligence. Sarah had become the most central figure in the vast NILI network that she and her brothers had created over the last two years. More crucially, she alone also held a great secret. A vast British expeditionary force had been formed in Egypt under General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby, and it was poised to launch a lightning attack on the Turks with the goal of capturing the regional capital of Jerusalem. Using intelligence Sarah had gathered from the NILI network, notably their secret maps of the Bedouin wells that dotted the arid Gaza desert, Allenby intended to bypass the heavily fortified coastal roads of Palestine and flank the entrenched Ottoman positions.

  The British attack could come any day now, any hour. It was imperative that Allenby be warned that the NILI group was in peril. Sarah knew she had to endure the soldiers’ tortures and not reveal where the other NILI spies could be found. But equally important, she had to find a way to break free of her torturers long enough to contact the British once more. It could bring rescue and liberation for her and her compatriots, but more important, the Ottoman hold on Palestine must be broken if Israel were to become more than a fragile dream.

  As one admirer would claim later, Sarah Aaronsohn was about to become the Joan of Arc of Israel.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Who Was Sarah Aaronsohn?

  1890–1905

  Sarah Aaronsohn on her horse, Tayar, ca. 1917

  In the early spring of 1917, when Sarah Aaronsohn was briefly in Cairo, she was a shadow of her former self. Just three years before, the twenty-four-year-old bride had been the picture of robust, healthy beauty. Sarah was what we would today judge to be of moderate height, but then she was taller than most girls in her village. With a high, proud bosom and small waist, Sarah’s firm stride testified to her long girlhood spent as an active horsewoman in the Carmel foothills beyond the town. Her fine features were dominated by the same piercing direct gaze of other Aaronsohns, and the same coppery golden hair that caused her Arab neighbors to stare at her.

  But now the gaiety and laughter that had sprung from her so readily had been lost by the privations of three years of war and the Turkish military’s ransacking of Syria–Palestine’s crops and livestock. She had lost considerable weight along with her carefree humor. But in their place she had gained the cold determined stare of the zealot who faced death as a necessary risk for the cause for which she fought. The war had certainly changed Sarah. She had been a proud optimistic pioneer in a new land that offered the dream of an Eretz Israel, the Biblical Zion for the world’s dispossessed Jews. Now she had become a hardened warrior to keep that flickering dream alive. However, history ordained a different path for the Aaronsohn family and especially for Sarah.

  Sarah’s entire life had been one of constant change and metamorphosis. Had Ephraim and Malkah Aaronsohn remained in Romania, Sarah would have been confined to the traditional role of young Jewish women of that time and place. She would have been an apprentice to her mother, a servant to her father and brothers, and, in time, sent into an arranged marriage where her status may have improved but the cloistered life of the ghetto would have continued its cycle.

  From what is known about the parents, and about Sarah herself, it is unlikely she would have lived a passive existence devoid of confrontation. The Aaronsohns were assertive in their beliefs and aggressive in making their way in the hostile world of late–nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Ephraim had built his fortune first as a farmer and innkeeper. But he used self-taught expertise in agriculture and hydrology to become the steward of several large farms near Bacau that were owned by absentee Romanian landlords. Malkah, something of a beauty in her youth, added prestige to the marriage since she was the daughter of a leading rabbi. Though little interested in scholarly pursuits, Malkah through her forceful personality stressed the building of strong character in her children.

  By the 1880s, the always perilous position of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe became unbearably dangerous. The once-great empires of the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottoman Sultanate were in a sclerosis of decline that rekindled dreams of their subject people for independence. Old frictions over religious identity—Roman Catholic versus Orthodox Christian versus Muslim—were inflamed by conflicts over national identity.

  Jews suddenly became the target of convenience in the struggle for power. Pogroms, once an episodic threat, suddenly became the increasing resort of paranoid governments and violent mobs alike. While there had been random anti-Jewish attacks long before, the systematic targeting of Jewish communities began after the assassination of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The next year, Ale
xander III blamed Russian Jews for his father’s murder and decreed harsh reprisals on the Jewish communities within his empire. Three years of violence erupted and was duplicated throughout much of Eastern Europe.

  A wave of migration and flight had begun in the decade before; those Jews who had the means or helpful relatives abroad set out for more welcoming nations in Western Europe or North and South America. At the same time within the Jewish communities of Russia, Poland, and the Balkans the historical dream of a Jewish nation was reignited. Well before the better known Zionist organizations of their Western European coreligionists took shape, the Hibbat Zion (“love of Zion”) movement spread from Russia across the Tsar’s mandated Jewish zone, the Pale, throughout Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe.

  Ephraim Aaronsohn was an early convert to the movement. His once-prosperous business was now threatened. And he now had two sons, Aaron, six, and Zvi, four. In his search for a better future for his family, the Hibbat Zion message was attractive. It renewed the millennium-old cry that only by returning to Palestine and reestablishing a homeland, could Jews be really safe from the endless Diaspora to foreign lands where they never could find a place. And to make Palestine a true Eretz Israel, Jews had to reclaim the land, to farm it, and not only grow their own sustenance but secure their own nation and lasting peace.

  So in 1882 the four Aaronsohns were among the most prominent of what became known as the First Aliyah (“ascension”) to migrate to Palestine. While the movement had at its base a deeply religious, almost mystical core, an important and often overlooked element was the financial and political support its adherents received from evangelical Christians as well as Jews in high positions in Western nations, most notably in Britain, France, and the United States. The support of the major industrial economies provided needed financial backing and, perhaps more important, the tacit protection of the great powers as movement leaders like Aaronsohn sought to inject themselves into a land rife with suspicion, corruption, and the threat of violent reaction against them.

  Everyone, it seemed, had a reason to want the Jews to return to Palestine. Not least of these were the governments of the European powers who viewed the early flood of these exotic refugees into their own cities as an unwanted addition to their troubles keeping their political power stable. Indeed, some of the Sephardic Jewish community leaders who had gained both prosperity and a measure of acceptance in the major capitals were alarmed at the arrival of these Ashkenazi Jews from the East, with their strange countenances, coarse manners, and dialects. It would be better for all concerned if “those people” could be resettled somewhere else. Syria–Palestine appeared ideal.

  Ignored by both the monarchs of Europe and Zionist adherents were the Jews who had remained in Syria–Palestine for centuries after the Roman diaspora. They were called the Yishuv (later, the Old Yishuv), and were deeply Orthodox communities who survived in enclaves in the four holy cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed. Strictly controlled by their rabbis, these scholarly communities were largely dependent on Halukka, donations from Jews elsewhere in the world in return for prayers in their behalf. The arrival of a wave of new immigrants with their independent ways was an immediate threat to the Yishuv. The world beyond Palestine suddenly seemed too close for comfort.

  Recall that today’s world of seemingly constant change got underway in the nineteenth century, when the technological explosions of industrialization challenged centuries of control that monarchies had held over the creation of wealth and the mobility of citizens. A power structure that saw life for most people unchanged since medieval times was vanishing, to be replaced by—what?

  This explosion had at its core the harnessing of new sources of energy that had begun a century earlier. Each new fuel exploited—from wood to coal and then to petroleum—released a quantum more power to enhance mankind’s ambitions. Regions that possessed an abundance of this energy—North America, Persia, the Crimea, and, potentially, Arabia—suddenly became targets of exploitation. Ancient empires—the British, French, Russian, and Ottoman—were jolted out of their slumbers and now raced to modernize in order to keep pace with the destabilizing forces that accompanied the new prosperity. The richer they got, the more energy they needed. The more that Western civilizations produced miracles of industry, communications, culture, and learning, the more poverty and injustice threatened the whole global structure. As steamships, railroads, and telegraphs shrank the globe, the lures and perils of modernity awakened distant corners of the world that had slumbered for centuries. This rude awakening was as frightening as it was exciting. Revolution of all kinds was in the air.

  The Ottoman Empire was far from immune. When Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I called Turkey “the sick man of Europe,” he was not referring to some decrepit backwater empire slowly expiring from corruption and neglect—although both diseases festered within the Sublime Porte, the central bureaucracy that served the sultans. Rather, Nicholas presciently observed that the Turks were being caught in the same web as he, having to seek ever-growing volumes of loans from foreign banking houses and rival governments to fund modernization projects, loans that put the borrowers in ever greater bondage to forces beyond their control. It was a tiger that could neither be ridden for long nor dismounted from safely.

  Sultan Abdul Aziz (and his nephew and penultimate successor Abdul Hamid II) became widely photographed celebrities in the 1860s on their visits to the major capitals of Europe. Such was his importance as a potential customer for British capital goods, Queen Victoria marked an 1867 official visit by Aziz by investing a slate of new Knights of the Garter that included the Sultan along with Tsar Alexander II and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria–Hungary.

  This was a tinseled era when crowned heads and lesser princelings could call each other cousins (with some reason in many cases) and smooth out international disputes by personal correspondence or a tactical marriage. Turkey was merely an acute case. Indeed Abdul Hamid II was reported to have French lineage through one of his grandmothers. But aside from an affinity for the West, the Sultanate had more pressing reasons to court the support of the major powers. From the Balkans to farthest Arabia, the subjects of Ottoman rule chafed at the pervasive corruption and calculated cruelty of their masters. Nationalist movements were being plotted in coffeehouses and Bedouin tents across the Empire. Most pressing of all, the Turks were being harried by a series of losing skirmishes with Russia for hegemony over the oil-rich regions on their shared borders.

  So Tsar Nicholas’s rueful observation was correct. More than even Russia, the sultans embarked on an orgy of foreign borrowing and ambitious projects to yank their empire into modern times. A network of railroads slowly began to link Constantinople north to the capitals of Europe and south toward the farthest shores of the Arabian Gulf. Telegraph lines tracked along the railroads, postal service was regularized, universities were founded, and even cautious attempts at constitutional reform were tried.

  By the time Abdul Hamid II took power in 1876 Turkey boasted the third largest navy in the world, lagging behind only Britain and France. A young cadre of military officers were being sent abroad (most to Germany) to learn modern tactics and public administration. Seven years after he seized power in a coup, the famed Orient Express luxury train began service to Paris and brought adventurers from a dozen nations with ambitious schemes for even greater advancement. Like its European role models, the Porte under Hamid now could afford to create a thoroughly modern secret police network and to invent a unified cultural identity for Turkey. Among the consequences was a ruthless suppression of dissent and the start of a systematic expulsion of non-Turkish minority groups that ultimately led at the start of World War I to the genocidal eradication of millions of Armenian subjects. It would not stop there.

  One of the more fascinating of the promoters to arrive in Constantinople was the fifty-three-year-old Laurence Oliphant. He was a former Member of Parliament, a London Times war correspondent, a popular novelist,
and, not least, a former British Foreign Office spy in the Orient and Middle East. Oliphant had in midlife turned into an ardent Zionist. He was one of those exotic personalities generated during the Victorian era. Often sketchily educated, their natural intellect led them to become fascinated in equal amounts with desolate regions, primitive people and strange causes, either religious or political. They could be brilliant or they could be outright loony but somehow straitlaced British society tolerated them.

  Oliphant had become a convert of a tiny communal sect based in America on the shores of Lake Erie. Like many American and British evangelical Christians, he believed that Jews must reclaim the Holy Land of Palestine as a prerequisite to the Biblical prophecies of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Despite his mysticism, Oliphant also became a skilled fundraiser among likeminded evangelicals in America and especially in the higher ranks of the British government. His cause was also helped by the fact that in the late 1870s the Prime Minister was Benjamin Disraeli, who endorsed Oliphant’s plan to buy large tracts of land in Palestine for resettlement of his coreligionists from Eastern Europe.

  Nor was Oliphant averse to personal profit. His evangelistic zeal was elastic enough to allow him to represent the interests of prominent British financial and railroad interests in a dead-heat race with German and French promoters to win rail and oil concessions from the Turks. His patron was Edward Cazalet, the leading investor in schemes to link a network of railroads throughout the Balkans to better exploit the rich oil fields of the Caucasus and Persia.

  It is unclear just how the forces of Cazalet and Oliphant first made contact with Ephraim Aaronsohn and other well-heeled leaders of the Romanian Jewish community. Oliphant had made one unsuccessful bid in 1879 to win Ottoman permission for his resettlement plans. What is clear is that in 1882 he returned to Constantinople with a few hundred Aliyah adherents from Romania and that Ephraim Aaronsohn was among them. Instead of trying to trudge their way through the bewildering corridors of Ottoman bureaucracy, the Oliphant delegation made its first call on General Lew Wallace, the American ambassador, himself a pro-Zionist.