Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  In Constantinople, the Committee of Union and Progress had begun as a secret society formed in the 1880s among the medical students of the new university in Constantinople founded by Abdul Hamid II. It soon made alliances with disaffected military cadets, whose zeal for modernizing Turkey had been kindled during the training courses they attended in Germany.

  As the cadets became officers of rank they took control of the CUP and by the summer of 1908 were strong enough to launch a rebellion that forced Abdul Hamid II to give up his absolute power and restore the constitution he had banned in 1878. The rebellion supposedly installed a multiparty parliamentary monarchy bent on reform and modernism. But as the struggle for dominance continued between the CUP and other rival reform movements against the Sublime Porte, the CUP became steadily more nationalist, more centralized, and more demanding that Turkish society become more Ottoman, more Muslim, and less welcoming to other nationalities and faiths who had existed there for centuries. It did him little good, however.

  Abdul Hamid II did not last another year as monarch. This seems to be the natural order of succession among the Sultanate. He had, after all, ousted his uncle and was about to be pushed aside for his own brother. Abdul Hamid’s decline had been sordid indeed. For all his reformist zeal at the start, Abdul Hamid proved mentally unstable, paranoid, and given to fits of murderous reprisals against ethnic dissidents among the empire’s diverse population. He ordered the first systematic attacks on Armenian Christians, which seven years later would expand into the genocide of millions. In April 1909 he was deposed by the Young Turk hierarchy and replaced with another more pliable and even more mentally weak sibling, Mehmed V.

  The doddering Mehmed V would know no peace or real power. Lands once firmly in the grip of the Ottoman Empire splintered into rebellions and a series of bloody conflicts known as the Balkan Wars. Within the walls of the Sublime Porte, the paranoia that was the inheritance of the descendants of Osman took on a political reality. The new Sultan preferred solitude so he could perfect the poems he wrote and gave over almost all real power in a further coup in 1913. With such threats outside and within its borders, the Sultan (who still was Caliph) and his military patrons in political power both despised and feared any people who were not Ottoman Turks. Ethnic cleansing became increasingly relied upon to punish and subdue.

  Because of the recent centennial of the start of World War I, there has been a revived debate among historians as to the exact date that the Great War became an inevitability. For our purposes, it can be argued that that monstrous conflict had its Middle East beginnings in September 1911 when the relatively recent unified monarchy of Italy (1871) decided to reclaim part of its ancient Roman heritage by sending 34,000 troops to invade the Ottoman Mediterranean province of Libya.

  There was no question of Constantinople sending an equal counterforce. Instead, a young major named Ismail Enver and a handful of “volunteer” junior officers arrived and organized a lethal guerrilla campaign using Bedouin tribesmen who were outraged by the invading nonbelievers. Using savage attacks on Italian patrols and isolated outposts, the Bedouin penned the invaders into the towns that hugged the Mediterranean coast. The success of the campaign made a national hero out of Enver and vaulted him into the top ranks of the CUP junta.

  All of this turmoil was far away from Zichron Ya’akov for the time being. If anything, the upheavals in Constantinople further weakened the power of the provincial governors. As their economic situation grew more promising, the Aaronsohns built two more structures at Athlit: a greenhouse and herbarium for Aaron’s plants, and a separate library and study for his books.

  Sarah was now working almost full-time, cataloguing the plant specimens arriving from Aaron’s trips for an herbarium at the new experiment station ten miles away. She was now nearly twenty and prospective suitors, and not just hometown lads, began to call with invitations to picnics, dances, and Sunday strolls along Founders Street. For the moment, however, Sarah was content to enjoy her physical freedom and the intellectual stimulation of aiding Aaron.

  The invasion of Libya in 1911 put an end to that idyll. The guerrilla war in that far-off province added to the strain on already-straitened burdens of the Turkish military. Even as the Young Turk military commanders were consolidating their hold on the Porte, they faced perils on almost every border of the empire.

  Turkey’s European provinces in the Balkans were the most vulnerable. Russia was still determined to control the areas around the Black Sea. Tsar Nicholas II publicly vowed to regain Constantinople as the historic center of Orthodox Christianity. Austria–Hungary wanted to regain one of its lost Adriatic ports for its navy. The Germans eyed ways to push a railroad through Turkey to threaten Britain’s possessions in India and the Orient. And the British hung onto Egypt and the Suez Canal with fierce determination.

  Then in 1912 some of the larger Ottoman vassal states rose up, each determined to achieve full independence. Sparked first by tiny Montenegro, its alliance with Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria quickly overwhelmed the more poorly led Turkish armies and in seven months not only cost the Turks those lands but also led to an independent Albania.

  This First Balkan War ended in May 1913 but Bulgaria was left feeling cheated of land it coveted. The resulting Second Balkan War began a month after the first peace treaty had been signed and lasted just short of six weeks. This time Serbia emerged as the big winner but the Young Turks (many of whom were now commanders) managed to seize back some of its border provinces and were judged by public opinion to have reclaimed national honor.

  In 1913 a triumvirate of CUP generals seized personal power from the last rival faction ensconced in the Sublime Porte. Even though Sultan Mehmed V remained titular head of state, the new government they set up became known as the Three Pashas. At the head of the trio was the hero of the Libyan war, Ismail Enver, who was made Minister of War. Mehmed Talaat was the Grand Vizier over the sprawling civil bureaucracy. The third important post of Naval Minister went to a general who had a few modest successes during the Balkan wars and was now the mayor of Constantinople.

  At thirty-one, Ahmed Gamal Djamal had been more successful building alliances within the CUP than he had as a commander. He became a problematic equal in the triumvirate. Very soon, Djamal Pasha would become an ominous presence in the lives of all the Jews of Palestine and a dangerous threat especially to the Aaronsohn family.

  The Three Pashas immediately began to augment their power through alliances with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm, who sent weapons and officers to modernize the army and new battleships for the now-decrepit Turkish navy. The Three Pashas also pursued a relentless program to rid the population of long-established communities of foreigners; the first targets were Greeks and Armenians who were driven from their homes, and who died by the thousands as they sought refuge elsewhere.

  In Palestine the various tribal groupings of Arabs also felt the crackdown from Constantinople. Various regions of Ottoman Arabia spawned their own liberation movements, again sparked by young Arab students who had attended universities in Europe. Arrests and executions of suspect Arab leaders left it increasingly clear to the Jews of Zichron Ya’akov that they were hardly immune.

  Any unified response by the Jews of Palestine never was likely. The rabbis of the old Yishuv clung to their strategy of placating Turkish authorities. They and their dependent followers still resented the early settlers, now all the more so because early aliyots like the Aaronsohns and others had become very prosperous in their own right—wealthy enough to send their children off for foreign educations and their wives on shopping excursions in Paris, Rome, and Berlin. New conflicts among Palestine’s Jews had been further complicated by the arrival of the Second Aliyah. An estimated twenty thousand of these new arrivals brought with them a mix of political ideologies—varying shades of Marxist–Bolshevik theory mingled with the idealized communal philosophy fashioned late in his life by Leo Tolstoy.

  What they dreamed of was jarred sharply by wha
t they found on arrival. They sought a fertile ground for their paradise of kibbutzim—collective farms where everything from work to housing and to family structures would be held communally by Jews for the benefit of Jews alone. Instead, to their disgust, they found old-style villages reminiscent of the Europe they had renounced. The first aliyots lived in their own houses on their own land, each family responsible for its own economic welfare. Worse, some settlers did not farm at all; the prosperity of those who did enabled others to practice their traditional craft skills and to engage in commercial trade. Most offensive of all, the first generation had become dependent on labor provided from the adjacent Arab villages.

  After 1912, the turmoil caused by the Young Turk revolt eroded what little official protection the Jewish communities had enjoyed. Bedouin desert raiders and, sadly, even some of their nearby Arab neighbors, used the breakdown in stability to pilfer grain and livestock and sometimes engage in wanton vandalism of Jewish farms. The more militant young arrivals in other towns and villages were quick to use Arab predations as an excuse for retaliation and increased violence under the pretext of protecting their communal kibbutz. For Aaron and his brothers, the increasingly vulnerable older Jewish settlements along the Mediterranean coast needed to consider how to defend themselves.

  Sarah was overjoyed at Aaron’s return in January 1910 from his American tour. Not only had he basked in the celebrity of his wheat discovery, but also he had won a host of new converts to the Zionist cause among prominent American Jews who had been skeptics. From them he had secured an American charter and funds for an experiment station at Athlit, and a donated windmill to raise the water needed for irrigation.

  The new project gave Sarah something useful to do. While she had been away on her tour, Rivka, the younger sister, had assumed the chores of cataloguing the plants and reports that Aaron had shipped home. She was two years younger than Sarah, and a far different personality from Aaron, Alex, and Sarah. Where they were tall, robust, and competitive, Rivka was small, shy, and self-effacing. Rivka had ambitions of her own, but she suppressed whatever resentment she felt for her outsized older siblings. She would wait. Her time would come.

  Sarah was glad to have her sister shoulder some of the burden of assisting Aaron. Sarah would be involved in the new project at Athlit but she also had other obligations. As the oldest daughter, she was now increasingly responsible for running the house on Founders Street. Her mother Malkah was in ill health, so the care and feeding of Ephraim and her younger brothers became her immediate duty. While Sarah was evolving into a modern personality, she still had part of her life tied to the traditional woman’s role of cook, house cleaner, and mender of clothes. Malkah, after a long illness, died the next year, early in 1913, leaving Sarah in full charge of the Founders Street home and the care of Ephraim.

  But life was not all drudgery. In March 1912, Sarah met a dashing young man named Absalom Feinberg, who was from Hadera. They were introduced almost as an afterthought by Aaron at a Purim festival dance held at the Zichron communal barn. The threshing floor had been swept spotless and trestles of food and wine drew the entire village. Sarah was now twenty-two, an age when most girls of the town had already married, but she had never found any of the young men she knew interesting enough. Absalom Feinberg was different and there was an immediate spark between them.

  If the Aaronsohns of Zichron were a source of controversy to their neighbors, the Feinbergs who lived in Hadera, a day’s journey to the south, were an endless source of uproar to theirs. Israel Feinberg had been one of the early aliyots and he had chosen the most dismal of swampy sites to locate his settlement. He argued that fulfilling the promise of Biblical Palestine’s abused land demanded they work hardest at the least likely locations. He also was among the first of the new village settlers to rebel against technical overseers brought in by Baron de Rothschild from his North African plantations.

  There was another trait that Israel Feinberg and his wife’s family, the Belkinds, shared that set them apart from both the baron’s managers and other, more orthodox fellow settlers. He admired the indigenous Arab inhabitants for their endurance and their adherence to their own religious faith. When Absalom was ten, Israel put him under the tutelage of a prominent local Arab scholar with a request not only to teach the boy Arabic but also to acquaint him with the Koran and the tenets of the Muslim faith. As a teenager, Absalom and his cousin Naaman Belkind would don Arab dress and go off on horseback adventures with their Arab friends. Some of the locals cheerfully honored him by addressing him as a sheik.

  Israel sent Absalom off to France for formal education when he was fifteen. During the five years he spent abroad he attracted favorable notice in Paris as a poet. But Paris was also a capital for radical philosophers of all stripes and the young man drank deeply from these existing wells. He became an impatient convert to the rising tide of rebels against imperial tyranny sweeping Europe, and he developed a burning desire to hasten the building of a Zion homeland for all Jews. With the new zealotry came a fiery hatred of the Turks and their cold oppressions of every non-Ottoman inhabitant of their empire. He was a revolutionary in the making.

  At first, Sarah and Absalom seemed to be made for each other. Tall and full-figured, her beauty was emphasized by her blue eyes, coppery hair, and easy laugh. There was nothing shy or hesitant about her; not for her the coy flirtatiousness of other village girls. Absalom was a year older, taller, with a muscular leanness, and dark soulful eyes that sparked fire when he spoke of his passions for Israel. Both were daring riders and crack pistol shots. Like the older Aaronsohn offspring, Absalom relished competition on horseback and swimming in the surf off Athlit. He also enchanted both Sarah and Rivka with a steady outpouring of poetry ranging from the deeply romantic to stirring calls for a rising Zion.

  Absalom had come to Zichron Ya’akov in the wake of his father’s illness and death. In Ephraim he found a surrogate who had been every bit as successful as his father. The Aaronsohns had been among the first to shift their farming from grain crops to planting extensive wine-grape vineyards. Ephraim was among the organizers of a modern wine press and bottling operation that became an important source of both the kosher sacramental wine and a popular commercial vintage that was much in demand in the booming port cities of Haifa and Jaffa.

  In Aaron, Absalom found a heroic older brother to emulate. In the younger man, Aaron found the acolyte who would devote his considerable energy and skill to making his dreams for the Athlit station flourish. It was an ideal relationship. Absalom’s total command of Arabic, his affection for the workers at the station, and his seeming inexhaustible energy made him an ideal manager as Athlit’s experimental beds were expanded and as new reclamation projects spread on the land above the beach.

  Absalom had an important impact on Aaron as well. Absalom’s fierce Zionism coupled with his intolerance of any oppression visited on the Jewish settlements found an echo in Aaron. He had always been short-tempered but in past confrontations with officials in Haifa he had opted for negotiation and compromise rather than defiance. Absalom began to convince him that such temporizing was useless. “I would set fire to the Turks as easily as I light a candle,” he would dramatically declare.

  Absalom quickly became a presence in the lives of all the Aaronsohns. Life was not all debate and declarations. He was clearly taken with Sarah and she with him. He spent most of his days at the Athlit station. Throughout 1913, whenever Absalom came to Zichron, he and Sarah were increasingly affectionate and easy with one another. That summer he went to Ephraim and asked for permission to wed Sarah. Then he made his proposal to her, fully expecting her acceptance.

  But something held Sarah back from taking the risk of truly falling in love with this charismatic friend. Had Absalom pushed his suit with more passion, Sarah might have given her heart. Why she did not is a puzzle. At twenty-three, Sarah was five years and more past the age when other girls in Zichron Ya’akov began to marry. Plenty of young men had shown an
interest, many of them had been good friends and welcome partners at the dances and parties neighbors gave. She had become a strikingly beautiful woman, glowing with vitality and spirit.

  That last quality may provide a clue. Zichron Ya’akov and other parts of Palestine had flourished in the previous two decades. Haifa had become remarkably modern. Automobiles were seen on its now paved streets. There were European-style hotels, movie theaters, and a growing community of European and American businessmen. The highway to Zichron Ya’akov had been modernized so the Aaronsohns’ carriage could travel there in a couple of hours rather than in a day. The village itself could be mistaken for one anywhere in Europe.

  But close at hand were the wildness and uncertainty of the mountain passes where bandits lurked in the hillside caves and Bedouin raiders prowled on the outskirts of the desert beyond. Sarah had reveled in that wildness. Her horseback treks accompanying Aaron in his botanical expeditions, her pistol securely holstered to her saddle, were exhilarating. While part of her changing personality was that of the fashion-conscious modern woman, another facet was that of the dutiful Jewish daughter. Clearly, though, the streak of wild unfettered creature of the hills and desert existed too. How could she choose one role and let the others go?