Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  She suggested a joint wedding ceremony with Rivka and Absalom, an offer Rivka briskly refused, saying she wanted her own wedding, probably early in 1915. Chaim returned to Constantinople, supposedly to prepare to receive his new bride. She might joke with Alexander but her doubts continued, as she confessed in a letter to Aaron—who had been away when Chaim had proposed. “I must admit the whole matter seems somewhat strange—but the fated day had to come and it has arrived. I hope you like the man I have chosen—that would please me. God grant we may be happy.”

  Her decision to go ahead did not bar her from showing her prospective husband her hot temper when she learned that he had wrangled with her father over the dowry settlement. She wrote to him in Constantinople, “I can’t understand you, Chaim. From what you told me . . . the money won’t make any difference to you. So what have you, the ardent Zionist, to gain by preferring a miserable sum of money to soil drenched with the sweat of pioneers?”

  Once she moved to Constantinople in March, Sarah at first wrote back enthusiastic letters about the sights and her experiences in the fabled capital spanning the divide between modern European and ancient Asian cultures.

  But gradually, her letters also began to reflect both her disappointment in her married life and alarm at what she was witnessing as war fever gripped the city. The lavish lifestyle Chaim had promised turned out to be a disappointment. His home was across the straits from the main city in the ancient Jewish quarter known as Galata, a shabby ghetto where houses were jammed together with warehouses and craft shops. Chaim also turned out to be if not exactly a miser, rather tightfisted. Sarah’s new home was dark, shuttered, and full of dreary and somewhat worn furniture and fixtures.

  Sarah’s wedding to Chaim Abraham (March 1914)

  Chaim remained pleasant but after some perfunctory attempts at lovemaking, he had shifted to a cool and patronizing distance from her. He traveled throughout Europe on business trips that often lasted for weeks. In his absence he insisted that his mother and aunts preside over the running of the household and as watchdogs over Sarah’s life. Sarah, with her wealth of language skills, was further offended that the family clung to speaking the Yiddish of the ghetto, while Palestinians of her generation adopted Hebrew. Bowing to the mother’s insistence that Sarah not venture out of the house unless she was accompanied by other women, she took to occasional rebellious escapes in the company of other young wives of other merchants.

  On a few occasions Sarah and her new friends broke free to take ferries on shopping expeditions in the enormous covered bazaars of the old city on the Asian side of the Golden Horn. They would end the outing with a totally respectable but exciting stop for tea in the fabulously ornate lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel. This was the hotel fabled in fact and fiction as the departure place for Western travelers embarking on the Orient Express luxury train. It was there, while the hotel’s orchestra played the latest popular songs from Europe and America, that Sarah got her first glimpse of a slender, almost reptilian Turkish officer as he crossed the lobby from a private dining salon. He glanced at her briefly and when she asked his identity she was informed in a hushed tone that it was Colonel Aziz Bek, the chief of Constantinople’s police then under the control of one of the Pashas—a man named Ahmed Djamal. There were rumors that both Bek and his Pasha master were to be given important posts in Syria–Palestine. He would later play a crucial role in her life.

  There was increasing talk of a war in Europe and troubling speculation that Turkey would become entangled. The Balkan wars had caused popular unrest and doubts. Worse, Tsarist Russia had resumed its probing of Ottoman lands around the Caspian and Black seas.

  Scarcely had the villagers of Zichron Ya’akov and the rest of Palestine taken these threats seriously than the war itself burst upon them. After a brief flutter of hope that the Three Pashas would remain aloof from the conflict among the European powers, they plunged in and joined the German Kaiser and his allies on October 28, 1914.

  Once Turkey entered the war, Constantinople went from a city of vibrant and cosmopolitan activity to a tense, suspicious, and repressive place. Travel outside the city now required a stack of passes obtained only after lengthy questioning by Bek’s security officers. Mail was strictly censored. The letters that came from Zichron Ya’akov were not consoling. Rivka wrote of the increasing scarcity of food and other fears.

  Absalom, who, it was assumed, was to marry Rivka in the spring added to Sarah’s unhappiness by sending disturbing signals that he might feel some ambivalence about his choice of sisters. In one letter he wrote, “I knew a trip like yours would be a wrench that doesn’t mend quickly, and that every letter would open the wound again. Perhaps time will quiet the pangs of longing. . . .”

  In one, he wrote her while he was away from Zichron and used the family diminutives for her name:

  Sarati—In spite of everything, here we are, still friends and I love you with all the strength of my heart. But you make me furiously angry, and for that you are a naughty girl, Saraleh, my darling. I would like to enjoy a quieter happiness, so I ask you to send me quickly, in a registered parcel, your little sister. We will talk about you here, I promise you, and think of you when the sun goes down. In the moonbeams we will see something of your dreaming eyes, and in the flame of the setting sun your ardent heart.

  Well aware that her brothers were in a dangerous position politically, Sarah began to send fearful warnings of the reports of the massacre of Armenians and other ethnic groups. To hide her reports she wrote in tiny letters that she then covered with large postage stamps on the envelopes. As a hint, she wrote a letter to Rivka urging her to admire “the boule”; using the French word for tree-lined boulevard, but really a pun on the Hebrew word bul, or stamp. Rivka’s return letters also carried covert reports on the increasing peril faced by the Jews in Palestine. Then the letters from Rivka stopped coming at all.

  Sarah was distraught in her isolation from her family and her home. In one letter to a sister of Absalom, she wrote, “God knows how much I hate the life I lead here. Famine reigns in Palestine and I sit here without lifting my little finger.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Plagues of War and Locusts

  1915

  A team waving flags tries to push a swarm of locusts into a trap dug into the ground, ca. 1915

  The hope for a quick resolution to the four-month-old war in Europe faded by the start of 1915. Like most people in the Ottoman Empire, the Three Pashas had not at first intended to become embroiled in the conflict. Their emissaries had secretly sounded out both the British and French for possible alliances, but both Allies had brusquely rejected the overtures; Britain’s First Sea Lord Winston Churchill enraged the Pashas by refusing to hand over new battle cruisers that were ready for delivery from British shipyards. One motive was that Tsar Nicholas was an ally and had ambitions for Turkish territory.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Turkey would end up being drawn in on the side of the Central Powers. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II had made a point of paying court to the Sultan and then the Pashas from the early days of their seizure of power. He had unsuccessfully tried in 1912 to broker a return of Libya to Ottoman control. Now he pressed the Turks to provide a needed second front against Tsarist Russia in the Black Sea region.

  After the insulting British denial of the new warships the Turks had paid for, the Germans promptly sold Constantinople two brand-new battle cruisers—the Goeben and the Breslau—then sent a cadre of experienced general staff officers to direct Turkey’s ramshackle army formations. The Kaiser also urged the Pashas to quickly seize Turkey’s lost province of Egypt. It was a tempting idea: control of the Suez Canal would block Britain from moving vital forces from its far-flung Empire to the battlefields of France. A quick end to the war in Europe would bring huge benefits to Turkey for being on the winning side.

  Long neglected Syria–Palestine became a major theater of operations and thus a major source of crisis and challenge for Constantinople.
With that mix of ignorance and arrogance that characterized so many of the three rulers’ actions, the region was treated as if it were enemy territory that had to be subdued. As they began to move troops into position in the winter of 1914, their control of the region began to unravel. The Pashas’ spies brought troubling rumors that Arab desert tribes in the south were planning an uprising in order to secure their grip on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. An often chaotic shifting of Turkish Army divisions to the new Suez front was soon bolstered when each unit had a German chief of staff to impose de facto direction of operations.

  Convinced of a quick German victory in Western Europe, the Three Pashas moved to clamp down on the internal threats to their rule wherever they had suspicions. Starting in early 1915, the Pashas launched genocidal attacks on the Armenians, ultimately killing an estimated one million and sending an even greater number fleeing the region. At the same time they turned their attention to Palestine with dire results for independence-minded Arabs. Key to their oppressive policies was the firm belief in a doctrine of a Pan-Turkish society purged of the polyglot populations of other nations and other faiths; those that could not be firmly controlled were to be expelled or, if need be, exterminated. Some people such as Greeks and Bulgarians would simply be driven back to their notional homelands, while other, lesser breeds would be made to disappear by force if necessary. Arabs were to be controlled; Jews would in time vanish by whatever means.

  For the moment, the fact that most of the Jewish settlements remained loyal to Constantinople spared them some of the worst brutalities and it fooled some of the elders into hoping they could survive. Even some of the new arrivals—David Ben-Gurion, now a law student in Constantinople—tried vainly to raise detachments of Jewish volunteers but the notion of arming Jews was rejected by Enver Pasha.

  In January 1915 the triumvirate in Constantinople sent one of their own, Pasha Ahmed Djamal, to Damascus as both the new governor and as commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army. Djamal Pasha had been part of the earliest Armenian atrocities, where he had shown a brutal zeal. He was vain, greedy, and totally unscrupulous; he was also cunning and determined to achieve an iron grip over his sprawling province. Short in stature, he had a curvature of the spine that gave him a hunched and feral appearance, which he sought to offset by wearing ornate uniforms clustered with military medals.

  The forty-three-year-old Ahmed Djamal was a toxic mix of outsized ambition, ruthlessness, and startling incompetence that would prove a major contribution to the ruling triumvirate’s ultimate defeat during the war. When the Three Pashas had seized power, Djamal was made Minister of the Navy, but he did nothing to resurrect that decayed force. He so stridently opposed the purchase of the two battle cruisers from the Germans that Enver Pasha maneuvered him out of the Navy Ministry, briefly making him mayor of Constantinople, and then pushing him farther away with the lure of the governorship of Syria–Palestine and the command of an entire army there.

  Enver might not have done so if he had been aware that during Turkey’s secret offers to France in the weeks before the war, Djamal had made a secret offer of his own: to guarantee French possessions in Syria–Palestine in return for making him ruler of the region. Later, during the war, Djamal would make a similar offer to the British: to let Britain’s forces in Egypt seize control of the region, again, with Djamal as ruler of both Syria–Palestine and Egypt. The British seriously considered the offer but finally judged he was too untrustworthy for them to control.

  Although a German general named Kress von Kressenstein was assigned to actually direct operations of the twenty-thousand-man Fourth Army, Djamal Pasha routinely interfered with strategic planning and diverted troops to round up more than one hundred Arab political leaders whom he suspected of fomenting the revolt that had broken out in the southern deserts. He assigned the duty of ferreting out suspect Arab leaders to his chief torturer Aziz Bek, a colonel who was chief of his intelligence service. Bek exceeded his master in the studied art of cruelty. The young Arab leaders were rounded up, imprisoned, and tortured by Bek’s interrogators in an ordeal that ended eighteen months later in a round of public hangings in Beirut in August, 1916.

  At first, the entrance of Turkey into what first had appeared to be a strictly European war confused everyone in Syria–Palestine. Many of the inhabitants who were Christians had ties to either British or French trading partners. The Second Aliyah Jews had experienced firsthand the anti-Semitic prejudices of the Germans and of Austria. Among the older, more established Jewish residents there was the complication that they held Turkish citizenship, which they hoped would insulate them. At first, even Alexander Aaronsohn went into the army hoping that by his example Jews could escape the hostilities that the authorities were now visiting on their Arab neighbors.

  In the meantime, the Pasha’s troops swept throughout Syria–Palestine, seizing the resources and manpower he needed to support the Fourth Army buildup in that region. Travel within the region now required passes, mail from abroad was censored, and carts and draft animals were seized. Almost at once a tight naval blockade was imposed by the French and British navies and this cut off Palestine’s burgeoning export sales of wine and citrus to European and Russian importers. Worse, the blockade cut off imports of gasoline and diesel fuel that powered the irrigation pumps that crops depended upon.

  Then the Turks came after the province’s young men. Jewish and Arab youths, including Alexander Aaronsohn and Absalom Feinberg, were conscripted into the army and at first many went willingly; they were, after all, Turkish citizens, and the bitter memory of Libya’s seizure by British and French ally Italy still rankled. But the cooperative spirit among Palestinians of all faiths quickly vanished in the face of Djamal’s depredations. While the Turks showed a brutal zeal in their confiscations, much of what they seized was so mismanaged as to be of little use to them—many of the livestock perished from neglect while crops rotted from poor storage at army depots.

  For the first few weeks conscripted Christian draftees and Jews like Alexander did not face the unendurable conditions that Arab recruits did during their basic training. Because they could get money from home they could bribe their officers to get better food, cleaner uniforms, and shelter, and they also adapted more easily to the rigid training regimen now imposed by German officers. That abruptly changed when Djamal began to exercise greater control as commander. The Christians and Jews were stripped of their weapons and uniforms and moved from their training regiments to forced labor battalions where they were set to the grueling tasks of improving the roads and fortifications needed for the imminent invasion of the Suez Canal. The work was exhausting, the tools inadequate, and their rations were barely enough to keep them alive. Some way of escape had to be found.

  Aaron was appalled at the abrupt turn of events. He not only feared for his brother, he also had reason to suspect the Turks would loot Athlit despite it having been accepted by Constantinople as an accredited American establishment. He sent an urgent telegram to David Fairchild in Washington asking for help in protecting the Athlit station from plundering by the Turks. Fairchild consulted Paul Warburg, now the first chairman of the new Federal Reserve central bank. The central banker worked through the U.S. State Department to arrange for the admiral in charge of the U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean fleet to send a ship to rescue Aaron and his collections.

  American–Turkish relations during World War I were beyond complexity. The United States never formally declared war with Turkey—even after America entered on the side of the Allies in the spring of 1917. As early as 1915, the Pashas’ German advisers had strongly urged the Turks to do nothing that might lure America into the conflict. Despite an effective Anglo–French blockade of all major Ottoman ports, the American fleet in the Mediterranean was grudgingly allowed through the cordon and even more grudgingly allowed by the Turks to enter the major ports of Syria–Palestine to help rescue the hundreds of American missionaries, teachers, and merchants whose operations had been abru
ptly closed. Not only did this mean there was a small window of escape for Aaron and his friends but it was also the means by which the Zionist money could continue to flow into Palestine.

  Back in Washington there was understandable anger when Aaron refused to be rescued and instead, in February, asked for another interview with Djamal Pasha. The rejection was put down to his reputed arrogance and lack of gratitude. However, the incident may better be explained as a case of bad communications between the State Department and its diplomats abroad. Aaron unwittingly caused the confusion when he directly appealed to his friend Fairchild in Washington and also to a new friend, America’s ambassador to the Pashas, Henry Morgenthau.

  The New York financier had been an early recruit of young Democrat Progressives like Bernard Baruch and Franklin Roosevelt who pushed the 1912 presidential candidacy of Woodrow Wilson. His reward was the ambassadorship. Morgenthau was much taken by his belief that he had special influence with Enver and Talaat Pasha as many of his predecessors had had with the Sultans. He had been a frequent visitor to Zichron Ya’akov and admired Aaron. His mandate as he saw it was to back President Wilson’s firm determination to remain neutral in this European war. Not only was Wilson pressed by the large Irish and German constituencies of the Democratic Party, but he also cherished his conviction that he could by the moral force of his personality bring the Allies and the Central Powers to an equable peace. Crucial to this strategy was a plan advanced by Morgenthau to convince the Turks to abandon their risky alliance with the Germans and Austrians. Diplomacy and conciliation would not only convince the Pashas to drop out of the war, it would also temper their depredations against the Jews in Palestine. Aaron was a key to pacifying the new governor in Jerusalem. Or so both Morgenthau and Aaron hoped.