Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Aaron, however, was increasingly preoccupied with a problem that had vexed him from the time he left London a year before. Chaim Weizmann and the overarching World Zionist Organization had steadfastly refused to show any partiality for either the Allies or the German-led Central Powers. They were playing a longer game to secure an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine. Waiting to see who would win the terrible European conflict seemed only prudent.

  Adding to the complexity of the Zionist posture was that the British and French were busy fleshing out the details of the secret Sykes–Picot pact that aimed to divide Syria-Palestine between them. Weizmann knew what Aaron did not: there was now an agreement that part of Palestine would include a protectorate for the Jews under British control. At the same time, the Turks and the Kaiser’s diplomats were dangling the prospect of a semi-autonomous zone for the Jewish settlements in Palestine if the Central Powers won. The Zionist officials had to wait and see which side would prevail. The American troops had landed in France but had not yet turned the tide of battle. The Germans could still win.

  The central council of the Yishuv excitedly got word to Weizmann that no less than Djamal Pasha had suddenly left his command to journey to Berlin for joint German–Turkish talks with Jewish officials in Berlin. No one could know that the talks were basically a sham to keep the WZO from suddenly bolting to the Allied side. As it turned out, the assignment of Djamal Pasha to the talks was engineered by General von Kressenstein, the Fourth Army field commander, to keep Djamal from interfering during the expected battle over Gaza.

  Aaron found all this temporizing infuriating. Equally frustrating was the fact that Weizmann refused to permit Aaron to administer some of the funds being raised by Jewish donors in America and Britain for the relief of the starving villages in Palestine. After all, it was NILI that alerted the world to Djamal Pasha’s expulsion of Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv. And Rivka, still in New York, had taken a leadership role in raising donations from wealthy American Jews—even those who were still skeptics about Zionism.

  He sent a series of telegrams begging Weizmann to release funds to help with the expenses of his Cairo activities and to prompt the WZO to publicly back the Allies, but they had gone unanswered for most of the year. Until the last week of August the British had also forbidden Aaron to go to London to confront his adversary, but then just as suddenly Deedes informed him he was to board a ship for England with just twenty-four hours’ notice. Again, some historians have suspected the British wanted him out of the way on the eve of the attack.

  Aaron had sent ahead a lengthy letter by courier to Weizmann, setting up the confrontation. In ornately formal French, the language of scientific publications, Aaron urged him,

  The declaration of neutrality on the part of official Zionism seemed to me since the start of the war like vulgar opportunism, in other words, an attitude that is both lacking in dignity and unpolitical. There is no shadow of a doubt that from the points of feeling, conviction, and Realpolitik we need to follow the Allies, whatever the results of the struggle. . . . I wait with anxiety new decisions by you that are inspired and reflect these new conditions. I am an optimistic Jew. And I have confidence in your high intelligence and I hope that your decisions will be the best for our cause. I hope for a true confidence and collaboration between us and no further suborning of my efforts.

  Anxious to resolve this frustration, Aaron rushed to sail for London. He left behind his brothers Alexander and Shmuel, who had come from America to help translate the intelligence flow in Hebrew and in code. Both men had been given instant officer commissions and uniforms, and swaggered about the hotels. The British flattered them and made much over Alex and his experiences in the Turkish army. Aaron gave Alex firm instructions to convince Sarah to leave NILI in Lishansky’s control and flee to Cairo and safety. But he did little other than send a few perfunctory messages, which she ignored.

  Like everyone else in Palestine, Sarah was waiting for the imminent British attack. But the first weeks of September came and went with no sign of it. General Allenby apparently had taken one of Aaron’s early briefing papers to heart. The memo warned that the period of August and September was the most dangerous season for malarial fevers. He decided to wait well into October before launching the offensive. Meanwhile he had succeeded in getting London to divert added units from France to Egypt, and used the time to strengthen his force.

  Allenby might have had the luxury of waiting, but the Jews of Palestine were near the breaking point as their spirits were crushed between worsening privation and the brutality of the Turkish spy-hunters prowling around them. Longstanding resentments among the Aaronsohns’ neighbors at Zichron turned into anger. How dare that family put the whole community in such peril?

  Naaman Belkind’s caution finally gave way. Early in September, he recklessly convinced a young Albanian officer in the Turkish army to defect. The unhappy soldier was a frequent consumer of Naaman’s generous gifts of wine. Importantly, he was the secretary to a Turkish commander, and had accompanied him on an inspection tour of the new trenches being dug around Beersheba. Naaman bragged that he need not risk escaping across the desert to the British lines. He belonged to a group that had regular contact by sea and would take him to Athlit on the next boat scheduled to call. To Sarah and Josef’s horror, he suddenly showed up at Athlit with the officer, who had taken four days leave from his post. Unhappily, the ship did not appear and Josef had to hide him with NILI allies in Haifa until he could be taken away.

  Naaman was bitter when, instead of praise for his coup, both Sarah and Josef rebuked him sharply for his foolishness and they dismissed his renewed demands that he be allowed to go to Cairo to find Absalom. Zvi was now demanding that Sarah send Aaron his own letters accusing Josef of murdering Absalom and seducing his sister. Further poisoned by Zvi’s bitterness, Naaman could no longer endure his suspicions about his cousin’s fate, so he decided to try to follow him and cross the desert to Cairo and put his doubts to rest. Without telling anyone, he left Rishon-le-Zion and set out—only to be quickly arrested by the Turks and taken to the police compound at Beersheba. There, the German officers demanded that he be hanged at once. But the Turks had plans for Naaman.

  An infantry colonel who had been one of Naaman’s best wine customers made a big show of rescuing him from the Germans and soothing his fears. He held a lavish dinner in Naaman’s honor and plied him with his own wine infused with hashish. The gullible young man, now drugged and euphoric, became expansive and boastful.

  The Turkish colonel hinted that he too was fed up with military service, and understood that the British paid bounties to Turkish officers of his rank—which he would be glad to share with his friend. Naaman bragged that he knew how to get them both to Cairo: by embarking on a British vessel that called on friends of his on the coast. While he may not have named Sarah explicitly, he provided enough clues for Aziz Bek to make the connection. The Turkish warders tortured Naaman brutally to extract whatever other information they could, and then he was bundled off to the prison in Damascus to await trial and likely execution for his recklessness. Once in the Damascus main prison, worse tortures awaited him.

  News of Naaman’s arrest spread panic through NILI’s ranks. It was time for Sarah to flee, but roadblocks and raids made it impossible for NILI to function. The Turks had begun to arrest suspects in other villages, some not even privy to NILI’s existence. Zichron Ya’akov was paralyzed by an intolerable fear of extermination and it was only a matter of time before someone would break and inform on her and the band.

  When the Managem made its next visit to Athlit on September 25, it carried a letter from Alexander urging her to leave everything in Josef’s hands and come at once to Cairo. But Sarah was adamant. She would only come to Cairo for a brief stay until the British invasion was underway. And Josef must come with her. But when the ship anchored, Josef suffered a bout of malarial fever. She would not leave without him. Instead, she sent the Turkish officer and so
me relatives, including Shmuel’s wife and child in her place. She told the courier that they were to come for them both in two days. By then she would have shut down the NILI network, gotten everyone to safety, Josef would have recovered enough from his fever to get into the rescue skiff with her, and she could leave with a clear conscience.

  But the Managem did not return and some have wondered at the British failure. Alexander would later write in his memoir the excuse that the Managem’s captain had refused because there would be a full moon in a few days and it would be too bright to escape detection. It would seem a feeble excuse for the British to have risked their most valuable intelligence source. Sarah would never know.

  On September 30, with the advent of the Sukkot observances, Sarah abandoned hope of rescue and she and Josef returned to the house on Founders Street. Josef’s wife and two children had come to Zichron Ya’akov to join in the observances. But that day, while attending a neighbor’s celebration of an impending marriage, she was warned that the Turks who had been harshly questioning villages all around Zichron Ya’akov were now on their way there. She moved Josef’s family to a friend’s home, gave him some of their meager stash of gold and told him to hide out in one of the nearby caves. If the Turkish probe came to nothing he could return and hope for a rescue. Otherwise, he was to try to escape as best he could.

  Sarah then galloped on her horse to Athlit to make sure the Arab workers were sent to their home villages with orders to deny all knowledge of what NILI had been doing. She burned the few remaining documents that had not been buried and hurried home to prepare the food for her father and brother and the festival. She was startled to find no trace of either man. Alarmed, she realized the normally busy streets of the town were empty; all of the nearby houses were tightly shuttered and dark. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Just at dusk came a pounding at the door and a sergeant of the gendarmerie and two soldiers seized her and pulled her into one of the larger houses at the far end of Founders Street. Most of the rooms had been turned into jammed holding cells, for the Turks had been busy all day selectively rounding up suspects from a specific list that clearly had been provided by informants. Most were NILI loyalists, a few innocent captives—like Zvi’s wife and children—were meant to be hostages to lure other suspects to surrender.

  As Sarah would discover, two front rooms of the house were set aside for the actual questioning. In the first sat Hassan Bey, the Kaimakan of Haifa and the police chief. It was here that Sarah was confronted and had to witness the savage beating of Ephraim. When he was dragged away unconscious it became her turn. While it was clear that the inquisitors were mistaken on some things—such as Ephraim’s leadership of NILI—she was alarmed at how much they did know. They knew specific names of NILI agents who had escaped; most of all, they demanded to know where Josef Lishansky was hiding and when the next British boat was due to arrive.

  Instead of meekly denying all knowledge, Sarah taunted them. She alone was responsible for the spying and she would live to see them all destroyed for their brutal tyranny and for the genocide of the Armenians and persecution of the Jews. Frustrated by her stubbornness, the two officials adjourned to the hotel for refreshments and had her pulled into the second room to confront the official torturer Osman Bey, one of the most feared Turks in Syria–Palestine.

  The Ottomans had long perfected the techniques and use of torture as a means of extracting information and punishment. Their methods were a delicate dance of cruel brutality that inflicted maximum pain while prolonging life. Bouts of torture were alternated with periods of isolation and uncertainty to break the suspect’s will. When it came to torturing women, however, the Turks had a cultural quirk that amounted to ambivalence. While it was common at the time for a Turkish man to beat his wife and other women in his household, it was considered unmanly to harm other women. The two officials did not particularly care to witness what was going to happen to Sarah, just as long as she talked.

  Osman Bey, however, had no such scruples. He took pride in the ingenuity of his craft. He tied her to a chair, as he had done with Ephraim, and beat the soles of her feet until they bled and then tore the back of her blouse to expose her back and lashed her there. He asked no questions; it was just a taste of what would come if she did not begin to talk. Then she was locked into a room where her sister-in-law, her young niece and nephew, and several other women and children were confined.

  Later in the evening Sarah was dragged to the front room where Zvi’s wife also was being held. To add to the unreality of the scene, all of the children were allowed by the Turks to roam freely through the house and most were oblivious to the peril they were in. Sarah immediately shouted at the officials that her sister-in-law was totally innocent of any treason and should be freed. Thinking this was a sign of her weakening, they released the woman and her children. When Sarah made it clear she would not talk further, they sent her back to Osman Bey.

  But all that night and for the next three days and nights she had to withstand alternating bouts of pain and respites of fear and uncertainty. When she was not actually suffering excruciating pain herself, she had to listen to the shrieks of other prisoners from the torture room. A British intelligence report on her fate hinted strongly that she was sexually molested, even raped, by Osman Bey. That atrocity aside, Osman Bey certainly ran through his repertoire of cruelty. The beatings continued until she fainted. Single hairs were pulled from her scalp and her fingers were crushed by pliers. Near the end he boiled eggs in a spirit lamp and fixed them to scald her armpits, breasts, and, finally, into her vagina.

  While this horror was going on, Hassan Bey took his search for Josef to another level. He called the Zichron Ya’akov council to the village synagogue. First, he announced a reward of fifty pounds in gold for anyone who would reveal Josef’s hiding place. Then, with his second breath, he told the elders that if they did not assist him in tracking down Josef he would subject them to the same fate as the Jews of Jaffa. He would raze Zichron Ya’akov to the ground and drive them all into the desert. To their everlasting shame, the council agreed and began a search for Josef that drove him from his cave in flight to he knew not where.

  Finally, on October 5, Sarah’s oppressors gave up. She had not only endured everything they could subject her to, she had rebuked them with threats of her own. She is quoted as shouting at the Kaimakan and the others, “Your end is nigh, you will fall into the pit I have dug for you. You are murderers, blood-thirsty wild animals. I, a weak woman, decided to defend my people lest you do to us what you did to the Armenians. I have hated you, heroes of the falaka (the thin cane) and the baksheesh. . . . Osman, you hangman, what a hero you are, beating up women.”

  Colonel Bek’s patience was exhausted as well. He ordered that Sarah be taken to Damascus, where the means of extracting information were more refined and effective. She was suddenly dragged from her isolation and put in handcuffs. Again, the complicated Turkish mores about women came into play. Sarah asked with dignity if she could be allowed to go home and change her clothing and wash her wounds before setting out. The Kaimakan was in the process of releasing many of the hostages who were no longer of use to him and perhaps he was preoccupied so he gave permission. In the process, Sarah was able to whisper to the young son of one of the hostages to come to the rear of the Aaronsohn house and search for a note she hoped to leave there and to guard it. Then he was to take it to a relative who was not a NILI, and to whom she had given some of the gold.

  Then, chained between two soldiers with an armed guard around her, Sarah walked upright and proud the length of the street to her home. From their houses her former friends and neighbors came to stare at her, and four women chased after the procession shouting abuse at her in a frenzy of suppressed fear and rage. She stared at them coldly and said nothing.

  Once inside her home the macabre scene continued. She announced firmly that she intended to wash herself and change her dress in the bathroom with the door locked. Afte
r checking that she could not escape via the high window, the guards stepped out of her way. Once inside, she turned on the water tap fully, snatched up a fragment of paper and wrote a brief note that she folded up and tossed out the window.

  Astonishingly, the note began with detailed orders to her relatives to pay some outstanding bills and a final wage to the Arab workers. She then reported that she had overheard her interrogators let slip the names of three informants who had betrayed her and NILI. Then she made her final plea:

  Our situation is very bad, mine most of all because the whole blame falls on me. I was beaten murderously, and they have bound me with ropes. Do remember to describe all our suffering to those who shall come after we have passed away. I do not believe we shall survive after having been betrayed, and the whole truth about us probably exposed. The news of victory must eventually come, and as you will be seeing my brothers, tell them about our martyrdom and let them know that Sarah has asked that each drop of her blood be avenged measure for measure, vengeance upon our Jews and especially upon the rulers under whom we live that no mercy be shown, just as they have shown no mercy to us. . . .

  When the guards nervously began to call her to hurry, Sarah opened one of the bathroom cabinets and took out a small caliber pistol that Aaron had given her. She put it in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Tragically, the bullet missed her brain and instead went through her mouth and shattered her spine. When the soldiers broke open the door they rushed to call Dr. Yaffe. He later recorded in his diary, “I took some instruments and rode to the scene. I found Sarah lying unconscious on the floor of the bathroom. Next to her was a small revolver. Her pulse was faint. Blood was coming out of her mouth. I gave her a caffeine injection and her consciousness returned. She recognized me and pleaded, ‘For heaven’s sake, put an end to my life. I beg you, kill me . . . I can’t suffer any longer. . . .’”