Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Yaffe rightly feared that if he did assist Sarah in dying, he himself would be executed. But putting aside his feud with Aaron, he administered morphine to ease her agony and injections of stimulants to keep her conscious. He even rebuked the Turkish military doctor who the police had insisted examine her, and extracted a promise—sincere or not—that if Sarah stabilized she would not be tortured further.

  For the next three days and nights, Sarah drifted in and out of awareness. A number of women relatives and neighbors overcame their fear and kept a constant vigil at her bedside. They cooled her fever with damp cloths and called for Dr. Yaffe to return whenever her agony became unendurable. During her lucid moments she pleaded with them to make sure Ephraim and Zvi were spared further torture by the police.

  At seven o’clock on the morning of October 9, a Tuesday, Sarah woke for the last time and lucidly said good-bye to the friends around her and made one last plea for them to care for her father. Then, Yaffe later wrote, “At eight-thirty she gave up her soul without revealing a thing to the Turks.”

  The stark reality of Sarah’s end brought all of Zichron Ya’akov to its senses. The entire town followed her body wrapped in cloth to the cemetery. There, to everyone’s discomfiture, the gravesite next to her mother had not been dug. It took two hours to prepare, during which the townspeople stood silently, contemplating what they had done. As the first shovels of dirt were dropped into the grave, the first rain of the autumn season began to fall.

  A darkness would hang over Zichron Ya’akov for some time to come. News of the Turkish threats spread quickly, and a manhunt for Josef Lishansky began in earnest. Members of the Ha-Shomer joined in the pursuit. Early in his flight, Josef had been found and taken prisoner by some of his old comrades, who finally decided to let him go. On the run, out of money, he traveled by night on foot, begging handouts and a brief shelter from terrified friends. He finally made his way south to Jaffa, where in a desperate attempt to cross over to the British via the desert, he was caught trying to steal a camel.

  A final irony is that during those dark weeks, Josef became something of a celebrity for the Turks. He was held for ten days in Jerusalem but not subjected to any torture. Finally, in a heavily guarded sealed railroad car he made the four-day journey to Damascus, where a crowd of Turkish officials jammed the station for a sight of this daring young man.

  Once he arrived at the special jail for political prisoners, he found Naaman Belkind and a dozen NILI members. Again, Josef was not mistreated, certainly not tortured as savagely as Naaman had been. He was taken to interview Djamal Pasha, who was curious to see the fugitive.

  On October 30, 1917, the Third Battle of Gaza had begun with a sweeping assault on Beersheba that sent the Turks into retreat. On the night of the thirty-first, before the Turks could maneuver eastward, a massive bombardment of Gaza began by a combined force of British and French warships anchored offshore and a concentration of artillery. The next morning, the infantry assault on the city began.

  Six days later the city was in the complete control of the British. Then followed two months of fierce fighting up the coast road as the Turks managed a doggedly skillful retreat that gave ground grudgingly. But as pledged, it was on Christmas Day, 1917, that General Allenby won a welcome from the people by entering the main gate of Jerusalem on foot as a liberator, and not on the horseback of a conqueror.

  In early December there was a trial for Josef Lishansky and Naaman Belkind, but no sentence was announced. And there were rumors throughout the prison that German diplomats had urged the Three Pashas not to repeat the scandal of the Jaffa expulsions, but to treat the NILI affair as a minor matter involving a few harmless fools. They began to hope that they all might be pardoned or, at worst, draw short prison terms. After all, General Allenby had finally launched his attack.

  A week, later however, Josef Lishansky and Naaman Belkind were awakened, forced into penitents’ white robes, and hanged in the public square of Damascus. The crude signs hanging from their necks proclaimed them to be vile traitors. In the weeks that followed, as the Turkish troops retreated their way north in retreat, they vandalized the agriculture station at Athlit. The rooms were pillaged, the farm implements that were not stolen were wrecked, and the horses and camels of the troops were set to graze and destroy the carefully tended beds of plants.

  For the time being, the flame that was Sarah Aaronsohn and NILI seemed to be extinguished. But it would not be so for long, and that flame shines as brightly today in the Eretz Israel that she helped bring into being thirty years later.

  EPILOGUE

  Myth versus History

  Israeli postage stamp honoring Sarah Aaronsohn, 1991

  Victors may get to write the history after great events, but it is merely a rough draft. Sarah Aaronsohn was scarcely in her grave before conflicting myths began to form, and they continue to this day. Happily, a succession of historians have begun to chip away to reveal the truth beneath the surface.

  The Germans and Turks got a head start with the early myths. General Allenby miscalculated when he promised Prime Minister David Lloyd George that after liberating Jerusalem he could quickly push Djamal Pasha’s Fourth Army out of Syria–Palestine and send troops back to France in time for the next offensive in the spring of 1918. It turned out that the Ottomans did not ask for an armistice and surrender until days before the November 11 peace was declared in Europe between the Allies and other Central Powers.

  During those final months, both the Three Pashas and the leaders of the Yishuv and Ha-Shomer had their own reasons to dismiss the impact of Sarah and NILI on the inevitable Allied victory in the Middle Eastern theater. In Zichron Ya’akov a curtain of silence descended over Sarah’s heroism and final betrayal. The presence of Zvi Aaronsohn and the crippled Ephraim in their midst could be neither ignored nor fully acknowledged. The NILI agents who had been imprisoned were quietly set free as Allenby’s army drew close to Damascus and Turkish officials began to flee to sanctuary elsewhere.

  Once the war shifted to the struggle over the peace, other myths began to surface. The diplomatic contest waged at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 featured a bitter argument over who had better claim to parts of the Ottoman Empire coveted by the victors. Sarah’s two brothers, Aaron and Alexander, traveled between London and New York, where they were caught up in postwar debate between President Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George over the duplicitous promises made to various Arab and Jewish leaders about their future roles in what was going to be London’s mandated rule over Palestine and Arabia.

  The Arabists and the pro-Zionists in the military staff and political ministries strengthened their cases by arguing about whether the Jewish spies in Palestine or the Arab insurgents had contributed most to the victory. William Ormsby-Gore and Wyndham Deedes, and even General Allenby, publicly credited Sarah and NILI with providing the crucial intelligence that led to the triumph. But their praise was more focused on devoted Aaron, who was still alive; Sarah was treated as a tragic but minor figure. The Arabists turned to the already celebrated T.E. Lawrence.

  Aaron remained strangely muted when confronting his sister’s fate. He had not learned of her death from the British until January, when he had gone from London to America to meet with Zionists there. He never returned to the Middle East. Instead, he made an uncomfortable truce with Chaim Weizmann and served as his aide at the Paris Peace Conference talks—where he clashed with the delegation headed by Sharif Hussein in his robes and T.E. Lawrence, who still wore a keffiyeh headdress over his officer’s uniform.

  Unhappy fates awaited Aaron and Alexander. In May 1919, Aaron was on his way back to the Paris conference from London via a Royal Flying Corps airplane when the aircraft crashed off the French coast, killing him and the pilot. Widespread rumors that the crash was due to official sabotage continue to circulate without resolution. Alexander was placated with military promotions and a Distinguished Service Order medal. The undeserved rewards pushed the already self-cen
tered Alexander into a kind of delusion. He avoided returning very often to postwar Palestine. Instead he set himself up as an expert on the region and keeper of the NILI memory in both London and America. He actively promoted book and film projects that never materialized, and prospered for a time after marrying an heiress to a fortune founded on popular soap products. After a life of idleness, he died in 1948.

  Sarah’s other surviving relatives lived on in uneasy obscurity in Zichron Ya’akov. Zvi lived only until 1921 with the injuries inflicted on him; Shmuel died in 1950. Rivka returned from America and cared for Ephraim in the house on Founders Street until his death in 1939. She lived on, unmarried, keeping a tight control over the large collection of Aaron’s diaries, notebooks, and correspondence, which she selectively censored and then turned over to the Beit Aaronsohn–NILI Museum that was set up in the compound. She lived until 1981. The four women who were accused of betraying Sarah and shrieking at her as she went to her death all suffered and soon died painful and troubled deaths.

  Rough justice also was meted out to Sarah’s and NILI’s Ottoman enemies after the war. All three of the Pashas fled prosecution by the reformists who seized control of what would become the new republic of Turkey. But they found no sanctuary. Assassins for the Armenian separatist movement tracked down Talaat Pasha in Berlin in 1921 and killed him. Djamal Pasha managed to become a military adviser to the rulers of Afghanistan who were waging a war with the new Soviet Union. In 1922, he was sent to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for truce talks with the Soviets and was shot there—again by revenging Armenians. That same year, Enver Pasha was killed in battle leading a Muslim rebellion against the Soviets.

  Only Aziz Bek, the head of the Ottoman counterespionage service, managed to survive. At the war’s end he fled to Switzerland along with other Ottoman officials who feared prosecution. But after three years he returned to Turkey and spent two decades in a series of high offices in the new government of Kemal Ataturk. In the 1930s he published two memoirs in which he added to the layers of myth by alleging fanciful meetings with Sarah and describing a mutual attraction between them. He was never prosecuted for his oppression of either the Arabs or the Jews.

  The most persistent myth of course is that of an ambivalent T.E. Lawrence and, tantalizingly, about his love for Sarah Aaronsohn. For the rest of his life until his death in 1935, Lawrence continued to shed identities and don new ones in search of the happiness that eluded him. He had plenty of help along the way.

  British officialdom happily seized on the image of the daring English soldier-adventurer dashing across desert sands with his loyal band of Arab princes—part spymaster, part military genius. The government needed heroes once the horrible reality of the war began to sink into the public consciousness, and Lawrence was made to order.

  He became a truly international celebrity thanks to an American showman-political operative named Lowell Thomas, who took a series of photographs and motion pictures of Lawrence during the war and attracted huge audiences in lecture halls across America. Thomas, with Lawrence at first a willing participant, shamelessly inflated the myth after the war with outlandish photographs of Lawrence in exotic Arab costumes. He used the images to illustrate a stream of books and articles that perpetuated fanciful fables of Lawrence as a master of disguise and daring, wandering at will behind Turkish lines and turning the tide of the Middle East campaign while heading his Arab band.

  At the start, Lawrence took part in this charade. His government lavished medals and promotions on him. He became Colonel Lawrence and was feted everywhere including Buckingham Palace. He added to his own luster by publishing in 1926 the international best-selling memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom—which had, by his own later admission, a number of embellishments included within its often impenetrable mix of memoir and philosophy.

  Some of the fabrications later refuted, such as the victory at Aqaba and his capture and sexual torture at the hands of the Turks, found their way into the Hollywood film version of his legend. Among the persistent and dubious parts of the Lawrence myth are the allegations of his homosexuality and its impact on the rival myth of his love for Sarah Aaronsohn.

  One of the more spurious assertions is that Lawrence’s dedication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom “to S.A.” refers to an Arab peasant boy named Dahoum, who was his servant and supposed lover during his archaeological work at Carchemish. Just to think what Leonard Woolley or D.G. Hogarth would have made of such behavior, let alone whether a confirmed Edwardian English gentleman as Lawrence remained all his life, would countenance such behavior, is to see it for the nonsense it is.

  The absurdity is all the more ludicrous given the cultural evolution of progressive attitudes on gender identity and sexual relations that exist today. Yet the wrangle over whether Lawrence was or was not an active homosexual continues to produce a steady outpouring of books and articles. There is even an online Dutch website devoted to a detailed examination of the conflicting theories.

  It is telling that contemporaries of Lawrence who were skeptics and some outright foes such as Colonel (later General) Walter Gribbon and Richard Meinertzhagen, who did conduct spy raids behind Turkish lines, dismissed such a notion. Meinertzhagen brought criticism down on himself by publicly declaring, “Lawrence never commanded anything but a looting rabble of murderous Arabs, he took part in no military operations and his desert exploits had not the slightest bearing on Allenby’s campaign. In his own words his was a ‘side-show of a side-show. . . .’ I probably knew Lawrence better than any living man. . . . I believe I was the only one of his friends to whom he confided that he was a ‘complete fraud.’” Yet he, Leonard Woolley, and others present during his archaeological and wartime lives later publicly refuted the homosexuality myth.

  It is probably more accurate to describe Lawrence’s exploits in the desert as both brave and important, if not crucial, to Allenby’s victory. More than the British liaison officers with other tribes, he managed a fragile coalition of tribal forces that forced the Turks to divert large numbers of troops away from the Gaza–Beersheba front. That should be glory enough for any man.

  As for Lawrence himself, his sad search for a better identity quite plausibly could have led him to adopt part of Sarah Aaronsohn’s own very real heroism for himself. He gradually wearied of the Lawrence of Arabia image and shed it just as he had others before. Part of this was no doubt due to his government’s dismissal of the Arab cause and his dismay at how the Arabs had proved themselves unable to achieve unity. He resigned his army rank, dropped out of sight, and adopted a new name altogether. After being dismissed as an enlisted man in the army, he found a new enthusiasm in the romantic future that aviation promised in the 1920s. He became Aircraftman T.E. Shaw and a mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps.

  As for the woman he never met but clearly admired, his conversation and disclosure to Douglas Duff in a Dorset village store in the 1930s can plausibly be read as yet another of his attempts to appropriate something of Sarah’s very real heroism to bolster his own fragile self-esteem. A related motive could be that Lawrence late in life came to a sense of guilt in part because of the way the Arabists at the Savoy headquarters had hampered—or even subverted—what Sarah and NILI were laboring in constant danger to achieve.

  So Lawrence’s poem can be taken as a form of apology to Sarah as much as an attempt to attach himself to her legend. He could claim, “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars to earn you Freedom.” But even with that claim, he forced himself to admit in the final stanzas that his attempt to build her a “fit monument” ended up shattered and unfinished.

  Sarah Aaronsohn’s legend continues to grow. Her dream of Eretz Israel is a reality. It is an imperfect one, to be sure. The Jewish–Arab comity that was briefly possible seems an unlikely prospect these days.

  Visitors to the Beit Aaronsohn–NILI Museum, established in Zichron Ya’akov in 1956, should find inspiration in the life and heroic deeds
of Sarah and her family. Sarah’s courage and leadership made her a woman ahead of her time. One hopes she will serve as an inspiration to future leaders rather than merely a historic figure whom Israeli schoolchildren honor when they visit her grave in the now-prosperous suburb of Haifa that is Zichron Ya’akov.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Lawrence of Arabia (ca. 1917)

  From the frontispiece of his privately printed edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, 1926:

  To S.A.

  I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

  And wrote my will across the sky in stars

  To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house

  That your eyes might be shining for me

  When we came.

  Death seemed thy servant on the road, till we were near

  And saw you waiting;

  When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me

  And took you apart: into his quietness.

  Love, the way-weary, grasped to your body, our brief wage

  Ours for the moment

  Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind

  Worms grew fat upon your substance.

  Men prayed me that I set out work, the inviolate house,

  As a memory of you.

  But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished and now

  The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels

  In the marred shadow

  Of your gift.

  An Explanation

  Douglas Duff was at Thear’s Garage in the Dorset village of Bridport on a spring day in 1935 when he met the fabled T.E. Lawrence.

  Duff had been a knockabout adventurer who for some years had been the prolific writer of thrilling adventure stories of the kind favored by British schoolboys as “ripping yarns.” His latest book had been set in the Middle East, where he had been chief of Jerusalem’s notorious Palestine Police that enforced British rule in that volatile region after World War I. He certainly would have known Lawrence of Arabia on sight. More than twenty years later in a letter footnoted in an obscure intelligence study, he recalled: