On April 24, on the eve of the Allied landings at Gallipoli, Interior Minister Talaat had ordered the arrest of hundreds of Armenian civic leaders in Constantinople, and simultaneously instructed the governors of those provinces with a substantial Armenian population to immediately close down on all Armenian “revolutionary and political organizations” and arrest their leaders. This directive, carrying the suggestion that a credible Armenian secessionist movement actually existed, had terrible consequences; in the eyes of many government officials in the hinterlands, all Armenians were the enemy. Within days of Talaat’s directive, tens of thousands of ordinary Armenian civilians were being pulled from their homes, to be force-marched to some unspecified “relocation zone” elsewhere, or in many cases simply butchered where they stood.
Given the porousness of Turkey’s frontiers, as well as the presence of Western mission schools throughout the empire, reports had soon started coming into Constantinople telling of massacres of Armenians across the breadth of Anatolia, of corpses lining the routes of their forced marches into the countryside. As the horror stories multiplied, on May 24, the foreign ministers of the Triple Entente issued a proclamation vowing that the Young Turk leadership would be held responsible for “these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization.”
Constantinople’s response was one of defiance; three days after the Entente proclamation, the Turkish cabinet approved the “Provisional Law of Relocation.” Without specifically citing the Armenians, the law stated that the army was now “authorized and compelled to crush in the most severe way” any sign of resistance or aggression among the population. To do so, it had the power “to transfer and relocate the populations of villages and towns, either individually or collectively, in response to military needs, or in response to any signs of treachery or betrayal.” As for where this potentially vast sea of internal deportees might be sent, Talaat and Enver had already selected a spot: gathered up from across Anatolia, most would be herded down to the barren reaches of northern Syria. The insanity inherent in this scheme, of uprooting a vast population and casting it into a land already devastated by the deprivations of war, would play out to obscene result: by best estimate, some 800,000 of the Armenian deportees were to perish—starved, shot, or beaten to death—en route.
The consensus among historians is that Djemal Pasha stood very much apart from his Young Turk coleaders in his response to the expulsions. In June, the first survivors of the death marches began to trickle into the north Syrian city of Aleppo, a way station toward their intended destination, the “relocation zone” of Deir al-Zour some one hundred miles to the east. Visiting Aleppo, Djemal Pasha was horrified by what he saw. Reiterating a March decree that commanded his army to protect the Armenians, he lobbied Constantinople to impose the order on military units where it really mattered, in Anatolia. That plea was ignored.
Getting no satisfaction from Constantinople, Djemal allowed thousands of Armenians to remain in Aleppo rather than continue their death march, and despite the deepening hunger and food shortages spreading through Syria, he ordered an increase of government food aid to the refugees. Testament to his love of order and regulations, he issued a rash of new edicts directing that the army regulate and maintain the food supply for the Armenians, that cars and horses be procured for their transportation, even that each refugee be given a financial allowance. But implicit in the stacks of documents that the Syrian governor signed in his office each day was the notion that his regime actually had the wherewithal to carry out these initiatives, never mind that all evidence—evidence that started just outside Djemal’s office windows and stretched to the farthest corners of his realm—argued otherwise. It was as if he fancied himself the administrator of a canton of peacetime Switzerland, rather than of a poor and highly fractured region the size of Italy that was being ravaged by war, hunger, and disease. In the face of the Armenian crisis, as with so many other problems that came his way, Djemal responded with a mixture of bluster, threats, and pleas, and when none of that worked, he simply averted his gaze. By September, with the crisis worsening, he issued a new edict, making it a criminal offense to photograph the Armenians.
SOMETHING UNEXPECTED HAPPENED to Aaron Aaronsohn in the Palestinian village of Katra, when an elderly Arab man approached him with the words “zatna mamnounin”—“we are grateful to you.” As the agronomist noted in his diary that evening, “the Arabs did not speak that way to Jews only twenty years ago. The job I undertake is a hard one indeed, but to compel the natives to declare, even if they are false in their hearts, zatna mamnounin to the Jews, for them to realize they are helpless in such calamities if we don’t help them out, that is already worthwhile.”
As the head of Djemal’s locust eradication program, Aaronsohn traveled the length of the Syrian plague zone that spring of 1915, giving public lectures and holding field workshops on how best to combat the pestilence. At his urging, Djemal Pasha decreed that every man, woman, and child was to collect six rotels, about forty pounds, of locust eggs for destruction or face an exorbitant fine.
But even for a man of unflagging energy, there were times when the enormity of the task cast Aaronsohn into despair. Despite all the eradication efforts, the swarms continued to expand—at least one was credibly measured at one mile wide and seven miles long—as did the scope of their destruction. Ever more of lowland Judea, normally a verdant green at that time of year, became a study in brown: mile after mile of orchards stripped bare of both fruit and leaf, fields so devoid of vegetation they appeared set in winter fallow.
As crises everywhere have a tendency to do, the locust plague also laid bare the inequalities and deficiencies of Syrian society. Despite the extraordinary powers given him by Djemal, the response Aaronsohn typically encountered among local bureaucrats and military officers he tried to enlist to the eradication effort fell somewhere between uninterest and defiance. In Jaffa, he had been compelled to shame the kaimmakam, or local governor, into attending his public lecture, only to watch the man pointedly leave the auditorium halfway through. The old man in the village of Katra notwithstanding, the far more common response in Arab villages was resignation; to them, the locusts were djesh Allah, or “God’s army,” and it was futile, perhaps even sacrilegious, to resist it. Also laid bare was officialdom’s resentment of the Jewish colonists, which was always simmering just beneath the surface. Ottoman tax officials were punctilious in handing out fines for insufficient egg collection in Jewish villages, while those same shortfalls—and in many cases complete inactivity—in Arab villages were ignored. In a particularly outrageous case, Aaronsohn reported, shortly after all the plowhorses in the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah had been taken away under the war requisitions statute, their owners were fined under the locust eradication statute for failing to plow their fields. Time and again, he threatened to resign from his inspector-general position in disgust, only to receive new assurances from Djemal that the problems and inequities would be addressed, that a new day of harmony and collective effort was just around the corner.
At least part of Aaronsohn’s discontent, however, was rooted in the deeply personal, a change that had come over him during his travels through Palestine. For the first time, he had begun to question the Ottoman Empire’s ability to survive—or, perhaps more accurately, the ability of the Jewish community to survive in her thrall. It went far beyond the petty harassments and corruption he had witnessed. At most every Jewish settlement he’d visited, he had been approached by frightened residents who told of growing tension with their Arab neighbors, of overt threats from local officials brandishing weapons.
The warning signs didn’t attach solely to the Jews. In April, Aaronsohn had dispatched his brother Alex to Lebanon, both to see if the locusts had reached there and to check on their youngest sister, Rivka, who had been hustled off to Beirut during those tense days when the Turkish army was searching for Zichron’s arms cache. Under the terms of the Capitulations, Christian-dominated Lebanon had a
lways enjoyed a great measure of freedom from Constantinople, and had become a proud and prosperous Francophile enclave in Syria; as Alex reported back, even though Lebanon had escaped the locusts, it was now a sad and broken place, with Turkish soldiers everywhere and even the normally haughty Beirutis living in dread of what might come next. By early June came the most alarming reports yet, dark rumors about the massacre of Armenians in Anatolia. It was just around this time that Aaronsohn’s brooding led him to two interlocking conclusions: the Jews in Palestine had to break with the Ottoman Empire. To achieve that break, they had to actively work for its downfall.
The agronomist was undoubtedly helped in reaching this conclusion by his assistant at Athlit, Absalom Feinberg, a twenty-six-year-old firebrand who was engaged to Aaronsohn’s sister Rivka. In his home village of Hadera, a Jewish colony just ten miles south of Zichron, Feinberg had formed a local chapter of the Gideonites, the paramilitary organization that both protected Jewish settlements and launched reprisal raids against their perceived Arab enemies. It was an activity well suited to his political outlook, for to Feinberg the Arab-Jewish struggle in Palestine was a contest between “culture and savagery,” and there was little doubt which role the Arabs fulfilled. “I have lived among them all my life,” he would write, “and it would be difficult to sway me from my opinion that there is no more cowardly, hypocritical, and false race than this one.”
But if there was one “race” Feinberg detested even more than the Arab, it was the Turk, and ever since arriving at Athlit he had preached to Aaron Aaronsohn the gospel of revolt, on the need for the Jews of Palestine to rise up and throw off the Turkish yoke.
Aaronsohn, fourteen years Feinberg’s senior, may have laughed off his assistant’s fiery oratory as the passion of youth, but a turning point of sorts had been reached that previous January when Feinberg and twelve other Hadera residents were arrested on the spurious charge of spying for the British. Managing to escape, Feinberg had made straight for Aaronsohn.
To win the release of the Hadera men, the agronomist contemplated taking the path he had trod so often before—working his network of contacts in the Ottoman bureaucracy, dispensing bribes where needed—but this time Feinberg would have none of it. “Our worst enemy is the Turk,” he told Aaronsohn. “Now that the hour of his downfall has struck, can we stand by and do nothing? The Turks are right to suspect us. They know the ruin they are planning for us. Anyone without a rabbit’s heart would be proud to spy against them if it would help to bring the English.”
Certainly, Feinberg’s views hadn’t softened during the long days and weeks he had spent with Aaronsohn on the locust eradication campaign. Instead, by that June, it was the agronomist who had been converted.
As for how to work against the Turks—which by extension meant helping the British—the answer was fairly obvious. Over the course of the locust eradication effort, Aaronsohn and his various assistants had covered the length of Palestine, and the scientist now had a stack of reports on his desk detailing local conditions and resources for much of the region. The lists of available resources had quite naturally included the size and location of army camps, supply depots, and gasoline storage facilities, all vital information for a large-scale civic campaign but also for an enemy army. More specifically, these reports and Aaronsohn’s own travels confirmed that the Turkish army was concentrated in just a few towns and cities in Palestine, that virtually the entire coastline had been left undefended save for a few motley crews of local gendarmes and rural militia. The British clearly didn’t know this or they might have stormed ashore long ago, and this was the most crucial intelligence that Aaronsohn could provide them, a detailed, mile-by-mile report on the opposition to be faced—or more accurately, not to be faced—along the length of Palestine’s coast.
As to the question of getting word to the British that a spy ring was waiting to be at their service in Palestine, the answer was even more obvious. In Beirut and Haifa, American warships were continuing to evacuate “neutrals” who wanted to leave the Ottoman Empire, and both port cities boasted thriving black markets in forged documents. While nothing in Syria was easy anymore, getting a messenger on board one of the Egypt-bound evacuation ships was little more than a matter of money and luck.
For Aaronsohn, it was also clear who this messenger should be. Twice in the opening days of the war, his brother Alex had run afoul of the Ottoman authorities, and he was now locked in a dangerous feud with a local functionary. Furthermore, Alex spoke flawless English, courtesy of a three-year residence in New York. So it was that in mid-July 1915 Alex Aaronsohn boarded USS Des Moines in Beirut’s harbor. Joining him was his “wife,” Rivka Aaronsohn. Once past the American warship’s first port of call, the Greek island of Rhodes, the couple would continue on to Egypt, where Alex would make straight for the British military intelligence office in Cairo.
THE TRIP DOWN had been a delight: two weeks on a first-class train surrounded by beautiful scenery, broken here and there by stopovers in exquisitely picturesque Anatolian towns. Best of all, William Yale had fallen into the company of Abdul Rahman Pasha al-Yusuf, a member of the Turkish parliament and one of the wealthiest noblemen of Damascus, and been accorded lavish hospitality as the pasha’s temporary “adopted son.” In fact, just about the only disagreeable moments on the entire journey had been the bedbugs at the hotel in Eskisehir and the sight of the starving Armenian refugees massed along the rail siding in Tarsus. “It was a sad sight to see the poor people,” Yale blandly recalled, “uprooted from their homes, going to an unknown destination, the shadow of a great tragedy looming over them.” If the American oilman felt any moral uneasiness about his or his company’s role in collaborating with the regime that was orchestrating this tragedy, he kept it to himself; William Yale had a delicate task to perform.
After just a few days in the Syrian capital, he took reluctant leave of the pasha to continue on to Jerusalem, where his first order of business was to arrange a meeting with Djemal Pasha. With a haste rather out of character for the Ottoman government, he soon received a summons to the German Hospice on the Mount of Olives.
As his horse-drawn carriage climbed the steep cobblestoned road up the mount on the appointed day, Yale found himself growing increasingly nervous. “I practiced the salaams and salutations I had learned on the trip from Constantinople,” he wrote, “and wondered whether they were the proper ones to use for such a powerful person as Djemal.”
Yale’s anxiety was more than just a case of starstruck jitters. He had come to Jerusalem to secure concessionary rights to a half million acres of Palestine for Standard Oil, and as he well knew, the success or failure of that enterprise rested on his meeting with the Syrian governor. He wasn’t at all sure how it might go.
Passing through the wrought-iron gates of the German Hospice, Yale’s horse carriage drew to a stop before the main entrance of the magnificent building, where liveried sentries stepped forward to help him down. With his papers and maps, the American oilman was ushered into the ornate main hall, then down a long stone corridor to the anteroom of Djemal’s inner sanctum.
As Yale waited there, he fell into conversation with one of the governor’s young aides, a naval attaché who spoke English. Welcoming this distraction from his anxiety, Yale became so engrossed in their talk that he took little notice of those coming and going from the room, including the short uniformed man with the close-cropped black beard who eventually emerged from a side door. It wasn’t until this man strode briskly up to the receptionist’s desk, hopped up on one corner of it, and fixed him with an intent stare that Yale realized it was Djemal Pasha.
“Well, Mr. Yale,” he said in elegant French, “get your maps and papers out and show me what you want.”
Djemal’s informality had the effect of instantly dissolving Yale’s nervousness—but also of filling him with a sudden regret. At the last minute, he had decided that asking for the entire half million acres that Standard wanted in Palestine was simply too audac
ious a request to make at this first meeting with the governor, so Yale had brought only half his maps to the German Hospice. These he quickly spread upon the receptionist desk and pointed out a broad swath of central Judea. Djemal looked on, but judging by the impatient nodding of his head, he wasn’t keen on hearing a lot of details. After just a few moments he straightened and gave another curt nod. “Tell me what you need and I’ll issue the necessary orders at once.”
It was only at that instant, Yale would later contend, that he grasped the gulf of understanding that stood between him and the Syrian governor. If there was oil in Palestine, Djemal Pasha naturally wanted it found and quickly tapped so that his transport trucks could move and his armies could fight their war. But Standard had no intention of doing that. Instead, Yale had come to Palestine merely to buy up concessions and put dibs on the region for Standard in the postwar era.
“As I look back on it now,” Yale recounted some twenty years later, “I regret that I didn’t tell him the truth.”
But he didn’t. Instead, with Djemal Pasha’s support, Yale quickly obtained the necessary official papers and organized a field expedition. In short order, and with Turkish soldiers and local officials ensuring the full compliance of tribal sheikhs, he had nailed down the mineral concessionary rights to some quarter million acres of central Palestine. His Socony superiors back in Constantinople were understandably thrilled with the news, but apparently so was the Turkish leadership. First, Standard had helped them skirt the British naval blockade by smuggling oil in from Bulgaria, and now Standard was taking the further step—or so the Turks thought—of helping them develop their own oil resources. In late July, the regime resolved to show their gratitude to their friends in Socony’s Constantinople office in the time-honored tradition of empires everywhere: the bestowing of medals.
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