The agronomist from Athlit was a very different type of Zionist from those Sykes had quietly plotted with in London. Those men were sober-minded and cautious, their approach gentlemanly, whereas Aaronsohn was brash and impatient, a man hardened by his having actually lived the Zionist “dream” in Palestine. In comparison with some of those London confreres, he also had a much grander vision of what should happen in Palestine: not just an expanded Jewish presence under British protection, but an eventual outright Jewish state, one that would extend from the shores of the Mediterranean to east of the Jordan River and nearly to the gates of Damascus. Aaron Aaronsohn was a radical, but as Mark Sykes well knew, it was often the radical who catalyzed change.
What he couldn’t have guessed just then was that he and Aaronsohn were about to be handed a bountiful gift from someone on the opposite side of the battlefield, Djemal Pasha.
TO THE ANNOYANCE of defense-minded military commanders throughout history, civilians have a tendency to stay put in their homes until an enemy invading force is just over the horizon. Then, once the arrows or bullets or missiles begin to fly, these civilians bundle up their families and as many possessions as time allows and take to the roads in whatever conveyance is available to them. Predictably, the most common result of this rushed exodus is severe traffic congestion—and often complete paralysis—on all paths leading away from the battlefront, making it extremely difficult for the defending force to bring reinforcements to the scene. To guard against this, armies have routinely forced civilians out of a likely battle zone well ahead of time—and at bayonet point if required. Due to the stasis of the battle lines, such forced evacuations had rarely been necessary on the Western Front through the first two and a half years of World War I, but they had been a common feature in the east, and most especially on the Ottoman Front.
It was a policy that came quite easily to the Ottomans, and for reasons that went beyond simple military expediency. Many times over the centuries, the sultans in Constantinople, mindful of both their comparative military weakness and the polyglot nature of their empire, had adopted a kind of scorched-earth policy in the face of external threat, uprooting entire populations that might tacitly or overtly collaborate with invaders. Time permitting, also removed from an invader’s path were livestock, farm equipment, and food stores, most anything that might provide the enemy sustenance, and that which couldn’t be taken away was burned, smashed, or poisoned.
For all their reformist ideas in other spheres, the Young Turks had seen little reason to revisit this tradition when they came to power in 1908; more likely, they’d simply been overwhelmed by the pace of events. During the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, entire civilian populations were forcibly ejected by most all the combatant armies, less for reasons of military convenience than in pursuit of a policy that a century later would become known as ethnic cleansing. That massive if largely forgotten human tragedy—hundreds of thousands of Turks, Bulgars, Macedonians, and Greeks were permanently expelled from their ancestral homes—set the precedent for the far more brutal and deadly expulsion of Anatolia’s Armenian population beginning in the spring of 1915. Despite that ghastly recent example and his own efforts to ameliorate it, when Djemal Pasha found his own Syrian realm under threat in early 1917, it was to the policy of expulsion that he turned.
At first there was nothing controversial about it. In late February, with the British invaders massing below Gaza and clearly about to strike, he had ordered the evacuation of that town’s population, perhaps twenty thousand civilians in all. It was a move the Syrian governor had every reason to congratulate himself on; when the British attack came in late March, the cleared roads to the north and east of Gaza had allowed the Turks to rush in reinforcements and carry the day.
In that battle’s aftermath, Djemal and his German commanders studied the map of the larger southern Palestine region; surely the British were going to try again, and just as surely they would be more artful than to attack over the same ground twice. In trying to anticipate where that next strike might come, Djemal’s concerns centered on the coastal town of Jaffa, some forty miles to the north.
Throughout March, rumors reaching Djemal’s headquarters had held that the British might bypass the Turkish trenches in Gaza by making an amphibious landing to the north. Not only did the smooth beaches and gentle surf of Jaffa provide a nearly ideal site for such a landing, but so did the town’s mixed population; among its forty thousand residents were some ten thousand Jews and perhaps four thousand Christians, minorities that were becoming increasingly disenchanted under Ottoman rule. While those initial concerns had been mooted by the failed British frontal assault at Gaza on March 26, they came rushing back in its aftermath, so much so that on March 28, Djemal ordered Jaffa’s evacuation. After initially giving residents less than a week to organize their departures, Djemal relented to protests by Jewish leaders—Passover, one of the most sacred of Jewish holidays, was about to begin—and extended the deadline another eight days.
Despite the Ottoman government’s proclivity for sunny proclamations at such times—there was usually much talk of extra trains being laid on to transport the uprooted to safety, of the pleasant temporary quarters being readied to ensure the refugees’ continuing comfort—these evacuations were invariably messy, wretched affairs. For the criminally minded, they provided an opportunity to loot the homes of their departed neighbors, or to waylay exhausted and overburdened travelers on the road. Given the corruption endemic to all levels of Ottoman government, they also tended to be highly selective; those blessed with the right connections or the funds to bribe the right officials might be allowed to stay behind or only move to a town’s outskirts, while others were being herded days or even weeks away. Perhaps inevitably, these abuses were likely to be most prevalent in a “mixed” town like Jaffa, a chance for the ethnic and religious animosities that always lurked below the surface of Ottoman society to be given full play.
Nevertheless, there was initially nothing about the evacuation of Jaffa to suggest it would be anything more than one of those little forgotten footnotes of war, another point of misery for a civilian population long grown accustomed to it. But in issuing his edict, Djemal Pasha unwittingly set in motion one of the most consequential disinformation campaigns of World War I. The first link in that chain of events occurred on the night of April 17, when a twenty-seven-year-old woman was helped aboard a British spy ship trolling off the coast of Palestine.
IT WAS A poignant reunion. Aaron Aaronsohn hadn’t seen his younger sister Sarah in nearly a year, but there she was in Port Said, pale and weak but alive, having just come off the Managem from Athlit. Rushing her to his rooms at the Continental Hotel in central Cairo, Aaronsohn summoned a doctor, who diagnosed anemia and proffered iron tablets. Despite her exhausted state, Aaronsohn then began pumping his sister for news from Palestine.
To say that Sarah Aaronsohn was an independent spirit would have been a gross understatement. As a young woman growing up in Zichron Yaakov, she had fairly scandalized its more conservative residents with her insistence on riding horseback and participating in hunts in the surrounding foothills with the men. Like her male siblings, she was extremely well educated, had traveled—in her case, throughout central Europe—and possessed of a worldly sophistication quite out of keeping with a woman coming of age in the hardscrabble Jewish colonies in Palestine. Even if she had bowed to tradition by quickly marrying after the engagement of her younger sister, Rivka, to Absalom Feinberg—it was considered close to scandalous for an older sister not to marry first—she’d been modern enough to walk out on her unhappy marriage in Constantinople and not look back.
Perhaps most shocking for a woman in the early 1900s, Sarah Aaronsohn had made no attempt to hide either her intelligence or her natural leadership skills. While these qualities spurred resentment in some, others were totally enamored, and over the years the attractive Aaronsohn sister had gathered about her an ardent coterie of male suitors. She was not shy about tr
ading on that attraction for her own higher purposes. Upon the death of Absalom Feinberg in the Sinai desert in January 1917, Sarah had assumed leadership of the NILI spy ring in Palestine, and among the operatives scattered across the region, a network she had helped expand to nearly two dozen, were several men clearly in love with her.
That element aside, Sarah Aaronsohn seemed uniquely suited to the perilous role into which she’d been thrust and, judging by the results, performed it more ably than either of NILI’s original leaders—her temperamental brother; the impetuous Feinberg—might have done. As a woman, she was largely immune from the suspicions that attached to Palestine’s westernized Jews in the eyes of Ottoman officials, and she had used that immunity to make extended reconnaissance trips through the countryside, just an innocent “lady’s outing” should she ever be stopped. Once contact with the British had been established, she turned Athlit into her command post, sorting the bits of intelligence coming in from all over Palestine and ensuring it was organized in time for the next scheduled delivery to the spy ship offshore. One measure of her steeliness was her ability to keep the death of Absalom Feinberg, the man with whom she had shared a chaste love, a secret from the rest of the NILI ring. So as to maintain organizational morale, she held to the fiction concocted by her brother in Cairo that Feinberg had gone off to Europe to train as an Entente pilot.
Now, in mid-April 1917, Sarah Aaronsohn had come to Egypt with a disturbing story to tell. Three weeks earlier, she told her brother, Djemal Pasha had ordered Jaffa’s evacuation. While this edict applied to the entire population of the town, it was hardly a surprise that the burden had fallen especially heavy on its Jewish residents; with transport scarce, they were forced to leave most of their possessions behind, while simultaneously suffering abuse and depredations by their long-resentful Muslim neighbors. According to Sarah, at least two Jewish men had been lynched on the Jaffa outskirts.
For Aaron Aaronsohn, the news was deeply alarming. Mindful as he was of the fate of the Armenians, the Jaffa expulsions suggested that something similar might now befall the Jews. He immediately set out to alert his associates in British intelligence of the potential humanitarian crisis looming in southern Palestine.
His timing couldn’t have been worse. On the very day of Sarah Aaronsohn’s arrival in Cairo, April 19, Archibald Murray had thrown his army against the Turkish trenches at Gaza a second time. Proving Djemal Pasha wrong, Murray chose to attack over precisely the same ground as in the first assault, although opting for an even more artless, human-wave approach. Just about the only British refinements since the First Battle of Gaza were the use of tanks and poison gas against the enemy, but even these couldn’t alter the outcome; in the six thousand casualties the British suffered at the hands of the vastly outnumbered but victorious Turks was a debacle so sweeping as to be apparent to all.
Few could have been more dumbfounded than Aaron Aaronsohn. Back on March 12, prior to Murray’s first attack, British planners had sought out his counsel based on his intimate knowledge of the topography of southern Palestine. The agronomist had been aghast that the British proposed to make their main thrust through an area south of the town known as Wadi Ghazzal, a stretch of flat ground broken by meandering streams, which then rose up to a gridwork of nearly impenetrable cactus-fenced animal pens. “I said I considered the ground very much to our disadvantage,” Aaronsohn had written at the time, “and would give a great chance to the Turkish snipers. Wadis there are numerous and difficult to cross.” Despite this admonition, in both Gaza assaults the British had made for the streams and cactus fences of Wadi Ghazzal like homing pigeons.
Of more immediate concern to Aaronsohn, with the latest Gaza disaster dominating the concerns of British Cairo, it was impossible to get anyone to pay attention to what might be happening to the Jewish population of Jaffa. Over the course of that next week, the scientist desperately approached most any British official he could think of, but got nowhere. Then his luck suddenly changed. It did so on April 27, when he was finally able to obtain an audience with Mark Sykes.
Since their arrival in Cairo five days earlier, most of Sykes’s and Picot’s time had been taken up in conferences with the “delegation” of Syrian exiles that Sykes had preselected to represent Arab interests in the region. Much of the urgency of these talks had dissipated with the grim news out of Gaza, but after several days of negotiations, Sykes felt confident that he’d managed to bridge the vast gulf between France’s imperial designs in Syria and Britain’s pledge to Syrian independence. A great aid in this bridging process was the fact that the three Syrian delegates were totally unaware a gulf existed.
“Main difficulty,” Sykes explained in a cable to the director of military intelligence back in London, “was to manoeuvre the delegates, without showing them a map or letting them know that there was an actual geographical or detailed agreement [already in place], into asking for what we are ready to give them.”
With the “Syrian Question” thus nicely resolving itself, at least temporarily, Sykes was able to carve out time for other things. High on that list was meeting with Aaron Aaronsohn, who had been beseeching Sykes’s retinue for an appointment for days. Their reunion took place in a conference room of the Savoy Hotel on the morning of April 27.
“At last!” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. “We immediately broached intimate subjects. He told me that since he was talking with a Jewish patriot, he would entrust me with very secret matters—some of which were not even known to the Foreign Office.”
Sykes filled him in on his clandestine meeting with the British Zionist leaders at the London townhouse on February 7, as well as expounded on a new formula for Middle East peace he’d recently devised, a scheme that called for a grand alliance of the Jews, the Arabs, and the remnants of the Armenians. With such an alliance, Sykes confidently explained, the Arabs could be made compliant—they had to know that without Jewish and British support, their independence bid would fail—but would also gain the clout to defy the French. At the same time, such a pact would freeze out the grasping Italians, marginalize the Russians, create a pro-British buffer state in protection of Egypt and India, all while paying lip service to the anticolonial demands of Britain’s newest ally, the United States. How the Arabophobic Aaronsohn responded to this dizzying graph-paper concoction—its complexity only surpassed by its absurdity—isn’t known. Most likely, he simply listened in respectful silence; after all, he had pressing matters of his own to take up with Mark Sykes.
If other British officials had been too distracted to pay attention to the predicament of Jaffa’s Jewish population, not so the War Cabinet’s new assistant secretary. Instead, it appears Sykes instantly grasped the potential propaganda bonanza Aaronsohn’s news provided, a way to propel those still noncommittal elements of international Jewry toward the Zionist-British cause. He quickly dispatched Aaronsohn to work up a memo on the Jaffa situation, and to meet with him again the next morning.
In writing on the plight of the Armenians five months earlier, Aaronsohn had paid grudging respect to Djemal Pasha, pointing out that despite his personality flaws and failures as an administrator, the Syrian governor had been resolute in trying to stop the Armenian massacres and in alleviating the suffering of the survivors. The agronomist had also at times benefited from Djemal’s changeable and oddly courteous nature, his personal appeals to him winning the release of Absalom Feinberg after his arrest as a potential spy, as well as the modification of an array of edicts injurious to Jewish settlers. As he sat down to write his account for Mark Sykes on the afternoon of April 27, however, Aaronsohn appreciated that here was a golden opportunity to advance the Zionist cause, and to fully capitalize on that opportunity meant creative license would have to be taken. The primary victim of that creativity was to be Djemal Pasha.
Reconvening with Mark Sykes at 9:15 the next morning, Aaronsohn handed over his memorandum on Jaffa. In quick order, Sykes fired off a top-secret cable to the Foreign Office asking them to
get hold of Chaim Weizmann at the English Zionist Federation and deliver the following message: “Aaron Aaronsohn asks me to inform you that Televiv [the Jewish enclave of Jaffa] has been sacked. 10,000 Palestinian Jews are now without home or food. Whole yeshuv [settlement] is threatened with destruction. Jemal [Pasha] has publicly stated that Armenian policy will now be applied to Jews. Pray inform [Jewish] centers without naming Aaron Aaronsohn or source of information.”
The first to heed the call was the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s preeminent Zionist newspaper. On May 4, under subheadlines entitled “Grave Reports—Terrible Outrages—Threats of Wholesale Massacre,” readers were informed, “It is with profound sorrow and concern that the Jewish Chronicle learns, from an absolutely reliable source, the very gravest news of the Jews in Palestine.… Tel Aviv, the beautiful Garden City suburb of Jaffa, has been sacked and lies a mere heap of ruins, while similar wanton destruction has in all probability taken place in other specifically Jewish parts of Palestine.”
Taking up the fiction about statements made by the Syrian governor, the Chronicle continued, “But even worse is threatened. For the Turkish Governor, Djemal Pasha, has proclaimed his intention of the authorities [sic] to wipe out mercilessly the Jewish population of Palestine, his public statement being that the Armenian policy of massacre is to be applied to the Jews. If this dire and dastardly threat is carried into effect, it will mean not alone that thousands of Jews … will be put to the sword in cold blood, but that in addition the whole of the work of Palestinian re-settlement will be utterly destroyed.”
Over the next few days, the grim news out of Palestine reverberated through Jewish communities in Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, and drew anguished appeals to their governments that some kind of action be taken. In the case of the British Foreign Office leadership, however, just what could be done was not at all clear. “I regret,” one senior diplomat commented on the same day the Chronicle story appeared, “that no action by us seems in any way feasible.”
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