In the dark days of World War I, members of the Nili spy ring foresaw the new order emerging in the Middle East and opted to work with the British, despite all the risks. To other early Zionists, they were foolhardy adventurers, or even traitors

One of the most famous and heroic Jewish contributions to World War I is that of Nili (a Hebrew acronym meaning “Israel’s Glory Does Not Lie”), the spy ring that informed the British of Turkish military movements in the Middle East during the buildup to General Edmund Allenby’s conquest of the Holy Land, Syria, and Transjordan. Most members of Nili were captured and killed by the Ottoman administration, with the exception of leader Aaron Aaronsohn, who spent much of the war in Egypt, liasing with the British. Aaronsohn’s detailed knowledge of water sources in the Negev aided British well-digging efforts along the desert route from Rafah to Beersheba, which Allenby later used to surprise the Turkish garrison there, opening the gates of the Holy Land to the Allies.

Nili’s huge gamble more than paid off, but fellow Zionists focused instead on how these self-organized amateurs had endangered the entire Jewish population of Ottoman Syria and Palestine (the British, it must be admitted, showed more gratitude):

Last year a spy ring was uncovered in Zikhron Ya’akov and the experimental agriculture station, culminating in a huge trial. The bloodstains have yet to be wiped away, and the tears still haven’t dried. Yet now, the first official representative of the British authorities in Zikhron is one of those very spies [Alexander Aaronsohn]. The only house in Zikhron to be visited by the Zionist Council is the one where the spy plot was hatched…. I protest this conduct, and I wish to point out that the homeland of our dreams should be founded on moral conduct and fair methods. The spies were paid well enough for their actions. We must not allow them this honor. Thousands will follow in their footsteps, blinded by their success. (Eliezer Livneh, Yosef Nedava, and Yoram Efrati, eds., Nili: A History of Political Daring [1981], p. 372 [Hebrew])

Today it seems absurd that Nili was pilloried just when its ringleaders’ decision to support the British against the Turks had been so thoroughly vindicated. But the above letter, addressed to the Zikhron Ya’akov village council by local doctor Hillel Joffe in the autumn of 1918 – just two days after the British had conquered Zikhron from the Turks – was mild compared to some of his other utterances on the subject:

Woe to those cold-blooded murderers, those heartless patricides who endangered their village and the whole Yishuv [the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine] for the sake of their own ambitions! (Hillel Joffe’s Memoirs, Letters and Diary [The Zionist Library, 1985], p. 387 [Hebrew])

Dr. Joffe feared that the masses, blinded by Nili’s success, would follow in its footsteps. But this concern proved baseless. Nili and its operations were sidelined by the Israeli establishment and excluded from the national commemorative consciousness for decades. Only in 1967 – fifty years after the Turks had rounded up Nili’s activists and after deep-seated political, cultural, and social changes in Israel – did the first state commemoration take place in Zikhron Ya’akov. In the early 1930s, Nili’s supporters held their first memorial for Sarah Aaronsohn, Aaron’s sister, who ran the spy ring in his absence. One of the assembled voiced their frustrations:

Malevolence, malice and envy were behind the community’s total lack of appreciation for Sarah and her heroic friends. (Billie Melman, “The Legend of Sarah: Gender, Memory and National Identities [Eretz Yisrael/Israel, 1917–90],” p. 64)

A commemorative pamphlet issued at the time by the Bnei Binyamin Young Farmers’ Federation lamented the exclusion of Nili’s “bourgeois” homesteaders (idealized in the biblical character of Boaz, from the book of Ruth) by the overwhelmingly socialist Labor Zionists, who controlled the political consensus:

Sarah Aaronsohn is a national heroine unrivaled in the annals of the Hebrew revival. … Aaronsohn is not only the greatest national heroine in this period of our revival, she is also our own heroine, the heroine of the class modelled on Boaz, those who believe that the collective is built through the efforts of the individual and as his responsibility; whose values are constantly derided as un-idealistic and devoid of any iota of self-sacrifice; Sarah is not a solitary heroine in our ranks, she represented an entire organization of civilian farmers, who gave their all, devoting all their physical and mental energies to the liberation of our homeland and providing much needed aid to the Yishuv in its most difficult moments. (ibid., p. 62)

 

In the Eye of the Storm

Nili’s espionage was controversial from the outset. The fledgling Yishuv faced a conflict of interests from the moment Turkey plunged into World War I alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1914, three months into the war.

Conditions in Palestine deteriorated. Imports were cut off, and the Haluka – the funds from abroad on which the ultra-Orthodox majority of the Yishuv subsisted – dried up as European sovereigns forbade financial transfers to enemy territory, exacerbating the severe poverty and hunger there. Cholera and malaria spread, contracted from the soldiers conscripted from all over the Ottoman Empire. And the most severe locust plague in living memory struck in March 1915, devastating anything edible until October.

The Turkish government imposed draconian tax measures to finance its military mobilization, cracking down on all non-Muslim populations, especially those seen as a threat. The systematic genocide of over a million Armenians throughout the empire began in April 1915, and the Jews feared they were next in line.

Bilateral “capitulations” – under which foreign nationals lived within the Ottoman Empire under the protection of their own governments, exempt from taxation and prosecution – were abolished. Citizens of enemy countries, including most newcomers to the Yishuv (mainly from Russia), had to choose either deportation or Ottoman nationalization – and conscription if of age. Large swathes of property were expropriated for military purposes. Among the thousands conscripted for forced labor in the Turkish army, many died of infectious disease within their appallingly unsanitary environment.

Prominent Yishuv leaders such as Arthur Ruppin, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi were expelled from Palestine, finding refuge in British-controlled Egypt. Holding weapons, even for self-defense, was a crime, and even the most innocent displays of Jewish nationalism (such as the use of Jewish National Fund stamps or Hebrew signs in Tel Aviv) were outlawed.

Finally, in the spring of 1917, the Jewish residents of Tel Aviv–Jaffa were driven from their homes. By the end of World War I, twenty thousand Jews – almost a third of Palestine’s Jewish population – had died, mainly of sickness and starvation.

The leaders of the World Zionist Organization faced a dilemma. The outcome of the war was uncertain. The Ottoman Empire had long been in decline, but its alliance with a strong Germany meant that the Turks could end the war on the winning side – and eager for revenge against the pro-British Jews of Palestine. On the other hand, if the British advanced from Egypt to conquer Palestine, the dire plight of the Yishuv would improve.

So the Zionist leadership refused to openly support either side. But several important figures gambled on a British victory, convinced that a British takeover of Palestine would pave the way to a Jewish national home. These visionaries included Chaim Weizmann, who had diplomatic contacts with the British; Joseph Trumpeldor and Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, who founded the Jewish Legion; and the group behind Nili, the second-generation pioneers from the first wave of Jewish immigration, living mostly in the farming villages on the coast.

The idea of a pro-British espionage network was conceived by Absalom Feinberg of Hadera and his friends Aaron Aaronsohn (a world-famous agronomist known for his discovery of wild emmer wheat) and his younger brother Alexander, both of Zikhron Ya’akov. Feinberg originally intended to help the British by carrying out actual military missions, but the difficulties involved convinced him to be content with passing information about Turkish military positions to the British army.

Betraying the Turks did not come naturally: all three activists had been involved in the Gideonites, a short-lived semi-military movement that had called on Jews to prove their loyalty and fight for their land by enlisting in the Turkish army. Aaron Aaronsohn had even been engaged by Palestine’s Turkish ruler, Djemal Pasha, to help supervise the eradication of the locust plague in Palestine and Syria. Aaron, the oldest of the three, was clearly torn. As he wrote to a friend:

You can imagine that I was in tremendous turmoil and had many sleepless nights. And even after deciding which path to take, I endured endless deliberations about how to achieve the goal. (Livneh, Nedava, and Efrati, p. 68)

The Turkish army’s humiliation of the Gideonite recruits had turned the tide, and their reservations increased as the Turks stepped up their policies against the Yishuv. Returning from Istanbul to Palestine after the failure of her marriage, Sarah Aaronsohn witnessed the ongoing Turkish massacre of Armenians, which only added to her comrades’ fears. The Ottoman confiscation of Jewish weapons seemed to be the first step in rendering Jews defenseless when the time came for deportation or worse. But for Aaronsohn, perhaps the Turks’ greatest crime was their alliance with the Germans. Germany was then considered one of the most enlightened and tolerant nations. Yet Aaronsohn wrote to his friend Judge Julian Mack in Chicago in 1916:

I am anti-German beyond a shadow of a doubt, more now than ever. In fact, this German war completely confirms my predictions. … Did I not long ago foresee the depths that would be reached by the German poison? Did I not warn in private conversations and public lectures against the German danger, though it wasn’t easy to voice such feelings without raising suspicions of being a provocateur? (ibid., p. 58)