Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  One of the first to reach out to Aaron was David Fairchild, chief scientist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington. Fairchild was a recognized expert on Near Eastern agriculture and was part of the “dry farming” movement that sought to expand American wheat-growing regions to some of the arid regions of the western states. To his amazement, Aaron’s replies also included a surprising interest and knowledge of the geology, climate, and agronomy of California, which he asserted shared a similar climate and potential with Palestine.

  Aaron delayed accepting Fairchild’s invitation to come to America at once. A financial crisis had gripped the still-vulnerable Jewish settlements of the region. The flow of project funds from Baron de Rothschild had diminished as more villages began to prove themselves self-sustaining, and now many of the settlers proved unwilling to submit to his management discipline.

  The baron and the Aaronsohns both had reasons to be unhappy the way things were turning out in Palestine. Early in the 1900s a Second Aliyah was well underway. More than two and a half million Eastern European Jews were fleeing for their lives wherever they could find a haven. Those who could went to South America, Australia, and Canada, but more than half—usually those with relatives already there—headed for the United States.

  While only about twenty thousand of these refugees chose to go to Palestine, it was a large enough infusion to exacerbate the friction among these newcomers, the old Yishuv long-time residents, and the First Aliyah settlers. As the new century progressed, returning Jews had increased in number to an estimated 43,000. An Ottoman census at the time also counted 57,000 Christian Arabs and a dominant 430,000 Muslim Arabs throughout Syria–Palestine, so the aliyots were still a fragile minority.

  It was not a unified minority, however. The old Yishuv communities of scholars in the cities had never warmed to the first wave of immigrants. The second wave of newcomers was even more jarring and abrasive to both the rabbinical scholar and early pioneer communities.

  These new arrivals were obvious competitors for the support of other European Jewish philanthropists. They also brought a new and disturbing political philosophy with them. The deteriorating politics among the great powers was a driving force behind this Second Aliyah movement. The new immigrants headed toward Palestine came from cities in Austria, Germany, and France, as well as the Balkans. These city dwellers, often young men without families, had been converted to variations of Marxist–Socialist doctrines. Backed by ample funds from home, some were merely content to find a new urban environment where they could argue in cafes over philosophy and nurse revolutionary daydreams.

  However, many dreamed of reclaiming the land of Eretz Israel and farming it. These were the early kibbutzim who wanted a communal approach to farming and society, one that stressed total Jewish self-reliance and scorned using neighboring Arab laborers. More problematic for the older immigrants, these new Western Jews openly declared that the Arabs must give way to the historic owners of Israel, that they must live segregated and second-class lives in their homeland even if it took the force of Jewish arms to make it so.

  In the United States, philanthropic Jews had been slower than Europeans to come to the Zionist cause. Jews had been part of American life from the earliest colonial times and had played a significant role in helping to finance the Revolutionary War. Later immigrant waves from Austria and Germany in the 1840s had created dynasties in banking and trade that had enabled many families to move into the ranks of the upper middle class. By 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oscar Straus, of the Macy’s retailing fortune, to the post as Secretary of Commerce. He later served President William Howard Taft as U.S. Ambassador to the Sultanate in Constantinople; it was the only major diplomatic post abroad that would accept a Jew.

  Increasingly frustrated by the diversion away from his scientific studies required by writing begging letters to traditional patrons, Aaron finally decided to accept Fairchild’s invitation to visit America in early 1909. He would go to expand his contacts and knowledge within agriculture circles. But also he was intent on meeting influential American Jews who could be recruited to support his dream of building an agriculture experiment station in Palestine.

  In a tantalizing coincidence, Aaron was on his trip to America when a visitor arrived in Zichron Ya’akov in July to poke around the ruins of the Crusader castle looming over the beaches at a tiny nearby hamlet known as Athlit. The castle had been the southernmost and one of the most formidable fortifications built by the Crusader knights. In 1903 Baron de Rothschild had bought the lands surrounding it and forced out the Arab fishermen who had built shelters in its ruins. But the farming commune he hoped to install there did not thrive because the soil had been so despoiled over the centuries. Still, the remains of what had been known as the Chateau of the Pilgrims was of intense interest to the young visitor, an Oxford scholar named Thomas Edward Lawrence.

  He could not have escaped notice from anyone in Zichron Ya’akov who saw him. Barely five-feet-four-inches tall and with an odd physique of an elongated head, short torso, and dangling arms, the twenty-year-old Thomas Edward Lawrence arrived in the village wearing a shabby jacket, shoes more suited to city streets, and carrying only a small satchel for his personal possessions and notebooks. He would spend that summer on an arduous walking tour that took him a thousand miles from Athlit and Nazareth in the south all the way north to Antioch and the Hittite ruins at Carchemish along the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia.

  Even at the young age of twenty, Lawrence was busy fashioning a new persona, that of the antiquarian archaeologist-adventurer. Later in life, many of the witnesses to his more fabled role as the heroic Lawrence of Arabia would call him a “fraud” and “imposter” but that is not exactly true. More probably, Lawrence was one of those who so despised how he saw himself that he tried on various personalities to fit the moment, and when the moment passed he could put on another as easily as one changes a costume.

  From his earliest memories, young Ned, as his family called him, was surrounded by uncomfortable fictions. Even his last name was a fabrication. His father was an Anglo-Irish landowner named Sir Thomas Chapman who came under the spell of his children’s Scottish governess. In Ireland divorce was both a legal and social virtual impossibility, so Chapman abandoned his wife and daughters, gave up his estates, and, taking only a modest settlement, he and his new love left and after casting about first in Wales finally settled down in Oxford in a common-law marriage and middle-class anonymity as the Lawrences.

  Sarah, the common-law wife, was something of a tyrant over her husband and her five sons. But Ned, the second oldest, waged a constant revolt and refused to be cowed by the frequent thrashings she administered. Luckily he was able to enroll in a local school that served as a feeder for the fabled university, and there he discovered that the era’s popular fascination for stories of the Crusades led him on bicycle excursions to nearby churches where he did brass rubbings of the tombs of famous knights.

  Oxford at the time was undergoing a building boom in the center part of the old city and Lawrence and a friend haunted construction sites unearthing artifacts from its ancient history and taking them to the university’s famed Ashmolean Museum, which housed a trove of antiquities and a faculty of world-class scholars. His teachers recommended him to a place at Oxford’s Jesus College where in 1907 he began to study history and prowled the collections at the Ashmolean. There he came under the eye of its new director, D.G. Hogarth.

  Hogarth, then forty-six, was a character out of an adventure novel. A recognized expert on Middle Eastern history, a skilled archaeologist, and able administrator, Hogarth was also a talent-spotter for friends in the British government’s higher bureaucracies of the War Department and Foreign Office. At his encouragement, Lawrence undertook summertime bicycle tours of France to study the Crusader castles there as part of a thesis project. From that point on it was inevitable that the young man would go to Syria–Palestine in 1909.

  By then, an
important feature of the Lawrence persona was fixed, that of the romantic ascetic. Hardened by his mother’s angry discipline, the boy had gone further to toughen and test himself. He would go without food and set out ever-longer trips on foot and by bicycle until he was near exhaustion. By the time he reached Zichron Ya’akov on that three-month trek in 1909, he was used to walking astonishing distances and subsisting on the meager hospitality of the Arab and Jewish villages along the way. He certainly took notice of the Aaronsohn home with its pink stone walls and tended gardens but, would he, as some legends have it, have taken equal notice of the then eighteen-year-old Sarah Aaronsohn? More likely, Lawrence was too totally absorbed in his quest for insights into Crusader architecture. He had been warned even by Hogarth that the journey was too arduous and dangerous for an Englishman on his own. Lawrence was determined to return in triumph so he pushed on to Nazareth and then turned northward.

  Meanwhile Aaron’s own journey was turning into just such a triumph. In a stream of letters to Sarah, he recounted how he and Fairchild had bonded almost at once. Fairchild would later write about his astonishment when Aaron, who arrived speaking no English, quickly learned to speak and write in that language in a matter of weeks. Aaron, in turn, was surprised when Fairchild revealed he had secured an invitation for Aaron to visit his dream state, California, and better still, to go to the premier U.S. agricultural science establishment at the University of California at Berkeley. He found that the region reminded him so much of the climate and potential agricultural diversity of Palestine, that he began to draw immediate parallels. The boom that was going on in California offered the same future for Eretz Israel—if only it had the help it needed to flourish.

  As an added fillip to his pleasure, Aaron was surprised to learn he had been brought to the university as a prospective candidate to succeed the dean of the agriculture school, and he was offered the post. With some reluctance, he turned down the offer. On his return across the country he visited wealthy Jews in Chicago and other large cities and gave talks urging them to support his plans to accomplish in Palestine what was happening in California. Once he reached New York he secured patronage from figures such as Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; his protégé attorney Felix Frankfurter; and from financiers such as Straus, Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg (a relative of Aaron’s German scientist mentor Otto Warburg), and, fatefully, Henry Morgenthau. The latter was an early backer of the political ambitions of a dynamic Princeton University president named Woodrow Wilson. In 1913 Morgenthau would succeed Straus as the next U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople.

  Sarah, like Aaron, had been on the move as well. In 1907 and 1908, she had gone on a chaperoned tour of Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and Rome perfecting her French and German, broadening her experience of the modern world, and learning the latest sewing techniques. Her fluency in French and German rounded out the language skills she would need back in Zichron, in addition to Hebrew, Yiddish, and the Arab dialects of the area. She had become a very polished young woman. She had reveled in the cosmopolitan surroundings of Paris and Rome. Now back in Zichron Ya’akov, she had become familiar enough with the classifications of botany to arrange the collection of specimens arriving from Aaron’s travels and to oversee the library he had started. She was rapidly becoming a woman of the new century. Would she have even noticed the travel-stained Englishman who passed by her door any more than the self-absorbed Lawrence would have noticed her?

  Aaron’s stay in America was a triumph on a number of fronts. In a series of speeches that attracted press coverage and in personal interviews, Aaron convinced even resolute anti-Zionists that an agricultural breakthrough in a revived Palestine could produce enormous benefits of international importance. He returned to Palestine at the end of 1910 with $20,000 in contributions and an American legal charter from the leading U.S. Zionist group to establish an agricultural research station to explore ways to revive the region to its Biblical fruitfulness.

  Aaron managed at once to acquire a site for the new research facility in the tiny failed village of Athlit, which perched above the beach on the Mediterranean shore nestled in the shadow of the ruined Crusader castle. The plot was a good location just a few miles from Zichron Ya’akov and adjacent to the coastal road to Haifa. The soil at the site had been terribly despoiled over centuries, but Aaron insisted on buying it so he could prove that his techniques could restore even the most barren land.

  While Aaron’s international reputation was as a botanist, he also had devoted considerable study to that most precious of agricultural ingredients—water. He had started with old Biblical texts describing the lush gardens and vineyards of the fabled metropolis of Caesarea, which spread along the coast at the base of the same Carmel mountain range. Surely the water that fed those gardens lay buried beneath the arid, sandy wasteland of Athlit, and merely required drilling deep enough to find it. So in addition to the vital infusion of American cash, Aaron’s sponsors sent along drilling equipment and a windmill that soon was providing all the irrigation he needed.

  Aaron and Sarah spent that winter of 1910–1911 supervising the construction of the greenhouses, a herbarium, and planting beds, as well as organizing a comfortable book-filled library that was moved from Zichron Ya’akov. That year and the next would be remembered by the Aaronsohn family as a hopeful time. Their orchards and vineyards at Zichron were flourishing with harvests that commanded ample cash from the market and exporters of Haifa. Relations with their Arab neighbors—which had always been tentative—seemed to improve as more jobs were made available to the local workers in nearby villages. Aaron was totally immersed in his research and not above taking satisfaction in his international status. Sarah too was happy as she grew in independence in her own right and also in importance as her brother’s trusted aide.

  But events far away from Palestine were to bring that happy time to an abrupt and frightening end.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Three Pashas

  1911–1913

  Djamal Pasha, Governor of Greater Syria and Palestine

  In the decades after their arrival in the 1880s, the earliest aliyots could hope that they could find a way of working together with the indigenous Arab fellaheen even though they would live apart. After all, there was the shared problem of an Ottoman government, whose officials rarely stirred from their provincial headquarters in Damascus and Haifa unless it was to levy new taxes for their own use or for the absentee wealthy landlords who had influence in Constantinople.

  It was an irony of that early time that the Sultan’s representatives were so indolent, inefficient, and corrupt that systematic oppression was unlikely. If one could not avoid some levy or demand, a discreet payment to a local official could usually win an exemption. The Empire itself was a huge tapestry of so many restive people from the Balkans all the way to the Arabian Gulf that it had become too huge to control.

  In 1880 the Aaronsohns immigrated to Palestine, and the British preempted the vast regions of the Sultan’s principality of Egypt. London had to ensure absolute security over their Suez Canal lifeline to India and the rest of their own empire. Other bits of the Ottoman fabric began to fray. It became clear that the lands that had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks since 1299 were caught in the contradictions of its medieval structure and the need to catch up to the modern world.

  The truth was that Turkey had always been an artificial creature from the time Osman I had led his warrior tribe from Turkmenistan to subject rival tribes, founded his empire, and lent a variation of his name to the new entity: Ottoman. Osman’s successors had grown unimaginably wealthy standing at the gateway through which so much of the known world’s commerce passed between China and the merchant states of Europe during the Middle Ages. The constant challenges from their own campaigns of conquest—north through the Balkans to the gates of Vienna or south to the Arabian Sea—created as many problems as triumphs for an empire that could not be efficiently administered territory or full
y absorb its sullen, restive subjects.

  Worse was the corruption of the Ottoman soul. The once proud, ruthless warriors kept their disdain for the conquered even as they gave way to a grudging toleration for the myriad people within their borders. Rather than make Turks of them all, successive Sultans allowed an arbitrary tolerance that enabled Greeks, Serbians, Armenians, and Jews to prosper as craftsmen, merchants, and even to gain influence as officials within the Sublime Porte itself. Only the Arabs, despite being coreligionists, seemed especially despised, perhaps because the desert princes ruled over the two holy places of Mecca and Medina, prizes the Sultans—who also ruled as head of the Muslim Caliphate—jealously eyed. Meanwhile, successive Sultans became licentious paranoiacs as their seraglios of wives schemed and murdered to advance the futures of their sons and keep their own throats uncut.

  Neither Sultan Hamid II nor his advisers contemplated a huge influx of Jews (or any other ethnic group) into the empire. The aliyots were viewed as a useful political counterweight in pacifying the restive Arab farmers and herdsmen of the Palestinian region. Ottoman officials in Palestine at first had been grudging but acquiescent to the first wave of Jews who arrived. After all, Jewish merchants and religious leaders had long found a degree of tolerance in Constantinople and other cities that had not existed in Eastern Europe. The Aaronsohns and their group had willingly forsaken the protection of their Romanian passports and become Turkish citizens, albeit of the lower class accorded to all non-Muslims.

  That peaceful respite would end as the second decade of the twentieth century began. Independence movements had bubbled everywhere beneath the surface for years. Scholars have filled libraries parsing the genealogies of hundreds of dissident groups that began to gnaw at the European empires during the period. Standard histories allege a Victorian-era “balance of power” between the European empires, but it more resembled a barroom brawl. When they were not launching adventures to sop up the few remaining colonial lands left unclaimed in Asia and Africa, the emperors were increasingly vexed by revolutionary plots by dissidents in long-time provinces that now dreamed of nationhood. Restive outbreaks in Ireland, the Balkans, Crimea, and Arabia forced rulers to send troops that neither placated nor subdued. Soldiers consumed money that could have been better spent on other things, and also demanded a constant infusion of youth, so it should not surprise that revolution simmered most hotly in universities and in the ranks of young officers tired of official ineptitude and lost wars.