by James Srodes
Pasha Djamal had dismissed with insults the first petitions for relief from other Jewish delegations. But (to the irritation of his rivals) he agreed to see Aaron. After Aaron made his arguments, Djamal slyly mused aloud, “I ask myself, what would you say if I ordered you to be hanged?” Aaron, who had for some time struggled to keep his weight manageable replied, “What should I say, Your Excellency? The weight of my body would break the (hanging) tree and the noise would be heard in America.”
Luckily, Djamal laughed and he took the point. The war in Europe had converted large numbers of wealthy American Jews to the Zionist cause and a committee had been formed to send vitally needed funds to a council of Jewish leaders representing the Palestinian villages. However—and this was an important point—Aaron Aaronsohn had been given veto power over how the council distributed those funds. Most of the council wanted the funds spent directly to aid various communities, but Aaron demanded that a portion of the money be used to bribe Turkish officials for various concessions—and Djamal counted on his share. Aaron also spent some of the funds to free Alexander and Absalom from perishing in the labor battalions.
The relations between Aaron and Djamal abruptly improved a few weeks later, just on the eve of the Turks’ planned attack on Suez. Early in January of 1915 an infestation of locusts had begun in the faraway southern part of Sudan. By February, just as the Turkish attack was launched, the locusts swept north in a cloud over the arid Sahara and they alighted on the green valleys of Syria–Palestine. The region had suffered locust infestations before, but not in living memory had such a disaster loomed. The insects were of the largest variety and their voracious appetites devoured every living thing in their expanding path. Crops in the fields and even the bark from trees were stripped. Vulnerable livestock were killed and devoured, and there were reports that infant children had been attacked by swarms. A greater peril would come if the females were able to plant their eggs in the soil, setting up repeated infestations of the plague.
Pasha Djamal was frantic. More Ottoman divisions were arriving to support the assault on the British; the stockpiles of grain and the crops being planted for the coming year had to be protected at all costs. Convinced of Aaron’s expertise, Djamal Pasha commanded him to organize the means to halt the infestation in its tracks before it reached the coastal farm belt. Aaron told him the only effective counter to this plague was to construct an enormous network of ditches and then to literally rake the locusts by the hundreds of thousands into those ditches where they could be set on fire with gasoline. It would take an enormous effort and more manpower than the settlers themselves could muster, especially since so many were already conscripted elsewhere.
To Aaron’s surprise, the governor put him in charge of organizing the regional attack on the locusts. Aaron, along with the recently freed Absalom and Alexander, quickly realized this new opportunity to advance the cause of a Jewish nation. The intelligence they could gather while working inside the three Ottoman Army groups in the region—the order of battle, the size and number of weapons and equipment, and especially hints as to the plan of the Turks’ attack on Suez—would be of vital importance to the British planners in Cairo.
While Aaron continued to cling to his mistaken belief in his influence with Djamal, he had come to realize that a German victory in Europe would be a disaster reaching as far as Zichron Ya’akov and its inhabitants. Moreover, Aaron was aware that at the very start of the war the British government of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had begun actively considering supporting a Jewish state in Palestine if Turkey were defeated. Surely an active help in the war effort by Jews would ensure England’s gratitude.
While still in Jerusalem negotiating with Djamal, Aaron wrote to Alexander and Absalom a call to action. “Everybody in whose eyes freedom is precious now has to risk his life in the war against the Germans. For if, God forbid, we allow them to emerge as the victors, there will not be a single corner left in the world where we shall be able to live a life worthy of the name.” They organized a new structure to carry out this task. The old Gideonite group was quickly enlisted and under the guise of fighting the locusts they began to gather information on the state of the Fourth Army that could be of great value to the British planners in Cairo.
Neither the Gideonite spy group nor the battle against the locusts gained much traction at first. When the Turkish attack on Suez came in late January of 1915, the British were able to use their advance warnings to shift the bulk of their force to the main attack points and repulse Djamal’s troops with heavy losses. Among other consequences, the troops that might have been used to destroy the insects were never delegated, and Arab community leaders considered the infestation one of divine inevitability and refused to help. In April, Aaron resigned in protest, believing that he alone among Palestine’s Jewish leaders had a unique ability to influence the Pasha and stave off any serious persecution of the community.
At this point Aaron was playing a double game. While Alexander and Absalom used the locust campaign to recruit more operatives throughout Palestine and bring a growing flow of intelligence to the Athlit station, Aaron continued to pay court to Djamal. For his part, the Pasha continued to grant Aaron unique access and favors that no other Jewish leader could match. But as history would prove, his determination to visit the same Armenian horrors on the Jews of Palestine merely lay dormant.
Whatever the outcome might be, Aaron realized if he was to have any role in making Eretz Israel a reality he needed to find a way to establish contact with the British and inform them what the Gideonite network could offer.
Djamal Pasha’s attack on Suez had been a shambles from the start. The entire Fourth Army had set out in a disorganized forced march that left broken vehicles, dead livestock, and faltering troops in a trail behind them. Despite the confiscated stocks of food, Djamal’s soldiers had not been provided with enough rations and many troops never reached their assigned attack points.
While the British force in Egypt was outnumbered, they were amply forewarned by their newly utilized weapon, the reconnaissance airplane, and were able to move enough troops along the Canal to repulse the Turkish attack, routing the Fourth Army. The soldiers fled back to Palestine, looting and vandalizing Arab and Jewish villages on the way. Djamal, in a rage, laid the blame on saboteurs and spies who had betrayed his plans, and there was no doubt in his mind that the heart of the betrayers lay among the Jews.
Djamal ordered all the watchmen groups—the Gideonites, the Ha-Shomer, and others—to turn in their guns. At first most settlements turned in some weapons and buried the rest. But Arab informers prompted the Pasha to order the arrest of suspects among young Jewish men, Alexander and Absalom among them. They were beaten and when they would not reveal where their arms were cached, the Turks threatened execution. When the prisoners remained obdurate, Djamal warned village elders in suspect communities that he would round up selected young women and imprison them in the brothels designated for officers.
The Pasha’s crackdown on the Jews prompted their Arab neighbors to seek advantage against these more prosperous intruders. Dr. Hillel Yaffe was accompanying a neighbor’s daughter back to the village when his carriage was attacked by a band of Arab youths. The girl was assaulted and when Yaffe tried to protect her, he was savagely beaten. Even though Rivka stayed close to the home on Founders Street, her family feared for her.
While Aaron was still safe because of his campaign against the locusts, other Gideonites had to make themselves scarce. Absalom went into hiding along with others. There were hints to Aaron that Alexander too was increasingly suspect. During a visit to Damascus to see Aaron, who was at Djamal’s headquarters for the locust campaign, Alexander boldly told the Pasha that one of his trusted military commanders had been pilfering equipment and rations; the man was too important for Djamal to interfere and he made it clear he resented the embarrassing disclosures.
Sometime in May 1915, Aaron made arrangements for Alexander and Rivka to journey nor
th by donkey to Beirut; ever-watchful neighbors were told she was to be enrolled in an American college for safety. With Alexander wearing his old army uniform, they trudged through police checkpoints posing as a married couple. But the real goal was to reach Cairo to offer the band’s services to prompt a quick British invasion of Palestine. Their chance came when a cruiser from the neutral U.S. Navy called at Haifa to take refugees who had secured visas from the Turks to go to Cyprus. Armed with false passports, Alexander and Rivka got on board and sailed.
Of a slighter build than his older brother, Alexander Aaronsohn was a charming, light-hearted personality who shared Aaron’s zeal for causes but not his deliberate nature. He assumed that once he reached Cairo the British High Command would welcome the offer of the Gideonite’s intelligence and use it to hasten the liberation from the Turks of what would by right become the Jewish homeland.
There were now thirty of Aaron’s spies spread throughout Palestine and they had gathered a detailed list of the Turkish outposts on the Palestine coast as well as likely landing sites where a large British invasion could easily gain a firm foothold that would catch the Turks off guard. Under the guise of fighting the locusts, Aaron’s recruits had observed not only the location of specific Turkish regiments, but the state of their training and equipment. Roads and bridges had been mapped along with the fortifications that German engineers were building to resist the expected British line of attack on the coastal cities. Aaron was right that, beyond the range of British scout planes, the Cairo planners had no accurate maps and no reliable agents of their own.
When they finally arrived at Alexandria in early August, British authorities at first refused Alexander and Rivka permission to land since they had Turkish passports. But friends from prewar days who had settled in Egypt intervened and at last they were able to find rooms in Cairo’s Continental Hotel. By coincidence this was the same place where officers of the newly founded Arab Bureau—including a young lieutenant named T.E. Lawrence—were billeted.
Not only were Alexander and Rivka shunned socially at the Continental, but he was denied any appointments with senior planners. With characteristic impudence, Alexander began to submit articles to the English language newspaper in Cairo—the Egyptian Gazette—that asserted the general weaknesses of the Turkish Army, the impact of the locust plague, and the disaffection of much of the Palestinian population. The articles had the desired effect.
On August 18, Alexander went to British Army headquarters in the luxurious Savoy Hotel. There he had the bad luck to be passed over to a Major Stewart Newcombe. The meeting was a disastrous encounter where Alexander’s blithe self-confidence collided with the British High Command’s muddled strategy in the Middle East. The Army’s top commander was a general named Archibald Murray who had a reputation for being what the British called “a safe pair of hands.” Murray was a meticulous planner and organizer and had managed to turn back Djamal’s attack earlier in the year. He was not only risk averse but now he faced a double problem. A substantial part of his troop strength was diverted to a massive amphibious attack on the Dardanelles passage into the Black Sea that was to launch in just two weeks—at a death trap known forever as Gallipoli. At the same time London demanded that he and his remaining troops along the Suez increase pressure on the Turks in the Saudi Arabian desert region dominating the coastline of the Canal on the eastern side.
The British Arab strategy was a mix of wishful thinking, ignorance, and facile logic. Lacking even rudimentary intelligence about the state of the Turkish forces in Syria–Palestine, the government in London had turned to Oxford’s leading scholar on the region, D.G. Hogarth of the Ashmolean, and he had turned to colleagues who had experience exploring and digging at various ancient sites. These were given military rank and shipped out to Cairo to advise General Murray. Among the anointed experts were Stewart Newcombe, Leonard Woolley, and perhaps the most genuine expert on the topic, Gertrude Bell—later known as the Desert Queen, and lastly, the Mother of Iraq. After a period of idle confusion, the group in early 1915 was to be formally organized as the Arab Bureau, with Newcombe as its first head. Last to arrive was one of Hogarth’s protégés, T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence had tried to join the army at the outbreak of the war but was turned out for being too short. Now he was a newly minted lieutenant but, true to this new persona-in-the-making, he insisted on wearing a mixed costume of school blazers, military gear, and Arab slippers. Newcombe kept him out of sight writing regional handbooks for operational commanders.
More important than the briefing books on local geography, the Arab Bureau’s task was to devise a plan for General Murray to make use of the desert Arab tribes that occupied huge swaths of the Arabian Peninsula held by the Ottoman armies on the other side of the Suez Canal. The most likely convert was the Grand Sharif Hussein who nominally was the guardian of both Mecca and Medina, the two holiest of homes of Islam. Not only did Turkish forces hold both cities, but Hussein had evidence the Ottomans intended to depose him and replace him with a more pliable Arab sheikh, so ally Germany could have a clear field to build its strategic railroad all the way to the Arabian Gulf and threaten India.
Once she too was in Cairo, Hogarth and Newcombe relied on Bell—who held a vague rank of political officer—for her decades of experience in the region and her personal friendship with Hussein. The Sharif needed propping up from the start for although he feared the Turks, his own forces were poorly armed and untrained as a coherent military force against even the ramshackle Ottoman armies. He would need guns, advisers, and, most of all, huge sums of gold to win the loyalty of other tribal leaders.
So Newcombe had his hands full, for his staff had such a diversity of opinions as to which specific Arab leaders should be supported. Hussein had a number of sons, each of whom led sizable forces, but not all of whom were likely to back their father. The one point of universal agreement within the Arab Bureau was that the Jewish settlements of Palestine were of no consequence. A residue of endemic prejudice against Jews that infected many Britons of that time arguably had its impact as well.
The major was immediately suspicious of this plausible young man Alexander Aaronsohn, who was both a Turkish citizen and a Jew. When Newcombe asked him what money this supposed band of spies would need, Alex mistakenly thought he would enhance his proposition by refusing any compensation. That merely made Newcombe more abrupt. Moreover, Alex was distressed to learn that the London government planners had already dismissed Palestine as a theater of operations. Djamal Pasha’s attack, as disastrous it had been for the Turks, had convinced the British that a counterattack was too risky to attempt at that moment. A coastal landing was out of the question.
Instead, top officials in London (prompted by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill) had pointed to Gallipoli as the keystone of their strategy. It was the kind of ornate scheme beloved by war planners operating at a distance from reality. The plan was a bid to open passage into the Mediterranean for the Russian Navy, which was penned up in the Black Sea.
One key factor in the doomed attempt to force their way through the heavily fortified straits of the Dardanelles was the hope that opening the straits would help their embattled Russian allies and could bring still-ambivalent Bulgaria and Greece onto the Allied side. That implausible logic, however, was undone by a mix of ignorance about the state of Turkish defenses on the peninsula and blithe assumptions about the abilities of the Allied forces that would actually have to carry the battle. There was not, for example, a single up-to-date study of the Ottoman Empire in the library of the British Foreign Office. What Asquith’s planners knew about Gallipoli came from vague reports from journalists, missionaries, and business travelers. Tragically, the plan drafted by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill placed unwarranted faith in the ability of Royal Navy offshore guns to cover the untried Australian and New Zealand regiments that were to force an amphibious landing and capture the Turkish emplacements that bristled with artillery.
The Gall
ipoli campaign began on April 25, 1915, and would drag on until the last survivors were evacuated the next January. It was a clear disaster for the Allies, with 53,000 dead out of 250,000 total casualties of wounded or disabled—many of them from the epidemics of disease that swept through the ill-sheltered poorly supported ranks. But there could have been some comfort, had their intelligence been adequate, if the British planners in London and Cairo knew that the Turks had suffered 68,000 killed out of 300,000 casualties that could not be replaced as easily as were their forces in Egypt. Even with the Gallipoli losses, the British commander in Cairo, Lt. Gen. Archibald Murray, could boast a force of 13 divisions amounting to a mix of 400,000 troops, most just arrived from India and the volunteers from Australia and New Zealand known as ANZACs.
Turkish photographs of Gallipoli battle (April 1915)
That Gallipoli was one of the great disasters in British military annals was realized at once. Less understood at the time was the irreparable damage the Turks suffered as well. To replace the huge number of casualties they had suffered at Gallipoli, Constantinople shifted whole regiments and weaponry from the three armies strung out on the Syria–Palestine theater of operations. But the Allied commanders in Cairo would not know that for months because they would not listen to Alexander. Newcombe brusquely dismissed Alexander and later urged him to leave Cairo before he got into trouble.
