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THE NILI SPIES Sarah Aaronsohn the Nili Spies

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THE NILI SPIES Sarah Aaronsohn the Nili Spies THE NILI SPIES Sarah Aaronsohn The Nili Spies ANITA ENGLE With an Introduction by Peter Calvocoressi 0 Routledge Taylor &Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First Published 1959 by The Hogarth Press, London This edition first published 1997 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 © 1959 Anita Engle Introduction © 1996 Peter Calvocoressi British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0 7146 4803 5 (cloth) ISBN 0 7146 4293 2 (paper) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Routledge. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent Introduction Peter Calvocoressi MO WARDS the end of 1956 an article appeared in the New 1 Statesman in London about Sarah Aaronsohn. The name meant nothing to me but after reading the article I wrote to its author, Anita Engle, asking her if she had any plans to expand it into a book and might care to send it to us at Chatto & Windus where I was at that time a partner. I also showed the article to Leonard Woolf who had an obvious special interest in the story it told and was, as it happened, about to pay a visit to Israel where, I had discovered, Anita Engle lived. Leonard Woolf, besides being the founder with his wife Virginia of The Hogarth Press, had become a partner in Chatto & Windus when the two firms merged after World War II. In Israel Leonard met Anita Engle and her husband, and made a contract with her for what became The Nili Spies. On his return Leonard recorded the deal in an internal memorandum, adding with characteristic brevity and effacement that he was "inclined to think it (the book) should be a Hogarth book". Which it became. Anita Engle's manuscript arrived in our office in March 1958 and soon afterwards I wrote to say that I was reading it "with growing absorption" and was sure that, details apart, "the heart of the matter is here". There followed a copious correspondence — on our side mostly with Leonard Woolf— about the content and shape of the book, and the vexing matter of a title; the title which eventually emerged made its first appearance in a letter from Anita to Leonard. The book was published in April 1959. We printed 3,000 copies and sold all but 500 within about a year. There were more than 40 reviews in Britain with a number more in Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia, but we failed to persuade any American publisher to issue a separate American edition. The Nili Spies is a tale of the First World War but also a tale about a very small number of people in a limited area which was INTRODUCTION only on the fringe of that war. It is a work of chiaroscuro, vividly focussed but set in a wide context of which the actors in the story could see and know little. The NILI spies numbered at times no more than five or six people. Two of them — Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn — were of the essence of the group in the sense that without them there would have been no NILI spies. Their parents were Rumanian immigrants who had settled at Zichron Yaakov a few miles north of Caesarea in the early 1880s and had brought up six children there. The oldest, Aaron, born in Rumania, became world-famous as a botanist and agronomist, the discoverer of wild wheat in Palestine and the founder of an Agricultural Experiment Station (the first in the Middle East) where he hoped to develop ways of making deserts bloom and his fellow Jews less miserably penurious. He was by all accounts a man of outstanding intelligence and inescapable force of character, but also somewhat superior and, some said, arrogant or prickly. Brilliant and selfless, he sometimes comes through as the sort of man whom lesser men do not find easy to like or live with: a man who invites you to keep your distance. Aaron shared with his sister a passionate love for the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and an absolute conviction that it was in imminent danger of total extinction by the Turks. This was not just some paranoid fancy. They had seen what the Turks were doing to the Armenians, and the Jews had good enough reasons to fear that the attempted genocide of the Armenians would be followed by genocide of the Jews. Their fears were sharpened by the fact that the Turkish Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Syria was Djemal Pasha, a man both brutal and scared. They reckoned that time was not on their side and salvation lay only in action against the Turks and their German allies in Syria: action which could only come from the British in Egypt. They therefore resolved to help the British by collecting military intelligence or, in other words, by spying. Their assessment was probably correct: it was certainly compelling. But their understanding of the British position was quite wrong. Egypt was far away and the central zones and strategies of the war were beyond their ken. They did not doubt that the British, who had virtually bought the Suez Canal a generation earlier and were obsessed with the vi THE NILI SPIES imperial importance of the Middle East, would take the offensive against the Turks and the Germans in Syria. They were amazed and dismayed when the British landed in Gallipoli in 1915, and concluded that the British were hopelessly ill informed about the position of Syria and would with better information see their errors, reassess their opportunities and switch their efforts to Palestine. They were expecting this to happen in 1916, when in fact the British were reducing their forces in the Middle East and sending them to the Western Fronts in France and Flanders. It was not until October 1917, after Allenby's capture of Beersheba (which was greatly assisted by intelligence from NILI about the wells in the area) that the British advanced seriously into Palestine: their advance began three weeks after Sarah committed suicide. And finally, the NILI group failed to appreciate how insignificant a small group of Jews seemed to the British in Cairo who had plenty of other groups - Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks - to choose from if and when they wanted local help. The NILI spies did provide a steady flow of information about the enemy's strength, fortifications and morale, but to the British it was no more than an uncovenanted bonus towards a problematic and subordinate venture. The British were not even coordinated among themselves. Absalom Feinberg, the third of the groups preeminent trio, was rejected when he offered his services to the military in Cairo but, proceeding to Port Said, was taken on by Lieutenant (later Sir Leonard) Woolley of the Royal Navy who thus inaugurated, in late 1915, the shuttle service of the fruits of NILI's espionage from the coast of Palestine by sea to Egypt. (Half a century later, in 1967, Absalom's bones were found in the Sinai desert where he had been killed by Beduin while trying in 1917 to renew the broken contract with the British. "A fine palm tree", wrote Anita Engle to Leonard Woolf, "was growing over the grave and must have sprung from the dates which Absalom was carrying on him as rations".) These miscalculations created the tragedy which this book recounts, honours and celebrates. It would be wrong to resume the substance of this tragedy in an Introduction - doubly wrong since Anita Engle's telling of it, vivid, judicious, committed but controlled, could not be bettered. And tragedy it is, since on the vii INTRODUCTION human scale the Aaronsohns' miscalculations are as nothing compared with their heroism. Above all Sarah's. Before war came she was, or appears here to have been, unremarkable. Unlike her brother Aaron, Sarah was born in Palestine. She loved her family, particularly the incomparable Aaron, and next to her family her community and heritage. Early in 1914, and chiefly to clear the way for the marriage of a younger sister, she accepted an arranged marriage with a prosperous merchant from Istanbul who had come to Palestine in search of a Jewish wife. When war came a few months later, she left her husband, who never saw her again, and fired by the danger of the Yishuv, rushed back to Zichron Yaakov. She came as Aaron's helpmate, but a long break with Woolley in Egypt convinced Aaron that he must face the hazards of making his way to England to re-establish it; and so Sarah became NILI's chief. Her personal courage, determina- tion, exertions, and gift for leadership, and her cool head when alone and in danger were all extraordinary. Her death by her own hand, when she feared that she might no longer be able to keep silent under torture, was grisly and protracted. Like Aaron she aroused suspicions and even hostility among the people whom she was risking her life to save, for she too gave an impression of aloofness which aggravated the trepidation and distrust of her neighbours.
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