Tragic family became focus of Zionist Right
AT NOON on December 11 1917, General Allenby dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate to take possession of Jerusalem from the defeated Turks on behalf of the British Crown.
Five days later Naaman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky were hanged by the Turks in Damascus. They were members of the intelligence network of young Palestinian Jews, NILI — Netzah Yisrael Lo Yeshaker (the Eternal One of Israel will not deceive) — an epithet taken from the First Book of Samuel.
NILI coalesced around the Aaronsohn siblings — Aaron, Sarah, Rivka and Alexander — and their friend, Avshalom Feinberg, in 1915. Its 40 members, based mainly in Zikhron Ya’akov and Hadera, collected information about Turkish military movements and passed them on to British intelligence.
The Aaronsohns’ parents had emigrated from Bacâu in Romania in 1882 and were founders of the moshav, Zikhron Ya’akov. Their six children were amongst the first generation of native-born Jews in the Zionist return to Palestine.
Djemal Pasha, the governor of Syria and Palestine, was aware of possible subversion from both Arab nationalists and Zionist Jews but he appointed the eldest,
Sarah Aaronsohn Aaron Aaronsohn, a well-known agronomist, to combat the plague of locusts that had beset the Holy Land shortly after Turkey’s entry into the war. Establishing a research station at Atlit on the coast, Aaronsohn and his sister, Sarah, used the location as a cover for their espionage activities and were able to pass information to a regularly passing yacht, run by the forerunner of MI6.
During a brief unsatisfactory marriage, Sarah had lived in Istanbul and bore witness to the systematic killing of the Armenians by the Turks. Such atrocities, witnessed first-hand, made her determined to resist She did not, even when the torturers turned their attention towards her. In the belief that she would be taken to Damascus, face further brutality and eventually be hanged, she asked to wash and to change her bloodstained clothes at the family home in Zikhron. Instead she retrieved a concealed pistol and shot herself. It took four days for her to die.
Aaron had already left Palestine in June 1916 in order to directly convey details to the British of a planned Turkish assault on Suez Canal. Travelling via Istanbul, Vienna and Berlin, Aaronsohn eventually boarded a Danish ship which was ‘intercepted’ off the Orkneys.
The subterfuge of Aaronsohn’s ‘arrest’ led to a stay at a hotel in High Holborn in London under an assumed name and interrogation by War Office officials. Aaronsohn offered the services of NILI to the British. His location
He clearly influenced many actors in this drama