Spies

June 20, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Netzach Yisrael lo yishaker, "The Glorious One of Israel will not deceive" (First Samuel 15:29). These words from the book of Samuel became the battle cry for a small group of Jews in Palestine. The story, though, begins four hundred years before modern times.

That is how long the Ottoman Turks governed what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. For all that time, there were always some Jews living in the Holy Land. Most were religious, living mainly on charity from the Diaspora in the four "holy cities" of Tiberias, Hebron, Jerusalem, and Tsfat.

In June of 1896, Theodor Herzl met with Sultan Hamid of Turkey, hoping to buy or beg land on which to settle the Jews of central Europe. Hamid told him, "If one day the Islamic State falls apart then you can have Palestine for free, but as long as I am alive I would rather have my flesh be cut up than cut out Palestine from the Muslim land."

All the same, Zionists came to Palestine, buying land from the local farmers, willing even to pay for land the Arab serfs lived on but did not actually own. They bribed Turkish officials to allow First Aliyah settlements like Rishon LeTzion and Zichron Yaakov to be founded and the agricultural school at Mikveh Israel to open. More Jews arrived in the Second Aliyah, following the terrible pogroms in Russia. They founded new kinds of farming settlements: moshav villages and kibbutzim. They also bought land and bribed officials. As the Jewish presence grew in the Land, the Turks became more and more difficult to deal with. These were the conditions of the Yishuv, the Jewish "settlement" in the Holy Land, on the eve of the First World War.

Then, in 1915, the locusts arrived. The plague was of biblical proportions as the locusts stripped every tree and destroyed every crop from Egypt to the Holy Land, even all the way to Damascus. In the wake of this devastation, the Ottoman Empire hired a young genius named Aaron Aaronson, an agronomist. They gave Aaronson a free hand to travel anywhere and everywhere in the stricken land, to help Jews and Arabs alike to restore the agricultural life of the community. And, wherever he went, Aaronson took with him his young assistant Abraham Feinberg.

In the meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany, allowing the Germans to set up army and air force bases in the Holy Land. Pretty soon, Aaronson realized that he was in a unique position to help the British. As he and Feinberg traveled up and down the land, he made notes not only about the farms and villages, but about where the armies were located and how large they were, where the air bases were and how many aircraft were on each base, where the railways lines were located and how many supply trains were sent and when, where they were headed, and so on.

Aaronson approached the Jewish group called HaShomer, the "Watchmen," the self-defense arm of the Yishuv. He offered to give them his information, if they would smuggle it out to the British army in Egypt. But the members of HaShomer were suspicious of this amateur spy. If he were caught, the whole Jewish settlement might be punished as traitors.

Turned away by the Watchmen, Feinberg, Aaronson, and Aaronson's sister Sara, organized their own group of about twenty people, calling it the NILI from the initials of that quote from Samuel, Netzach Yisrael lo yishaker, "The Glorious One of Israel will not deceive." The question before them was how to get their information to Egypt, where the British General Allenby was gathering an army to invade Palestine. The twenty were all amateur spies, all idealistic, all willing to risk their lives.

But. at first, every contact they made with the British in Egypt was rebuffed. The British did not want to rely on amateur spies for information. This only changed when Aaronson was sent abroad to an agricultural conference in Europe. He made his way to England, where he met with higher officials who sent him to Cairo with their recommendation. He stayed in Cairo from 1916 on, while his sister Sara ran the NILI group.

In 1916, Feinberg attempted to cross the Sinai desert to reach Cairo, but he was ambushed by Bedouin raiders who killed him and buried him in the desert. The desert crossing was just too dangerous, so a new operation was conceived. The British sent a ship on a regular basis to sit off the shore at Atlit. The NILI relayed information using light signals from the shore. NILI gave the British information on weather patterns, Turkish fortifications, troop movements, railroads, desert routes, and water-sources. In return, money raised by the Jews of the Diaspora was smuggled ashore to help the starving Jews of the Settlement.

By 1917, the presence of German submarines made it too dangerous to send the ship to Atlit, so the NILI sent their information by homing pigeons. But one unfortunate homing pigeon landed on the house of the Turkish governor of Caesaria. The message it carried was written in a code, but it took the Turks less than a week to crack the code and suddenly the roundup of the NILI spies began.

Aaronson's home in Zichron Yaakov was surrounded. His sister was taken captive and sent to Damascus, where after four days of torture she committed suicide. The entire NILI network was uncovered, one by one, many tortured and some hung publicly.

Just weeks later, in October 1917, Allenby surprised the Ottomans by taking his entire army across the desert and capturing Palestine. In 1919 Major General George MacDonough explained to the Royal Military Academy: "You will no doubt remember the great campaign of Lord Allenby in Palestine and perhaps you are surprised at the daring of his actions. Someone who is looking from the side lines, lacking knowledge about the situation, is likely to think that Allenby took unwarranted risks. That is not true. For Allenby knew with certainty from his intelligence (in Palestine) of all the preparations and all the movements of his enemy. All the cards of his enemy were revealed to him, and so he could play his hand with complete confidence. Under these conditions, victory was certain before he began."

As we read in this week's portion about the spies sent by Moses to scout the Holy Land, we recall the bravery of these amateur Jewish spies of the NILI group. Aaron Aaronson was killed in an airplane crash in 1919 while crossing the English channel on his way to the Paris Peace Conference. In 1967, when Israel conquered Sinai in the Six Day War, an old Bedouin led the army to a grave in the wilderness where they found the body of Abraham Feinberg. Nearly fifty years after he was ambushed, Feinberg's bones were finally laid to rest with full honors in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

In 1991, Israel issued two postage stamps: one with images of Sara Aaronson and the other with a painting of the Aaronson house in Zichron Yaakov which has become a museum to the NILI spies. Once again, history proves that it is not just the march of armies and the leadership of generals that makes the difference, it is the role of idealistic people who step forward and change history through their individual bravery. And let us say, Amen.