CHAPTER 30 - Hunted like a Dog and Death in Damascus

Joe Enters the Village of Beit Gan

Dawn. Crawling on his hands and knees, hungry and weak from his injury, the hunted man enters the village of Beit Gan, the settlement he helped to found and where his wife and children live, hoping to find succour there.

Joe opens the creaking door of a back barn and hides among the mess of farming equipment, bridles, harnesses and a broken plough.

The barn door creaks open, and unlucky Joe is discovered by a man who has heard the creaking door and who we have met before: Joe's brother in law, Avram, carrying a rifle:
                       
    “Well, what have we here? A coward always comes home...” says Avram, not pleased, but not surprised.

Joe protests loudly and with a futile appeal to his captor’s emotions, that he needs to see his family. To say goodbye, then he’ll go.

    “They’re not here, your wife and children,” says, the giant, approaching Joe.

Joe tries to run, but Avram’s powerful hands are on his shoulders - including the injured one.

     “What should we do with you? After all the trouble you’ve caused us?!

Joe cries out with pain but Avram is stronger than him and tussles him to the ground.

Joe is left in the barn, tied up by a harness, under the guard of another man with a rifle, while Avram goes off to alert Tel Adas that their sought after prey has been found.

A cousin of Joe’s, lives in Beit Gan and ever crafty Joe, gets his chance when he begs to go the outhouse because he has the runs. The cousin, a woman lets him in and Joe begs to hide in the attic under the roof. The woman’s husband boots him out, knowing Joe well and having often warned him of the dangers of his work. Undaunted, desperate Joe creeps through the fields of the village he knows as well as the proverbial back of his hands.

He finds his way to the next door farm where a friend of his is more sympathetic. The Mukhtar of the village, Turkish appointed head of the local area, a Jewish man with four sons, gets one of his sons, a boy of seven or eight, to get some food for the starving man. But he cannot keep Joe, because of the danger to himself and his family.

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Joe's Many Adventures

Like a picaresque boys’ adventure thriller, Joe’s life and his many escapades and miraculous escapes, could fill the lengthy pages of a serialised novel by a Cervantes or a Dickens. But time is short and we must do with only a few of these. The proverbial roguish but appealing anti hero, relying on his wits and a great deal of dishonesty to outsmart his adversaries, every cliffhanger, a chance to outrun his persecutors and evade death. The reader knows full well that his end is nigh, but we stand with crooked Joe until that inevitable end.

Tel Adas Men Searching for Joe

The Tel Adas men are already out searching for him when they meet big Avram on the road.

It is not long before Joe is caught again by his tormentors who have hunted for him all night and find him wandering about near Beit Gan. This time he is tied up securely and bundled on the back of a horse and taken with Zvi Nadav and Shmulik Hefter, along a steep mountain path to Kibbutz Hamrah, near the Lebanese border, where he is kept under close guard, awaiting the decision of what to do next with the trouble-maker.

At Tel Adas there is turmoil. The cat and mouse game that slippery Joe is playing has enraged them all. The Jewish Mukhtar Zvi Nissinov knows that Joe will be tracked down and the blame will be put on them. He sends a message to Hamrah to keep close watch on Joe and to kill him if he tries to escape. Then to leave his body on the side of the road near a particular waterfall, where he will come and fetch the dead man. He sets off towards the north with a carriage with Zvi and Shmulik who are tasked with bringing him back to Tel Adas. En route, they pick up the Arab Police officer who has been promised that nice reward.

But when they get there, that cat with nine lives, has vanished again. Joe, had guessed what was coming next and ran away, evading the shots that accompanied his departure.

Nissinov writes: ‘They shot at him, wounding him, but it was a dark night and he succeeded in escaping. When I heard that, I felt that we were lost. If Lishansky was captured now, he would take his revenge on all of us.’

He headed for Metula, attempting to get to Lebanon where his friends, the Druze would hide him. But the Bedouins in the area had already been enlisted to wait for him.

At the waterfall, Bedouin trackers crouch in the ravine behind rocks, as Joe crawls up the slope.

One of the trackers fires and Joe falls into the ravine with many yells and curses.

Then silence. The trackers are sure he is dead and go to fetch a cart on which to load the body, so they too can get the reward promised by the Mukhtar.

Again, Joe is wounded, again in the same shoulder. He crawls along until he reaches the stream, washes his now heavily bleeding shoulder, anaesthetises it with Sara’s eau de cologne and ties the wound with her blue silk scarf, bought so long ago, by Avshalom and sent to Joe via Izi, by Sara.​

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House of Joe's Youth in Metula with half brother Israel & foster mother Miriam

Some of his relatives - Joe has many relatives - live in Metula, that town on the Lebanese border, of which you have heard so much in the Hezbollah confrontations of your own day. It is here that he arrives at the back door of his Lishansky family. His half brother Israel, already dead in 1912, Joe prays his daughter will take him in. He is greeted by a Druze maid servant who is asleep in the kitchen. She stares at him in shock but does not open her mouth. Joe gestures for silence and that he means no harm and he tiptoes down the passage. On the way, he sees two Hashomer men sleeping on the floor of a second bedroom. No doubt they are looking for him. If he'd had a weapon, he might have shot them. He continues into the main bedroom - that of his foster mother, Miriam, the woman that had taken him in as a child, who is actually his niece, but many years older than him.

She is fast asleep, snoring loudly, side by side with her own grown daughter and a granddaughter. He shakes her gently and when the poor woman wakes she suppresses an involuntary yell and shaking her head vehemently, instructs him to go to the outhouse which, as is usual in those days, is also the toilet. She promises to see him in the morning, when her daughter is at work.

Joe relieves himself in that long drop - a nice change from defecating in the wilds where thorns and stinging ants can attack ones’ nether parts. He waits a bit but then decides not to remain like a sitting duck, for his foster mother - who may or may not bring him a plate of food and who may or may not, give him away.

He is now ravenous and feverish. The malaria is back and he is fainting from both hunger and pain.

Another friend, a little tailor who has a severe deformity of the spine, and who he knew in his teenage years, is next on the list. Joe had always been kind to him in his youth, when other boys teased the poor, misshapen man. The tailor, though terrified, hides Joe in the wooden rafters of the roof, feeds him and tends his wounds as best he can and lets him rest.

But in the morning, it is clear, Joe must go. The tailor informs him that men from Tel Adas and Zikhron have heard he is in the North and are on their way for a showdown.

The little tailor gives him a sling for his arm, a suit of clothes and a loaf of bread and wishes him luck.

****

What to do now? His weak condition makes it impossible to brave the hills of Lebanon and in the back of his feverish mind, he still believes in the British, the bloody British, who Leo had promised would come again on the 12th of October.

He flees. This time back to familiar territory. No one will ever know how he achieved the Herculean task, the Odyssean journey to Atlit - whether by Bedouin sleuth, stolen horse or an Arab cart - but four days later, he is on the clifftop at Atlit.

A chill, incoming mist and a strong wind, do nothing to stop his apprehension. The Crusader Castle is as sinister and deserted as ever, the Station is in darkness, Turkish patrols on the hill top. What to do?

Joe Signals to the Ship to Stop

He sees a ship - the Monegam! - and with his one workable arm, signals like a wild man, his odd garb, bandaged arm and baggy clothes, would have made him recognisable to any who sought him out, but in his madness, he rushes down the windy cliff top and heads for the beach.

The ship does not stop.

On board are Alex with Raphael and Leibel. As we have already heard, the wind is too strong to permit the little boat to land and by the next afternoon, when they return to search the clifftop and cave, Joe is gone.

In his distress and burning with fever, Joe had thought of throwing himself into the sea, but self preservation and perennial craftiness, still uppermost in his mind, he returns back up the rough path, to the cave where once all those provisions and gold had been hidden.

He knows that a small tin of coins was left here, in their hurry to empty the place. He digs with a rock and his bare hands, which are soon sore and bleeding, and finds the tin.

Then he is off again. Having some money, he is able to obtain some food and a coat from a group of Trans-Jordanian Bedouin, quietly feeding their flocks as if still in biblical days. It seems that they have heard nothing of a missing spy and they happily part with a horse, obtained with the remainder of the coins.

With a last burst of his strength he gallops to Petach Tikva. A place he knows well, having dropped off a gift of some stockings there last summer. The roving adventurer’s last chance.

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Joe rides into Petach Tikva to the House of Peretz & Miriam Pascal

Peretz Pascal, the orange grower, who has worked with Aron in Egypt, and whose wife and children have remained in Petach Tikva, is not at home. He is actually with Alex and Leo in Egypt. They know nothing of Joe’s flight or his desperate attempt to find shelter at the Pascal house.

Mrs Pascal - another Miriam - receiver of those stockings - her mother and two daughters, Loret and Batya, are sitting in the darkness, fearing the knocking on the door from a Turkish patrol which has been sent to search the village. When they hear a pounding on the door, they do not answer, but sit still as statues, praying whoever it is, will go away.

The urgent knocking continues and the sound of someone speaking in Hebrew.

Mrs Pascal says: “Who is it?’

A low voice announces in a feverish mumble: “It’s Joe, Joe Lishansky. I’m ill.”

The women stare at each other, terrified; to shelter a fugitive means the death sentence but how can they refuse a sick man? The mother and one daughter, Batya, decide not to listen to Joe but the other daughter refuses to listen to them.

Eventually the youngest daughter, Loret - a young woman of impulsive and sensitive mind - goes outside and takes Joe’s hand and brings him inside where he is washed, fed, dressed in some of Peretz’s old clothes and a pair of boots, given a belt, gun, and wallet with some small change, and hidden under a bed in the girls’ room. Joe's plight will move her inexplicably.

Five years later, Loret or Laurette, as she is known in her multilingual family, will take her life at the age of twenty-seven. Sara's exact age on her death. Her brilliant, restless mind forever silenced.

Meanwhile Joe's horse, bought from the Trans Jordanians is still tethered to a post on the outskirts of the town.

The news of a strange horse wandering about the town is soon all over the place. The patrol starts to make a house to house search and Peretz’s wife, tells Joe to go as fast as he can.

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This time Joe has no steed and must walk in another man’s boots. He decides to go south towards Rishon, a place where he knows a Sheikh who owes him a favour, and he hopes that he will hide him, ‘until the British come’.

At the Arab village of Nebi Rubin, he walks in his too small boots, feet blistered, shoulder septic and very tired.

En route, he steals an unattended camel.

The end comes very quickly, without any of the thrilling tropes of escape fiction.

Joe's Last Ride

He is recognised by a man from his former days of information gathering, who is looking for his lost camel. The indignant man calls his friends and Joe, too weak to resist, is quickly surrounded, stripped of his camel, belt and wallet and its contents, his clothes and boots removed.

Barefoot, in Peretz Pascal’s long johns and buttoned vest, he is bound and gagged, and taken to Ramla for the blood money that is waiting for those expedient looters.

Our wishes for hope, justice, revenge and mercy, abruptly halted. Our Count of Monte Cristo is about to be tied up in a sack and thrown to the wolves.

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The torture centre in Zikhron. The Kaimakam has gone back to Damascus now that the crisis is over, to deal with the pressing matter of a public hanging, leaving the mopping up operation to the Moudir of Caesarea.

The Moudir and Captain Aziz, satisfied with the finale of Lishansky’s capture, peruse a list of new names.

The Moudir declares: “Let them go - Allah has decreed that we have what we want.”

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Mendel and his Father, Shnir Zvi Hirsch

That afternoon, as we have already heard, when Mendel Schneersohn, arrives at the torture centre, to look for his father, Shnir Zvi Hirsch, expecting to discover the worst, he discovers him, praying and smiling.

It has just been announced that Joe has been captured and has confessed everything.

The Moudir had said to Mendel's father: “You are a very lucky man. I have just received a telegram from Damascus to stop all the inquiries at Zikhron. I am glad you have avoided the tortures. Your God has heard your prayers.”

Soon after this, all the Zikhron men not directly affiliated with Nili, are released too.

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Joe Spills the Beans

The captured fugitive is taken to Ramleh where the local Governor welcomes him with a punch on the face, then he telegraphs Jerusalem to say that he has the dangerous traitor in his care.

That ‘care’, naturally consists of preparing to begin the customary Ottoman practice of ‘falaka’ - torture.

But he is saved the nuisance, when Joe casually spills the beans:

    “No need. I’ll talk. Don’t worry about the whip.”

And he does. But he remembers Sara’s words passed on to him by young Izi.

When asked who his accomplices are, he answers nonchalantly:

    “Only the HaShomer,” he says. “No one else, just the HaShomer.”

Can he remember their names?

Oh, yes, he can - and he proceeds to reel off the names, pseudo names and aliases of every Hashomer Watchman he can recall.

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An armoured car takes the prisoner to Haifa, where a very smart train, usually used only for the top brass, takes him to Jerusalem, accompanied by a whole battalion of heavily armed soldiers. It would not do for the slippery Jew to escape again.

A witness, already seated on the train would write of his departure: ‘Considerable military movement developed on the station, now filled with armed soldiers, high military officials and even the Governor of Jerusalem himself. The whole tremendous operation was performed for the ‘reception’ of one person, of medium height, broad shoulders, with shaven head - walking in chains  which had formerly served as part of an anchor of a ship that had sunk off the coast.’

When the unhappy man is securely on board, four armed soldiers jump on the roof of the freight car, which is then locked and sealed, by the Governor with much flourish.

The Pasha and the Bey at Damascus Train Station

From Jerusalem, unhappy Joe, all his bravado gone, is taken to Damascus. A marching band and crowd of top Ottoman officers, including both the Pasha and the Bey, greet the small, scruffy, bandaged, russet-moustached spy.

The triumphant fanfare soon over, the celebratory officers go off to a popular restaurant to feast on kebabs, kisir and kofte.

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Naaman & Joe in Khan Ali Pasha Prison, Damascus

Hungry Joe is thrown into a cell in the infamous Khan Ali Pasha Prison - what he wouldn’t have done for one of those koftas! - where, when the door is clanged shut, he discovers the dejected and broken figure of fellow spy, Naaman. The two of them, never the best of friends, forced to share a cell, in accusatory silence, each blaming the other for their sorry predicament.

Naaman’s sighing and crying irritates Joe who tells him to shut up.

Naaman with more sighing and crying says: “It’s not fair! I told them everything and now they’re going to hang me as well as you!”

Joe, so angry at this disclosure that he is ready to hang this informer himself, utters a long bellow of outrage and bitter pain, and awaits his fate on the gallows.

The prison is full - the usual wife murderers, honour killers, child rapists, petty thieves and money launderers, as well as what is left of Nili and its spies - and quite a few, new inmates; half of HaShomer’s Watchmen.

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Itzhak & Max Hear the Sound of Clanking Chains

Five days later, in an adjacent cell, Max Bronstein and Itzhak Halperin wake. It is midnight and the heavy noise of clanking chains has wakened them from their uneasy prison slumbers. In the corridor they hear the heavy footsteps of their doomed comrades. They know that men who leave the prison in the middle of the night, never return.

Naaman is blubbing like a child and keeps repeating: “It’s not fair!”.

When Joe passes their cell he shouts out: “Shalom comrades!”

An hour later, they hear Joe’s final words, from the courtyard, unrepentant and contrary to the end.

    “Long live the English redeemers” He yells as the noose tightens.

Then the heavy silence of a body falling - and another.

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In the kangaroo court of mock justice, held in the prison, with its already determined judgment, Joe is sentenced to death by hanging. The story goes that he begs for a bribe to stave off his death sentence but a certain Mr. Dizengoff refuses to transfer the necessary money, despite having received large sums from Nili and despite Joe’s refusal to reveal more names which might have saved him from the gallows. Following this betrayal Joe and Naaman spend their final days in deep depression. Joe even asks Dr. Moshe/Max Neumann, fellow Nili member imprisoned with him, for poison to take his own life. Despite having his medical bag with him, Dr. Neumann does not fulfill his request.

Naaman Belkind, too is sentenced to death and on Sunday 15th December 1917 he is hanged just after Lishansky. In Naaman’s last wishes, written fifteen minutes before his death, he asks his family, wife Adina Raya and son Uzi, to ensure that they transfer his body for burial to Rishon-Le-Zion.

The Hanging of Joe & Naaman in Damascus

The photograph, taken by a Jewish soldier in the Austrian Army, Daniel Auster, of the hanging in Damascus, is seen by the whole world, by Aron in London and Alex in Egypt and by Rifka in America. Some in the Muslim world deem it Allah’s justice. The rest of the world is shocked at the barbaric savagery of those descendants of the Caliphate. The picture shows, two men - or once men - with nooses around their neck, in white shroud-like robes, hung with placards recording their self-confessed guilt. The gallows are a primitive pair of tripods of rough wood. The hangman wears a tall conical hat on his head, like an image of a Plague Doctor or an Inquisitor. The dead man’s face in the foreground, is shadowed, but his features are still unmistakably those of Joe. The rope around his neck hanging from the apex of those gallows, clearly visible. The other, swinging from the scaffold, his back to us, is talkative Naaman, silenced forever.

The Final Resting Place of Naaman & Joe

The bones from the two gallows were brought to Palestine after the British conquest. Naaman's remains transferred by his father Shimshon and brother Eitan, were buried in Rishon-Le-Zion on October 24, 1919. Fewer than twenty people attended the funeral; it was less than two years after Nili's fall, and the Yishuv leaders forbad their members from attending. The anger against Naaman even led to his grave being desecrated several times. Fifty years after his second burial Naaman was recognised as a martyr of the State of Israel and more than sixty years after his death, his family was awarded the Nili Medal for his underground activities. Naaman's last letter was finally forwarded to his family by the Chief Rabbi of Damascus and can be seen at at the Nili Museum in Zikhron.

Joe's rehabilitation would take longer and the hatred of Hashomer for the Nili spies would never go away. Hashomer's plan to kill Lishansky was one of the more shameful episodes of that turbulent period. It was only after a contentious campaign by his supporters, that he was finally interred at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem in a state military ceremony at the gruesomely but aptly named, ‘Plot of the Ascenders of the Gallows’, near the grave of fellow Nili spy, Avshalom Feinberg.

Daniel Auster, the photographer of that first harrowing scene, would become mayor of Jerusalem in the final years of Mandatory Palestine, the first Jewish mayor of the city. 

And Meir Dizengoff would rise to become mayor of the burgeoning, modern city of Tel Aviv which was rising on the sand dunes like a shimmering mirage.          

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In the summer of 1917 following a telegram which Eitan Belkind received from his brother Naaman, he had returned to Palestine from Damascus and was arrested after Naaman revealed his membership in the Nili. Eitan was sent back to Damascus, to the prison, Khan Ali Pasha and was also sentenced to death.

At three in the morning on 16 December 1917, when Joe and Naaman were taken from their cells to the central square in Damascus, to the gallows, Eitan recounted: ‘Even though the cells were locked and the prisoners were confined, there was much excitement in the khan. Suddenly Yosef’s cry rang out: ‘Farewell, Jews! I am going to die!’ The Turkish Officer accompanying Lishansky calmed him, saying he was merely being taken to Aleppo. Lishansky scolded him: ‘Are you still mocking me! Do you take me for a woman?’ Naaman staggered in his walk and fell against the wall. Hearing the commotion, Eitan banged on the door of his cell and called to be permitted to say farewell to his brother. He was taken downstairs where he embraced a weeping Naaman.

Through his tears, Naaman kissed him and said: “Be a father to my boy. Teach him to be a good Jew.” 

‘As they parted,’ continues Eitan, ‘they - Naaman and Joe - turned to me, and together they cried: ‘Nili!’, I responded to them: ‘The eternity of Israel will not forget you.’ 

Only then did I break down into tears.’

At the central square, the Marj where the entire city had been encouraged to watch the execution, incorrigible Joe delivered an anti-Ottoman speech in Arabic to the Arab audience baying for blood.

The Rabbi, Netanel HaCohen Taarav, who had been appointed to attend the horrible proceedings, reported Joe’s words, though they have a definite postscript feeling about them: “We are not traitors; we did not betray our homeland, for betrayal must be preceded by love. We have never loved the homeland of the ‘falaka’ - and the ‘baksheesh’ ... We hated it with absolute hatred... We, the members of Nili, led by the great Jew Aron Aronson, dug a large grave for you, despicable Ottoman Empire!.. While you are busy hanging us, the British army is entering our holy city, Jerusalem, and your armies are fleeing the city without a fight.”

The British had indeed captured Jerusalem a few days earlier, on December 9th. But Joe would never know that.

When Joe’s speech was translated into Turkish, the executioner understood its meaning and ordered the translation to stop at once and a trumpeter to drown out his words. Naaman and Joe recited the ‘Viddui’ - the Hebrew confession before death - with the Jewish envoy of the Hakham Bashi of Damascus, Hakham Nataniel HaCohen Masalton, a Hebrew teacher at the city’s Alliance school.

After Lishansky and Belkind were hanged, their bodies were taken down at nine in the morning and transferred to shallow, prison graves with no ceremony.

As well as the evidence of army officer Daniel Auster's shocking photograph, a Yishuv woman, Divsha Ehrlich, who was also in the crowd, would confirm the defiant last words of our anti hero, super-hero Joe. 

The infamous Marjeh Square was the scene of other executions, including the public hanging during the Arab Revolt of 1918 of three Druze 'bandits' and the most famous, that of Israeli spy Eli Cohen in 1965.

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Eitan was only saved from capital punishment, by the fact that he was nineteen-years-old, an age considered too young for hanging, by his Turkish persecutors.

He had been kept with Nissim Rutman, Max Bronstein and Dr. Neumann, the latter, who still in the employ of the Turkish army, had been arrested and sent to Damascus for court-martial, and would be sentenced to twelve months in jail. The three men were kept in prison for many months, told every day that they were about to be hanged and enduring physical and psychological torture. When the British eventually took Damascus in 1918, they were freed by a certain Captain McRury, under whom Leo and Alex had been serving since the fighting began in Palestine, the previous year.

Eitan Belkind in the Damascus prison 25.6.18

A photograph of Eitan in the Damascus prison, depicts a thoughtful, resiliant, young man, with a touching dedication for his sister, Yemima Belkind; ‘for Yemimati, with much love, from Eitan’ and a caption: ‘year of imprisonment - 25.6.18 Khan Ali Pasha in Damascus.’

That is six months after his brother Naaman’s death and he was still in jail. 

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Max ‘Manasseh’ Bronstein's Tombstone Zikhron Ya'acov

Max ‘Manasseh’ Bronstein, released from prison after a sentence of a year, returned to his family in Zikhron Ya’akov and began to rebuild his life and to try to repair his destroyed farm. In 1936 he took part in the guarding operations in the colony. On the 17th May 1939 he was travelling to Haifa on a bus, when he was shot and ambushed by an Arab. He was taken to Hadassah Hospital where he died and was later buried in the cemetery in Zikhron Ya’akov, with much sorrow and many cries for revenge. He left a mother, Batya, wife Chasia, two sons, Mordechai, a boy called 'Nili' - after the eponymous spy group - and three daughters, Tova, Ruth and Guela. 

Dr. Neumann Outside his House in Jerusalem

Dr. Neumann returned to his profession and his dear mother, Lea.  He went on to marry and have two children, specialising in internal medicine and working at the Bikur Holim Hospital in Jerusalem, the city he loved and where he lived for the rest of his life.

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