CHAPTER 31 - A Number of Nili Postripts

An Eternal Love Story

‘What, you may ask, happens to a hero who is killed off half way on his journey? A novel which loses its protagonist mid story? A love story that comes to an abrupt halt. Inconvenient indeed. But the story continues and I am still the handsome young man of twenty seven who rode so foolishly and hopefully into the desert. The same age on my death as my sweetheart. Yes, while I might be a mere footnote in history's long, sad compendium of half truths and downright lies, I am perfectly placed to be tasked with delivering some of the postscripts of my fellow spies and Nili members and of an eternal love story.

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Lord Walter Rothschild & Lord Balfour with the Balfour Declaration

Less than a month after my beloved's death, on November 2nd 1917, the British foreign minister, Lord Balfour sent Lord Walter Rothschild the famous declaration according to which ‘His Majesty’s government view with frifavour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.

On October 31 Zionist Commissioner, Chairman Chaim Weizmann had acted with Lloyd George, Arthur James Balfour, Jan Christiaan Smuts, and others to secure British protection for the Jews in Palestine and the stated wish for a Jewish homeland. The British War Cabinet voted for the declaration over the objections of a very antisemitic gentlemen, Lord Curzon - and of the Right Honourable Sir Edwin Montagu, himself of Jewish descent, who despite his own father’s support for the declaration, was strongly opposed to Zionism, which he called ‘a mischievous political creed’ - believing that a Jewish homeland would endanger the security of British Jews at home. 

Presented as a letter to Rothschild on November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration stated: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

The seeds of so much future suffering for those ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’, in plain sight.

Sara, who was so close to this moment, did not see it.

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On December 9th, 1917, not two month's after my dear one’s death, General Sir Edmund Allenby and his British troops, took Jerusalem from the Turks. Allenby, as already described, had launched the Third Battle of Gaza on 1st November 1917. After an impressive victory at Be’er Sheva, his forces moved on to Jerusalem. The initial offensive in mid-November stalled but a renewed attack on 7th December proved successful against a demoralised and exhausted Ottoman army and after only a single day’s fighting, the city awaited its conquerors. 

The Mayor of Jerusalem Delivers the Keys of the City to Two British Sergeants

The official version of the story is that the Ottoman forces in the city surrendered and the Mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Salim al-Husseini, accompanied by his family, set out to deliver the Ottoman Governor’s letter of surrender and the keys of the city, to the British forces.

What actually happened, was much more comic and bizarre: The city was actually ‘taken’ by two British cooks searching for eggs for their commanding officer’s breakfast. A greasy little army cook and his scullery boy got lost and changed the course of history. One witness, Major Vivian Gilbert, was a machine gun officer with the British 60th Regiment. After months of bloody fighting, he and his company bivouacked for the night not far from the ancient city. The night was black, and Gilbert only realized he was just a few miles from the city when he heard its church bells striking midnight.

The next morning, was apparently misty, and the officers, hearing a rooster in a nearby village, summoned their cook and sent him off to get eggs.

Gilbert describes this cook as ‘culinary expert’ Private Murch, ‘a miserable specimen,’ a cockney from London.

British Squaddies in the First World War

‘He hardly gave the impression of a smart British soldier,’ wrote Gilbert. ‘His tunic was so covered with grease and filth it looked black instead of khaki colour … The toe-cap of one boot was missing, exposing to view a very red big toe, framed in a ragged grey woolen sock. He probably used his pith helmet as a pillow, for it had lost its original shape and had a twisted and drunken appearance; it was at least one size too small, and was only held in position by a thick piece of string doing duty for the leather strap it must have once possessed.’

Murch and his underling quickly get lost in the mist and stumble up and down rocky hills, looking for the village of Lifta, and their eggs. Murch keeps cursing as he stubs his exposed toe on the rocks and stones lying everywhere.

Eventually, our hero, the liberator of Jerusalem, stumbles into a crowd of people waving white flags and trying to kiss him. He has no idea who they are nor what the white flags may indicate.

A carriage draws up, and a well-dressed Arab in a black frock-coat and red fez greets him in a high falsetto voice, speaking in English, and says ‘You are British soldier? I want to surrender the city please,’ and tries to give Murch the keys.

‘I don’t want yer city,’ says the bewildered Londoner: ‘I want some eggs!’ convinced that he has fallen into the company of lunatics.

The man in the fez was, in fact, the Mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein al-Husseini. 

Gilbert says he was himself at battalion headquarters when Murch finally returned, ‘hot and out of breath.’

‘The perspiring private proceeded to relate his amazing adventures in a rich cockney dialect,’ adds Gilbert getting the most out of his amusing anecdote.

Once the cook had finished, the commanding officer, still awaiting his own breakfast, turned and said, ‘Gentlemen, Jerusalem has fallen!’

But the farce had only just begun. The colonel informed his brigadier, who, hoping to be famous, went and received the keys from Mayor Husseini - and reported to his divisional commander that he had captured Jerusalem. Not to be outdone, the divisional commander ordered the keys to be returned to the mayor, who had to wait for him to come personally and receive them.

Finally, the irritated commander in chief himself, Edmund Allenby, ordered the keys to be returned to the mayor yet again, for him to receive formally.  

Allenby Takes the Old City, 11 December 1917

The Jaffa Gate which had not been opened for many years was opened with the help of much pushing and shoving. A few ancient stones came loose. Many of the residents of the city, from across the religious spectrum, Jews, Arabs and Christians, went out on the streets to cheer as Allenby walked into the Old City on 11 December 1917. At noon General Allenby had dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate to take possession of Jerusalem on behalf of the British Crown.

His arrival on foot was intended to show respect for the city and not be viewed as another Crusader-style forced entry - a ploy intended also to contrast with the German Kaiser’s visit twenty years earlier when that grandee had insisted on riding into the city on a pure, white horse. No Allied flags were flown over the city, and Muslim troops from India were dispatched to guard the religious landmark, the Dome of the Rock.

In a proclamation declaring martial law that was read aloud to the city’s people in English, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Greek, Allenby assured them that the occupying power would not inflict further harm on Jerusalem, its inhabitants, or its holy places. “Since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of three of the great religions of mankind and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers and pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people, I make it known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faith they are sacred.”

Major Vivian Gilbert continues with more emotive and flowery language: ‘The narrow streets were packed with townspeople, old men and women and children, all wild with delight, all dressed in their best, to greet the victorious army. They had no flags, so they hung bright coloured carpets and Eastern embroideries from their balconies. The women had arms full of flowers which they showered amongst the troops; whilst the children, calling out English words of welcome, ran forward and seized the soldiers’ hands. Some of the older people kissed the guns and gun carriages, as covered with dust and mud, they clattered over the cobblestones; for a battery of artillery, followed by two battalions of infantry, was close behind us. Venerable Jewish rabbis, with long grey beards, knelt in the mud by the wayside and with tears coursing down their furrowed cheeks, blessed and welcomed us …’

Back in London, Lloyd George described the taking of Jerusalem as ‘A Christmas present for the British People’. Jews everywhere might have seen it rather as a very belated Channukah present. Allenby’s success, after so much despair on the Western Front, elated and inspired Allied supporters everywhere.

‘Jerusalem Is Rescued by British after 673 Years of Moslem Rule’

The New York Herald headline declared: ‘Jerusalem Is Rescued by British after 673 Years of Moslem Rule’ and featured a handsome, profiled image of the great General, his face resolute and proud as any Crusader knight.

Illustrations published in Europe depicted Allenby as entering the city in the presence of angels. The fall of Jerusalem was indeed likened to the Crusades in the British press, and Allenby, to Godfrey of Bouillon who occupied Jerusalem during the first violent Christian attack on the city. Allenby considered himself to have completed the unfinished crusade of Richard the Lionheart, the English king.

 

The impressive ceremony was also immortalised in various news photo pictures. The cook and his eggs are not among them.

The General walking into the city through the Zion Gate

The most famous of which, shows the General walking into the city through the Zion Gate, at the head of a small procession of British Officers, others on the battlements above the ancient gate, being greeted mainly in silence, by a motley crowd of bewildered Jerusalemites and the remnants of a few dejected Turkish troops.

Sadly it was reported that the Mayor of Jerusalem took ill a few weeks later and died - whether of pneumonia due to the inclement weather on that day of the passing of keys from hand to hand or from the shame of the hand over fiasco, is not recorded. 

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The Turks were thoroughly beaten and the Ottoman Empire finally came to a long overdue and sticky end. It was none other than my cousin Naaman Belkind’s torturer, Ali Fuad Pasha, who was in charge of the Ottoman XX Corps, and who had failed utterly in the guarding of the city. This was no doubt, aided by the fact that German General and Ottoman Field Marshal Falkenhayn, refrained from dispatching reinforcements, mindful, as he said, of preserving the holy sites. Each General blamed the other. Ali Fuad cabled Djemal Pasha with the following complaint: ‘Since my first day as the commander of the defence of Jerusalem, I did not receive any support, except one single cavalry regiment, from the Yıldırım Army Group. The British, who benefited from the fatigue of my poor soldiers who had to fight at the first line without having an opportunity to rest, invaded the beautiful town of Jerusalem. I believe that the responsibility of this disaster belongs completely to Falkenhayn Pasha.’ 

Field Marshal Falkenhayn in turn, attributed the setback to our old enemy, fiendish sadist Colonel Kress von Kressenstein, who had caused Naaman and I so much pain and grief. 

 Colonel Kress von Kressenstein with Ali Fuad on the right

Thanks to Djemal’s intervention, von Kressenstein faced immediate and ignominious dismissal and what many consider, his just deserts.

That year the British celebrated Christmas in the Holy City where plentiful eggs were supplied from the local villages to make a very large plum pudding. 

General Allenby Meets the Rabbis of Jerusalem

The Jewish community of Jerusalem rejoiced in the British victory, a number of elderly rabbis kissed the hands of any English official they could find and a Scroll of the Law was presented to General Allenby. As we have noted, martial law quickly enveloped Jerusalem, with guards stationed to safeguard sites revered by Christians, Muslims, and Jews and the Jews lit their Channukah candles as they always have.

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Captain Alexander Aronson Enters Jerusalem with the Conquerors.

Alex, now Captain Alexander Aronson, in the service of the British Army, entered Jerusalem with the conquerors. It is said that he begged Allenby to show his gratitude to the Nili spies, but none was forthcoming. The hatred and deliberate exclusion of the Aronson family and the Nili spies would linger for many bitter years, dividing left and right in bitter polarity. The Yishuv’s hatred against the British Mandate would colour the next decades with more division and eternal suspicion of their ‘liberators’. 

My own reputation lay in tatters.

It is some irony that during the Mandatory period, the British would set up a prison in Atlit and a detention camp for ‘illegal’ immigrants - which included those who had survived the ravages of the Shoah. Although the Nili ring was broken by the Ottoman security service, its remnants served the military governor of Jaffa during the final year of the Great War by running the Jewish Bureau. Alex was employed within the intelligence staff of the The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and ran an Arab intelligence network which delivered little of any significance. He was, however, decorated for his work, which served dual purposes for the British and our Zionists. From 1919 he served in the General Staff Intelligence of the British Camel Corps in Aleppo. It was here that he managed to find the murderous Kaimakam, Muftir Hassan Bey, who was brought to Jerusalem for trial and sentenced to a long term of hard labour. Apparently, Alex - perhaps in his messianic phase - took pity on the man with that pliable, putty-coloured face - ‘Vengeance is the Lord’s’, he is supposed to have said - and the prison sentence was cut to a few months. The brutal Bey was freed from jail but soon afterwards, suffered a stroke and became paralysed. Like Sara, never to walk again. 

Vengeance, indeed the Lord’s.

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The day, after the taking of the city, those prisoners still alive in Damascus, hear the unbelievable news that the British have arrived in Palestine and that General Allenby has taken Jerusalem. And those in Nazareth hear their guards fleeing, documents being ripped to shreds, torture implements thrown away in a loud and ugly clatter, and their cell doors thrown open.

My dear colleague, Reuven Schwartz who had obeyed Sara to the letter had escaped into the mountains. When the Turks couldn’t find him, they took his father-in-law, committee head, Alter Albert, hostage and tortured him. From his hiding place, Reuven heard the cries, and turned himself in to save his wife’s father. For four days his tormentors sought to extract information with cudgel, rope, rubber hose, strangling wires, hot irons and pincers used for taking nails from the hooves of horses. Then he spent two weeks in the convent turned prison, in Nazareth, where more blows rained down upon him. He was beaten mercilessly, his whole body a mass of festering sores, but he remained steadfast and revealed nothing.

Hanging in the Window of a Prison Cell

On the morning of  23rd October, he was found hanging in the window of his prison cell. The Turks claimed he had gone crazy and hanged himself, but according to his friends, his jailers, fearing that he would succumb to his wounds, hanged him from the bars of his cell window to make it seem as if he had taken his own life.

Reuven was buried near Afullah. He left behind a wife, Leah and two sons: Emmanuel and Asael. At the initiative of his family and members of Nili, his bones were transferred from Afullah in 1926 to the cemetery in Zikhron. A street was named after him in the Neve HaBaron neighbourhood.

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In September 1918, young, double agent, Eitan Belkind escaped from prison, while the Turks, in disarray, retreated from the invading British army. After returning home, he began restoring the family farm which had been destroyed by war, pillaging and neglect. In the Sukkoth Holidays of that year, as stated, Eitan and his father Shimshon, went to Damascus, to bring the remains of Naaman and Joe Lishansky back home for burial in the cemetery in Rishon-Le-Zion.

In 1967, after the Six-Day War, when my death site was discovered under that mythical palm tree, Joe’s name was fully cleared of the murder accusations against him. The slander that he had killed me in the desert now put to rest. Joe’s neglected widow Rivka, remarried to a more reliable husband, Moshe Lifshitz, had four more little Lifshitzs and died in 1976.

Joe's Rehabilitation & Commemorative Stamp

Three years later, Joe’s children Ivriya and Tuvia, requested that their father’s remains be transferred to Mount Herzl in Jerusalem and as you have read, a hero’s burial was finally accorded to roguish Joe, now rehabilitated as a national figure.

Eitan in Turkish Jail & ‘So Was It - the Story of a Nili Member’

Eitan returned to farming in Rishon-Le-Zion, and was appointed as secretary of the Rishon council. He married piano teacher, Nehama Segal and started a cinema in Rishon-Le-Zion, purchasing a movie projector in Cairo and opened the new cinema in conjunction with the celebration of the switching on of electricity in the town. His first cinema programme included a concert by the ‘leading opera singers and musicians of Eretz-Israel’, which included his wife, Hema, as she was known, who often played the piano at her husband’s cinema. For thirty years Eitan devoted himself to the business of film distribution - his film house was called 'Naaman' after his doomed brother - and he represented Israeli films all over Europe.

In the 1940’s, he would return to his underground activities, by joining the Etzel movement, the purpose of which was to throw out the British and buy weapons for the underground. With the establishment of the State of Israel he helped to create a monument for those executed by the British on the gallows, ‘erected in memory of the fourteen martyrs and members of the undergrounds of Nili, Etzel and Lechi’ and published a book ‘So Was It - the Story of a Nili Member’, in memory of his fallen comrades and his brother Naaman. His children Olga and Naaman - the latter named for his brother - continued his name into the future.

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Ronia Mazeh & in Turkish Jail

Yet another Nili member who provided intelligence to the British, was Eliyahu - ‘Ronia’ - his nickname - Mazeh, who as we have heard, worked as a telephonist in Turkish headquarters at Be’er Sheva. The son of Dr. Aharon-Meir Mazia, a bright scholar, in his youth, he attended high school in Switzerland, and then studied agriculture in Montpellier and Nancy, in France, gaining a master's degree in natural sciences. During our own war he had enlisted and served as agricultural advisor to the Turkish headquarters both in Be’er Sheva and on the Suez Canal. He also served as a censor and handled secret documents relating to the situation on the front. A position which gave him access to classified information as well as a cover for his espionage activities. After the arrest of other key Nili members like my friends, Na'aman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky, he was arrested at his father’s house in Jerusalem and brought bound in chains to Damascus, where he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

A year after his imprisonment, the British approached the Damascus border and the Turks fled taking with them their most important prisoners, including Ronia. When they reached Anatolia they were bombed by English planes, and Ronia fled with others to the mountains where bandits attacked and robbed them. When the escapees heard that Palestine had been conquered by the English, they tried desperately to get home. One winter night they were cornered by a company of Turkish soldiers, but they managed to jump into the Litani River and hid in that cold water all night long. Ronia got a fever but with difficulty, continued on his way with the others to Beirut and from there to Jaffa. When he got home at the beginning of 1918 he was already very ill from typhus and pneumonia and on October 18, 1919, he died of his illness. Many years later, he was brought to eternal rest on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

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Zvi Aronson, Reprieved from Hanging

Nearly all the Nili members were sentenced by the court to many months in Turkish jails. My beloved's vacillating brother, Zvi Aronson, was reprieved after being told he was going to be hanged. No one knows why. Perhaps the presiding judge was convinced by Zvi’s declaration of his innocence and that he'd never agreed with us, perhaps it was something else. There were still others who could be implicated. Perhaps the judge hoped he would reveal more names but Zvi's lips were sealed. Zvi was already ill from the various abuses that had been piled upon him, and another Aronson death in prison may have been seen as unnecessary. Writing to his wife Sara-Hinda, Zvi tells of being shuttled from Aleppo to Adana and then to Constantinople, in freezing freight cars and given no food by the Turks. At each station, where the freight cars stopped, Jewish women from those little towns, brought the prisoners sustenance. According to Zvi, this saved his life. In the capital, he was sent to a hospital where he remained until the British came.

At least forty of the total one hundred prisoners caught in the Nili aftermath are reported to have died of subsequent illness, disabilty or malnutrition. The remainder were returned to Eretz Israel by the British army on a French registered ship flying the Zionist flag.

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Sara's dear father Efraim got typhus in prison - it was said that if you survived Turkish torture, then typhus would get you. He was left to die, but sharing Sara’s stubborn genes, he refused to please his jailers and he was finally moved to the hospital in Nazareth. Here, a young Maronite Christian nurse looked after him with great care and compassion and when the British got to Zikhron he went home in a wheelchair, where he was greeted by little Rifka who had returned from London. 

Efraim & Rifka on the Porch

For the rest of his life, he devoted himself to keeping watered and tended, the plants of Aron’s collection that had survived both Turks and drought. He also rescued any of Aron’s books and files that had been hidden in the secret cellar and had survived, rats, spiders, damp and the ravages of the Turks.

Efraim's Smile Returns

When he was properly recovered, his smile returned and he went back to work in the vineyard and orchards behind the house where he had had his last walk with his beloved Sara.

He lived until the age of ninety, looked after by Rifka and Frida Lulu, former housekeeper at the Station at Atlit, who had herself been tortured and imprisoned in those terrible months.

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Fanny ‘Fanya’ Feinberg-Belkind at Beit Feinberg

My darling, brave mother Fanny continued to run the family farmstead in Hadera and to remember me daily. It was only after the 1921 Arab riots that she left and moved to live with my sister Tsila in Tel Aviv. Mother's last years were spent in Rishon-Le-Zion and when she died in January 1942, she was buried in the city's old cemetery.  

Lady Yvonne Sursock Cochrane & Tsila & the Damaged Sursock Palace, Beirut

My tomboy sister Tsila has her own part to play in the redemption of our Land. She offered to support the lawsuit of the wife of an Irish diplomat, Italian born, Lady Yvonne Cochrane Sursock, an heiress of the former Sursock Estates, to recover lands expropriated from her family by the Turks. An unusual and bold move from a Jew of Palestine to a wealthy Lebanese woman who grew up in a palace, in the old Achrafieh quarter above Beirut port. It was our uncle Yehoshua Hankin who did business with the Sursocks, buying much needed land from the family which required the Sursock signature to approve transactions in order to overcome Ottoman restrictions. It was Tsila who provided a detailed letter describing a trip to Beirut in the company of our uncle Yehoshua's wife, aunt Olga Hankin: ‘I visited with my uncle Yehoshua Hankin the late Lady Cochrane’s father, Mr. Alfred Sursock, and I witnessed his large and important part in the sale of land to the Jewish settlement. He did this despite strong opposition from extremist and nationalist elements in the Arab world and despite threats to his life.’ She continues: ‘I personally have no doubt that if it weren't for the great help that Yehoshua Hankin received from the Sursock family in various ways, in addition to the actual sale of the land by her, of course, the valley would not have been redeemed at the time.’

It might be added that due to Tsila’s letter, Lady Yvonne won due compensation because the land in Jaffa and Haifa was allocated for the use of a buyer ‘in good faith’ and could not be revoked.

And a sad postscript - an obituary of that far off year 2020, when nearly three thousand tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored there by the Hezbollah terrorst group, exploded in Beirut port and the Sursock Palace was destroyed by a massive chemical blast: ‘Lady Cochrane glamorous jet-setter who joined the Anglo-Irish elite, died from injuries sustained in the Beirut port explosion last month.’ Lady Yvonne had been very forthright in her condemnation of Lebanon’s political class as negligent, corrupt and lawless. At her funeral, when a representative of the Lebanese president arrived with a giant wreath and a posthumous National Order of the Cedar medal, her grandson apparently greeted him with: ‘You killed my grandmother!’ 

Fanny, Tsila & Shoshi with Absa & Nahum Wilbush

 

Absa & Niece Zohara

Of my sisters, Tsila and Shoshi, best remembered by some lovely pictures of us before our troubles came tumbling around us...

 Tsila with her husband Zeev Shoham on the left in St. Petersburg

After the war, Tsila went to England and married Zeev Shoham, a lawyer from Haifa, whom she met in St. Petersburg, Russia and who was sent to serve as the head of the Zionist executive in Britain. 

Tsila with her daughter Tamar, 1922

In London, my niece Tamar was born and there Tsila was involved in the establishment of the Woman's Zionist Organisation. Tsila studied botany and agriculture in Berlin and also spent time in Vienna, as an academic of genetic research. When the family returned home to Haifa, Tsila divided her time between that beautiful city and our home, colloquially know as ‘Beit Feinberg’ or Feinberg House, where the family orchard, so sorely neglected due to the Great War, was restored to its former glory. Tsila saw her role as working for the status of women and she ran the department for agricultural schools for many years, heading the citrus fruit council's control committee till the age of 90. Towards the end of her life, my diligent sister was awarded the title of ‘Darling of the City of Haifa’ and here she died, at the age of 92.

Shoshanna & Nahum Wilbush-Feinberg

Beautiful Shoshi, as already recorded, married Nahum Wilbush, and gave birth to two children, my beloved niece Zohara and my nephew Joel, and lived to 1981, when she was buried in the Old Hadera Cemetery; both my lovely sisters surviving over sixty years after I have been turned to dust. Nahum had been a consultant to Theodor Herzl, among other things, travelling to exotic Madagascar and dusty Uganda to report for Herzl about the possibility of establishing a homeland there. Fortunately none of those plans were actualised, for nothing could compare with our Return to Eretz Israel. Terms appropriated by the far right in your own time, but which once meant exactly what they said, an unquestioning belief in the just necessity of a return to Zion.  

Shoshi, Doba Belkind, Sonia Belkind, Manya Shochat & Olga Belkind

Shoshi was part of an elite group of Zionist, pioneer women, including her sister in law, firebrand, political activist, Manya Shochat, always in her dark dress, beauty, Doba Kreinin, married to my uncle, Israel Belkind, who devoted his life to raising funds for children orphaned in the Ukrainian pogroms, and my equally remarkable aunts, renowned doctor, Sonia Belkind and community midwife, Olga Belkind, married to brothers Mendel Hankin, citrus grower and one of the founders of the Yishuv credit bank, and Yehoshua Hankin, who was instrumental in the purchase of Arab land.

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Toba’s Story

Toba’s is something of an untold story which might deserve a book of its own: her serene beauty, well remembered, Alex’s dalliance with her on a drunken night, best forgotten, her love of the piano and all things clairvoyant, her loyalty for and love of Sara, her trip to Damascus when pregnant, her subsequent imprisonment by the Turks for six months, her unhappy marriage with Nissim Rutman, who returned from prison, an angry, jealous man. After his death, his brother said that he was beaten twice a day in prison, and that it ‘made him a hard man.’

Nissim Rutman's Grave

At any rate, I never liked him and when he finally Toba - for a younger woman, who in turn left him for a younger man - dear Toba was definitely better off. Nissim's involvement and prosecution in fraudulent land scheme engineered by none other than, Alexander Aronson, to buy Arab lands belonging to the village of Raml Zeita, must also have put pressure on the marriage. As soon as the land was sold, Nissam Rutman threw out the inhabitants of Raml Zeita who were cultivating the land which had long been theirs. 

Sir Herbert Samuel, British High Commissioner & Sir Norman Bentwich, Attorney General

A long court case followed with the prosecution lead by none other than our old friend Norman Bentwich, now Attorney General in the Mandate, but ever torn between British law and his own Zionist leanings. In the end, he could please no one, considered too lenient for the Jews and too harsh for the Arabs, his life was threatened by an Arab messenger in the police force who shot him at close range in the thigh. Bentwich, being the kind of man he was, forgave his would-be assassin and actually defended him in court!

Toba's Grave

Toba died on January 20, 1974 at the age of eighty, her beauty now creased by age and disappointment, and was buried in Zikhron Ya'akov not far from my Sara. 

Toba & Nissim with Son Avshalom

The baby who sat on Sara's desk at the ill-fated, Atlit Station, born so soon after my fatal disappearance, was named Avshalom. Daughter Sara, born in 1922, was named for Toba’s best friend, my Sara. The youngest, Hadassah, born in 1928, a child intended to repair a long-broken marriage, lived to 2016. 

What else did Toba leave behind? A surprising and recently discovered find - a book of recipes, written in a leather-bound, blue notebook, on faded pages in a fluid, cursive handwriting. They are combined with rather vague cooking instructions, some in Yiddish and others in Hebrew, though there are few or no measurements, rule of thumb, tongue and eye, being the prevailing view of most cooks of that far off period: A pinch of salt is described as ‘salt between your fingers’; flour is added ‘as much as it takes’; ‘baking’ is baking powder or bicarbonate of soda; and eggs are to be beaten by hand for an half an hour until they are stiff! If there are no eggs in the chicken hock what should you do? Toba answers: ‘Buy some eggs’. How many spoons of sugar? A few. Another one if you like. There are of course no instructions regarding cooking time - other than ‘take it off the fire when ready’.

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Dr. Yaffe's Disturbing Opinions

Of Dr. Yaffe, more disturbing opinions. Despite his care of dying Sara, he considered us, reckless adventurers who pursued risky exploits without proper consideration of the consequence and he condemned us very harshly. In the autumn of 1918, two days after the British had conquered our little town from the Turks, he wrote most indignantly: ‘Last year a spy ring was uncovered in Zikhron Ya’akov and the experimental agriculture station, culminating in a huge trial. The bloodstains have yet to be wiped away, and the tears still haven’t dried. Yet now, the first official representative of the British authorities in Zikhron is one of those very spies - Alexander Aronson. The only house in Zikhron to be visited by the Zionist Council is the one where the spy plot was hatched… I protest this conduct, and I wish to point out that the homeland of our dreams should be founded on moral conduct and fair methods. The spies were paid well enough for their actions. We must not allow them this honour.’

The opinion that Nili was unfairly punished, just at the time that our actions proved to be instrumental in removing the Turks from the land, was held by a small minority of outraged supporters. The rest, Hashomer and others, continued in their ill-justified hatred of us to the end of their lives. In the realm of political polarities and the shifting tides of war, the moral outrage of the majority often masquerades as justice. Just look at the support for Hamas and the Palestinians, in your own day, while little of that same outrage is forthcoming for the victims of October 7th...

High-Handed Utterances

But the above letter, was mild, almost tame, compared to some of the Doctor’s other high-handed utterances on the subject, which bordered on the downright incendiary:

‘Woe to those cold-blooded murderers, those heartless patricides who endangered their village and the whole Yishuv - the Jewish population of Ottoman Palestine - for the sake of their own ambitions!’ 

What pains me the most, is that all our efforts and our many operations were rejected by the new State and left out of the officially recognised historiography for many decades. Our efforts to free the Yishuv from the Turks forgotten in the aftermath of British betrayal. Collective amnesia confirming how political power and historical narratives are shaped by those in control of the memorialising process. HaShomer's heirs, the Labour movement condemned us for both personal and political reasons.

It was only in the early 30’s, that Nili’s supporters were able to hold their first memorial at my darling’s grave and in that seminal year of 1967, fifty years after the Turks had rounded up my co-conspirators, that a new narrative replaced the old, and the first State commemoration of Sara's death took place in Zikhron itself. 

The Aronson's derided and ignored, all except Rifka, went to their deaths not as celebrated heroes, but as shunned pariahs.

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Rifka, the last of the Aronsons

Yes, we must not forget, the last of the Aronsons, my first love, little Rifka, who outlived all her siblings. She never married and devoted her life to memorialising her lost siblings and a little dog who she loved dearly.

Rifka with her Puppy, 1921

We can picture her, a middle aged woman, pale, henna dyed hair, her powdery skin which I remember so well, more faded, more powdery, under a web of fine lines -  but still coquettish and identifiable as little Rifka. She sits in a cane chair in the verdant oasis of the courtyard or study - Aron's study, which she now calls her own - filled with pot plants, leafing through a pile of photos and newspaper cuttings. 

Rifka at Home in her Study

The Aronson legacy is now firmly in Rifka's hands. Aron is there, centre stage, of course. The hero of Nili. Alexander’s face is everywhere too, in the living room, in the study, fashionably dressed on the pier in Nice in navy blazer and on a yacht with sea captain’s cap, skiing in Switzerland with a dumpy woman who must be Mary Fels, and the famous picture of a much younger Alex in British captain’s uniform. A single portrait of me - on the top of a bookcase - and one of Sara, completes the constant show of mourning, which, like that of the British queen Victoria, accompanied my first love to her very celebrated grave.

In 1919 after returning from the United States, as we have said, Rifka took care of Efraim, and together with Alexander, began to preserve the remaining papers and books of Aron’s many researches. His collections geological and botanical and his marvellous library had been hit hard by the Turks. Despite the bad blood between the brothers, brother Sam was also instrumental in locating the remnants and restoring the collection.

Efraim & Rifka in front of the Aronson House, 1924

 

Efraim & Rifka in 1936

Rifka spent the rest of her life, commemorating and vindicating the Nili members and her loved ones. It was she, who established the museum at the site of the two Aronson houses and she who pushed for our rehabilitation. A site much visited by future generations of tourists and school children accompanied by very enthusiastic guides who presented our suffering in all its tragic and gory detail.  

The Aronson House Nili Museum

 The Nili Museum

Rifka would indeed, achieve much fame as the keeper of the Nili flame and the guardian of Aron’s library which would soon fill the Aronson House Museum under the close watch of fastidious Rifka who died in 1981 and was accorded a State funeral attended by the great and the good of the Land.

Rifka Aronson & her Grave

‘Beit Aaronsohn’, the Nili Museum, whether a place of selective memory, a worthy shrine to us or mere apologist ‘hasbara’ - propaganda - to fit the grand narrative of later years with a history that stubbornly romanticised the facts, white-washed the rivalry of right and left and made little mention of the bitter hatred between the two sides - who knows. But the impression made on the author of this history certainly demanded that the story, much told, be retold.