Epilogue - A Single Date Palm and Sara’s Resurrection

Absa & Sara at Dor Beach

‘The protagonists of this story, are all long dead. There are no happy endings, only new beginnings.

Field Marshall Sir Edmund Allenby The Third Battle of Gaza October 27, 1917

Nine months after my death and only three weeks after my beloved’s passing - zero hour was set for October 27, 1917. The Third Battle of Gaza began with a heavy artillery bombardment of the city using 68 large-caliber artillery guns firing from British and French ships. In the meantime, and as secretly as possible, many forces advanced towards Be’er Sheva, which the Turks had not yet finished fortifying. Apart from the trenches on the southern and western borders, most of the city was without any effective defense. The British surrounded the southwest part of the city with twenty four thousand soldiers and began shooting and capturing enemy positions.

British Troops in Gaza

Turkish soldiers began to prepare for the arrival of the British. The British planned to take Be’er Sheva by beginning with a mounted assault by the Australian cavalry from the east. After taking some time to rest and water the horses, Field Marshall Sir Edmund Allenby began to advance the infantry and cavalry forces westward from Be’er Sheva. The attack began at 4:30 PM from a distance of about six kilometres from the city. The horsemen slowly increased their speed until they charged the Turkish defenders, who were not properly armed and were in the midst of fleeing the city. Within a short time, Be’er Sheva had fallen, with a minimum of casualties due in no small part to our efforts and sacrifice. Indeed, after the war ended in 1919, British Chief of military intelligence, Major General George MacDough said: “The information that NILI provided saved up to a hundred thousand British casualties in the Turkish campaign.”

Turkish Guns in Gaza

In southern Gaza, the Turks had dug in a series of trenches that reached the Mediterranean Sea, with a number of control posts between them. The British captured part of their fortifications and went up along the coastline into Turkish territory as far as the village of Sheikh Hassan but they were stopped, and the capture of Gaza was delayed. The Turks realised that Gaza could no longer withstand the shelling and stop the advancing British forces, and on November 6, 1917, they evacuated the city.

Gaza in Ruins November 1917

When the British entered Gaza, they found it abandoned and in ruins. 

Jewish First World War Grave Deir El Balah Cemetery Gaza 2023

Most of the British soldiers who were killed in the battles for Gaza were buried in the military cemetery that was established there after that Great War, in the area that is now the Tuffah neighbourhood near Saleh al-Din Road. Among them were Jews with surnames such as Rittenbaum, Morris, Wilfrid and Hyman. The cemetery has three thousand six hundred and ninety one graves, most of them belonging to soldiers who fell in the three attempts to conquer Gaza.

The Destruction of Gaza 2025

The current destruction of Gaza, as the world knows only too well, makes the previous one pale into insignificance. Today, Gaza is dust and peace a dusty illusion...

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A Single Date Palm

My burial place was literally just down the road in the sands of unhappy Rafah on the outskirts of Gaza. Notwithstanding efforts to find my remains, including Aron's heartfelt search and those of his British superiors, my grave was not found. An occasional goat or camel might have wandered by as I lay under the sands of that no man's land. My shallow grave unmarked by anything other than a single date palm standing tall in the empty desert, its branches spreading towards the sky. At least that is how I would like to remember it.

The mystery of my lost grave continued to fascinate the public. In 1960, a police officer Shlomo Ben-Elkanah, attempted to solve the puzzle. He discovered that thirty years earlier, a Haifa railway engineer, Binyamin Raan, had supposedly found my last resting place, on the reconnaissance of a Bedouin called Yussuf Abu Safra, who described a place south of the Rafiah railway station that lay on a ‘path running eastward.’ However the exact location remained illusive and Abu Safra, when he was found, was evasive and was unwilling to name the spot.

Ben-Elkanah at Absa's Grave with Abu Safra as his guide

The mystery remained unsolved for fifty years, until in June 1967, Ben-Elkanah, now Lieutenant Colonel Ben-Elkanah, accompanying Israeli forces advancing through the Sinai, was guided by Abu Safra who  led him to a site marked by that single date palm, which he referred to as the ‘kubr yehudi’ - ‘the Jew’s grave’. Why did it take so long? Why was it such a secret? Perhaps Abu Safra had feared revenge from his tribe for revealing the location and equally Ben-Elkanah might have been fearful of asking the Bedouins for guidance in case they imagined that as Jews we might seek revenge as in the case of the Muslim blood feud. Finally Ben-Elkanah got permission from his senior IDF officer - Colonel Mordechai Gur - and elicited also from a Sheikh, Frayah Farhan el Masdar, permission to visit the site of ‘the Jew’s grave’. Here with Abu Safra as his guide they stood beneath that palm. A rather small specimen and nothing like the statuesque creation of memory or myth.

Digging for Dry Bones

Abu Safra & Local Bedouins Uncover Avshalom's Remains

Ben-Elkanah described the careful, slow work of digging beneath the tree, where some local Bedouins under Abu Safra's painstaking guidance, uncovered what was left of me, a sad skeleton, intertwined with the tree’s roots and laid to rest like a precious infant in a woven basket. He brought those brittle bones wrapped protectively in a sheet,  for identification to the government forensic laboratory where they were declared conclusively to be my own. A declaration authenticated by my darling sister, Tsila’s recollection of a filling I had in a molar after cracking my tooth on a rather hard nut. Nuts and dates, both playing a part in the story of my life and death.

Avshalom's Burial on Mount Herzl, with Rifka second right, 1967

In November 1967, my remains, including that dental filling, were duly reburied in Jerusalem, accorded a State funeral with full honours in the Olei HaGardom section at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. Rifka was there, as you can see and a number of Nili supporters and a few elderly stalwarts. The then Knesset speaker, Kaish Luz, delivered the eulogy and in the name of the government asked for my forgiveness and for that of the other Nili members, who had been so denigrated for so many years.

A year later, on Independence Day, the President of Israel, Zalman Shazar, granted all the surviving Nili members a military medal. In his address to the small crowd who gathered at this occasion, Ben-Elkanah declared his happiness at the rehabilitation of my name.

Absa's Grave on Mount Herzl

The mythology began - that in my pocket, the dates given to me by my beloved, to eat on my journey, had sprouted. The palm tree that grew from the date kernel was planted near my grave from its original spot in the Sinai desert. A lone palm, called by those who loved me, the ‘Palm of Avshalom’.

Remembering Avshalom

Each year, on 20 January, the day of my death, a memorial service is held here by the powers of the Land. Left wing or right wing, it no longer matters, all united in the love of the Land and its freedom, even if they are not united in anything else..

Memorial to Avshalom Placed by his Sisters in the Hadera Park

My beloved sisters Shoshi and Tsila, were instrumental too, in the building of a commemorative memorial in my name, in the Hadera Park, close to my once was home.

In a land of sad memorials I added a few. White marble and pale gold Jerusalem sandstone, scattered across the country, markers of loss and remembrance.

I had written with some prescience to Rifka when I was still a silly boy unsure of where to plant my kisses and when I fancied grand romantic gesture and hyperbolic metaphor were the key to love:

‘We won’t need to die… and when the day comes, the boys will turn into green crowned date palms and next to them their girls will transform into statues of white marble…’

‘Green crowned date palms and statues of white marble’

And while my beloved was not exactly transformed into marble immemorial, her tombstone when it was unveiled, was indeed of pale and pristine Galilean stone. 

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The Graves of Sara & Malka

In that cemetery we have seen before on two sad occasions, we can find Sara’s grave right next to that of her mother’s. Two gravestones, enclosed by a painted metal fence draw the eye. The first, the mother, Malka’s, with an older headstone, the second a more simple stone with a single word: ‘Sara’.

But like everything in this convoluted tail there is a twist. As we have heard, a person who takes their own life cannot be buried in a Jewish graveyard and at first my beloved was denied a traditional burial. She was however considered a  courageous, Jewish war heroine and eventually a compromise was reached. The small fence around her grave symbolically separates her from the rest of the graveyard. Her grave is still often visited and has become one of the landmarks of the town. 

A Cult of Pilgrimage to the Hero of Nili

Following her death, Sara became the centre of a cult of commemoration. Annual pilgrimages to her grave in Zikhron’s cemetery started in 1935. The cult, idealising her as the ‘hero of Nili’ - though I, of course, prefer the term 'heroine' - elevated my loved one to a symbol of activist nationalism representing her as a soldier-saint. 

Sara's Resurrection

She was routinely described as a Jewish Joan of Arc - though a Jewish martyr would be a more accurate description.  Her legend proved exceptionally resilient. After the Six Day War of 1967 she and Nili were incorporated in the state-sponsored cult of heroism, officially recognised by Labour and perpetuated in children’s stories and folk history to the present day.

The Cult of Sara

I would like to think that Sara’s grave became a place of pilgrimage for all those dedicated to peace. 

A golden sun shines on that pale stone, piled with pebbles. A small settlement clings to the brow of the hill. Below stretches the plain, down to the distant sea. Behind are vineyards with the stone watch tower and a field of pale green wheat, stretching as far as the eye can see.

Resolution of sorts, brief redemption, even resurrection and catharsis but never a full arc of reconciliation. We who had never heard of ‘conflict resolution’, did not know how to ask for forgiveness - and would never forget or forgive those who had harmed our cause.

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Together Forever

Of my Sara, a heroine defined by her courage, defying convention and moral outrage, always her own woman. She follows her heart unabashedly - at least after her failed marriage - goes against convention, subverts the usual gender archetypes of the time - from housekeeper and obedient daughter she becomes a warrior and truly wise woman. In the end, like only the brave can do, she takes her own life rather than live with dishonour and the horror of rape and violation. Like that opera heroine, Tosca who jumps to her death from a prison battlement, Sara maintains control over her own life and death in the only way she knows. She seizes her destiny and follows its course to the inevitable end. Her martyrdom comes at the cost of everyone and everything she holds dear, and yet she is calm and unwavering in her decision to do what she believes is right. An extraordinary woman, cast into the shadows by her own countrymen, left out of the official narrative of British victory in that first Great War. How ironic that collective memory now remembers Sara as a hero/heroine! A Jewish warrior saint! What a radical transformation from that earlier suspicion, antagonism and attempt to erase her memory from the national consciousness. Her unwavering bravery and conviction - all while putting herself in the path of danger for the sake of love and justice, placing her ideals above her own safety, makes her the shining star of the nation’s narrative.

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With my remains were a few crumbling letters, which I had taken with me, including my last undelivered one to Sara, which ends with a verse from my long ago poem. That youthful ‘Ballad of a Thousand Kisses’ - ‘Elef Nishikot’, which was preserved for future generations by many song writers and musicians.

A Thousand  Kisses - Absa's Poem

The words of lovers everywhere:  

‘A thousand kisses for you my love, Thus end all the letters that lovers send to each other, a thousand kisses for you my love, This is how all my letters begin and with my words I embrace you my love...’

Together forever in death as in life.’

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