CHAPTER 32 - Espionage, Epitaphs & Eulogies

One thing is certain, espionage is not much boasted of, during the event, but afterwards, everyone remembers being a member of Nili, even those who had been its most vehement critics. Another thing is certain - Israelis of every political persuasion are all united in their fierce, resilient and stubborn, love of the Land.

‘If we have to eat stones, we will eat them, but we will never leave this place’

The picture of my dear one's mother, Malka, hanging on the museum wall, her face adamantine and stony, wrapped in her black shawl, is accompanied by a plaque that reads: ‘If we have to eat stones, we will eat them, but we will never leave this place’ or in a more abrupt translation: ‘Though we must gnaw stones, we shall not leave.’

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Leo - Lyova Schneersohn - in British Army Uniform

Of Leo - Lyova Schneersohn - Levi Isaac Schneersohn, descendant of the famous Alter Rebbe with whom he shared his name and born to a well-off family in Russia, who would, like that stalwart Aronson matriarch, never leave his new national home, we can report that he was decorated by Britain for his services in the war. When awarded the OBE, his citation recorded that he had penetrated the Turkish lines and that ‘His services were of the greatest use to Intelligence, and at all times and in various ways he exhibited conspicuous patriotism and devotion to the cause which he had at heart’.

Leo in Sara's Garden in Zikhron

Leo, my dearest friend and sometime rival for Sara's affections, only found out about our loved one's death when he was being kitted out for his new role in the British Army. He was in a recruitment centre in the desert - sick with malaria - when a medical officer, prescribing medication for him, described what had happened in Zikhron a month earlier.

That night, still tossing and turning from fever he wept for our brave Sara.

Leo & Sara in Happier Days

‘I was haunted by visions and nightmares: Sara! Here she is, laughing, here she is - weeping, here she comes towards me, her pale, dainty hands stretched out in greeting. Here she is - among the rocks at Atlit, in a carriage in Cairo, at a concert, she is laughing again, and then again sad. Ah, Sara, Sara!’ So he wrote in his trusty diary.

Leo in Various Guises

By the end of 1918, Leo had developed a scheme for Zionist intelligence to operate in Palestine and Syria for both British and Zionist needs. He remained in the British army until 1920. During the Mandate and its sorry treatment of Jews, he directed his frustration against the military government, particularly in the personage of Foreign Office official, Sir Ronald Storrs, who he accused of using Arab agents to foment division. In this he was not wrong. Attributing the rise of Palestinian nationalism to British encouragement, he reported that Storrs and other British officers had strong misgivings about Zionist policy and did not like Jews, full stop. My co-spy attested also, to the divisive attitude of our own people toward the surviving members of our group who were harangued and criticised as ‘immature youngsters who had endangered the entire Yishuv’. The letter in question, was sent to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, and relates the story of the ring and lists the names of all its members.

Many years later, just after that Six Day War, ‘From the Diary of a NILI Member’, based on Leo’s diaries, was published.

Leo's Diary: ‘I am lying on the sofa in Avshalom’s room’

Some of the most memorable passages in the diary include the shock of the discovery of my disappearance and death:

‘I am lying on the sofa in Avshalom’s room. My friend, my friend!’ Leo writes when he hides from the Turks in the house of my youth, fearing that I have met with catastrophe.

When Leo eventually managed to get back on board the Monegam he was met by Aron who said:

‘Come up, come up: you are standing on English ground, and are a free man!’

When Leo begged from Aron to know what had happened to me, he did not receive an answer until the following day.

Leo's Diary: The Shock of the Discovery

‘Avshalom was killed in the desert” was all Aron told me!’ Leo writes on an almost empty page. ‘I was unable to respond - not with tears, nor screams, I sat like a rock, indifferent to the passage of time.’

The shock of the discovery would remain with him to the end of his days.

Brothers Mendel & Leo

In due course, he would marry a lady called Zina Shteinman and father two daughters. His brother, Mendel, also active in Nili, wife of Edna, had at least four children.

Leo's Portraits Later in Life & his Grave

Dear Leo died in 1975, his personal archive and his memories of his espionage days were donated to the National Library a year later, where they are safely kept in a number of number of notebooks of yellowing pages. A mere footnote to history, as I am...

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Alexander’s epilogue is a troubling one.

Alex in Cairo, and a Number of Unposted Letters

In November 1917, Aron, having heard about the end of Nili, wrote from London, upbraiding his brother for the lack of information from Cairo. ‘I don’t need to tell you that no explanation can excuse this, no amount of torpor.’

A description by brother Sam who visited Alex’s office in Cairo, talks of a number of unposted letters ‘lying around’ in his quarters. That Alex had been called to duty for the British Army, to help sort out post-war Palestine, could not in Aron’s opinion, be seen as an excuse for that ‘torpor’ or tardiness.

‘With the Turks in Palestine’

If Alex is to be remembered for one particular literary endeavour, than it is for his book ‘With the Turks in Palestine’, first published as we know, in 1916. He dedicates the book in an elaborate preface to his sister Rifka: ‘who with chaste devotion and intrepid love has served, and still serves as a priestess in Memory’s temple’ and he signs the book with obsequious modesty ‘A Simple Soldier’. The book, as we have read, tells the world of the struggle in Palestine during the early years of the Zionist movement through the prism of Alexander’s life, from his early trip to America to being forced into military service for Turkey. In the events that follow, he tells of his struggles to save his home and his family from growing oppression of the Turk, seeing his own role as pivotal, central to events and the reawakening of the historical conversation that is due only to him.

The Many Editions of ‘With the Turks in Palestine’

Written in English, the text was serialised in the July and August 1916 issues of the Atlantic Monthly under the title ‘Our Sword Is Red, O Sultan’. It was published in the United States soon afterwards - causing some problems for Aron, who was in that country at the time - and in Great Britain at the request of the British government, which hoped to use the book for war-time propaganda purposes. There were many editions, and it was translated into at least six languages, including Turkish and German, and distributed widely throughout Europe. There were those in the community who said Alex was a liar, a cheat and a philanderer, and that after the war with the Turks, he had paid many of the Zikhronites for silence on various matters.

Alexander Brave Soldier & Fighter

Be that as it may, Alex was determined to be remembered as a brave soldier and fighter, a key instigator, in the future Jewish State.

But rumours never quite proved, continued to soil his reputation. The ‘summer house’ where so many of his apparent trysts had taken place, now lay empty and decaying. It was actually the old stone tower from which young Izi had kept watch for the ship that never came. The building itself, a residue of those who had once lived here, an Arab house, now in partial ruin where a family had once lived. A family which might still hold the keys to a long vanished front door.

Many in the town condemned him for sins both committed and imagined - the division between Nili and HaShomer now firmly divided on political lines - left and right and in HaShomer’s implacable belief Nili had been the cause of the arrest of many of their members.

Shunned by the Community

Despite being shunned by the community, Alexander rode around town on a glossy stallion, dressed in smart British Army uniform. In 1918 he wrote to Aaron that: ‘For months we were the loneliest people in the land. When we passed people in the street stopped talking. They called us spies, scoundrels, traitors. They created a veritable boycott against us. Moreover, not a single Nili member was spared by the community. They and their parents, and their children...’

When brother Sam returned from America to hear Alexander making a speech eulogising the Nili martyrs, Sam called his brother a ‘decadent lecher’ and demanded he step down from the podium. Sam was kicked out of that little gathering but the rumours persisted. Alex continued to meet young girls, not out of their teens, at what he called his ‘pavilion’. In later years those pretty girls became old women, but they never forgot Alex and that pavilion in the vineyards. Alex himself may have confirmed the gossip, when he wrote in his ‘The Garden of Thought’, a slim booklet, its cover sporting his photo in British army uniform, his aquiline features and curling lips, like the head of a very self-satisfied, Greek god. But what he writes is more disturbing; the degenerate thoughts of a middle aged satyr, a bacchanalian pervert justifying his addiction: ‘The secret of life is to let sensual perception command and the mind find a way.’

And in another curious justification of his perverse predilection couched in pseudo spiritual terms: ‘There are men, far and few between, from whom lust is not a staircase descending to a wine cellar where they besot themselves, but a ladder ascending to God.’ He calls himself ‘The Knight of Love’ and in his puffed up masculine egotism writes something that in a later age would certainly have seen him charged as a paedophile: ‘From the earliest age, the child must be prepared to welcome with a tremor of joy the sexual impulse when it awakens, to receive it as a great and wondrous gift of divine grace.’ And in a final shocking sentence: ‘Children must be educated for the priesthood of sex.’

He describes decadent parties which supposedly took place in our staid, little town - though I never went to any: ‘The smell of beer, sausages, sour pickles, sweat and dust. The groaning of an old gramophone. And couples, many couples, dancing in the narrow aisles between tables. He describes too, the coupling of those many couple with partners who were not their own - and the shame of the day after. He does not mention his ravaging of dear Toba.

Alexander was a self-confessed lover of nature - and the naked human body - a vegetarian and some would say a proto fascist - an obsessive hygiene promoter, a worshiper of motherhood, devoted to Sara’s memory and protective to the end to little Rifka, who never ceased to be ‘little Rifka’.

‘Sara, Flame of Nili’

His last book ‘Sara, Flame of Nili’ is aimed at an audience of juveniles, the descendants of his own 'girlies' - and women loved the book, seeing in Sara’s death, a reflection of the immortality, denied them.

When the Turks retreat in hasty and undignified disarray, and the British eventually arrive in Zikhron, Captain Alexander Aronson, rode into town, in his British Army uniform and cap, with a reconnaissance unit, fully determined to show those on the left who had denigrated and sullied Sara’s memory, that the righteous right would win. In this capacity he founded an organisation called ‘The Sons of Benjamin’, convinced of his mission in life; to carry on - in Sara’s name - he lauds her as the ‘saintly Sara’ whose death is ‘one with the secret message of eternity.’

What Sara would have thought of this, is entirely debateable.

Alex & his Benefactor Mary Fels

All this should prepare us for, when a little less like a Greek god, he is drawn into the aura of one, Mary Fels, a very wealthy, American widow, twenty five years older than him who shares his goals and his politics. Mary was born in Bavaria, the Jewish daughter of Elias and Fannie Fels, immigrating to the United States with her parents in 1869, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at Bedford College in London. It was while she was in Philadelphia that she met Joseph Fels, a distant cousin, a very wealthy manufacturer of soap - Fels-Naphta Soap - if you must know - and as an ardent Zionist and supporter of a Jewish state, she sought to buy substantial tracts of land for Jewish farmers in Palestine. She arrived in Zikhron and found Alexander a willing acolyte and supporter of all things right-wing and colonial. On the day of her arrival in the holy land she was greeted by the dashing Alexander and found her future paramour and slave, dressed as an Oriental Sheikh, carrying a large Bedouin sword and leading a procession of horsemen - the so called ‘Sons of Benjamin’ - dressed to the hilt in make-believe uniforms and waving similar swords.

His Nili membership, politics and bizarre antics were seen as a betrayal by the labour-oriented left, who never forgave him and sought every pretext to disgrace him.

Alexander & the ‘Sons of Benjamin’

Alexander was hounded from office and accused of stealing some of Mrs. Fels parcel of land meant for the farmers - in what is known as the Zeita Lands Case. A long, convoluted tale of treachery and fraud followed, where Alexander persuaded the gullible Mrs. Fels to part with some of her fortune to buy Arab land in the name of his sister Rivka and that of Toba Rutman, whose husband Nissim was instrumental to the fraud, acting for Alexander in the transactions. The scandal that followed ended Alex’s political career and ‘The Sons of Benjamin’ died a quick death. Alexander became persona non grata in Palestine. A few weeks later he sailed in a huff for New York with Mrs. Fels, having completely fallen under her spell. And she under his.

Mary Fels in her Apartment in New York

The Fels apartment in New York was filled with gilt-framed photographs of Mary's husband Joseph and her hero: Alexander in British uniform, Alexander in the guise of a Sheikh of Araby, as a muscled sportsman, a Hollywood film director and a theatre impresario. Anything, ‘her adorable Zikhronite’ as she called him, wanted, he got. She saw in his messianic ambitions, a way to compliment her own. A red travertine bathroom in the New York apartment, was the shrine dedicated to her Adonis and it is rumoured that like an anxious mother with a beloved child, she watched him bathe. ‘He is my Jesus,’ she wrote: ‘my omnipotent son, a Galilean by birth too.’

As if this was not enough nonsense, she confirmed: ‘I’ve decided to spend my whole life and my entire fortune on the world movement, he will soon found.’

And so it was that the besotted heiress became Alexander’s official patron and he, became her grateful gigolo, certain that with Mary’s millions he could achieve his ambitions and ride back into Zikhron on a white horse as messianic redeemer and saviour.

Despite this lofty intention, Mrs. Fels and her paramour, only returned once more to the Holy Land in September 1925, and it is said that even though Alexander may have accepted Mary’s bed and her munificence, he never stopped visiting high-society ladies, who were only too willing to share their beds too.

Alexander in his Older Years

He remained in Mary’s generous possession, indulging in a little debauchery along the way, until his firm mistress decided to drag him off to a villa in France where he died of a heart attack in 1948.

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A Tragic Epilogue

Aron’s epilogue is an altogether more tragic one.

Notwithstanding his influence within the British political elite, which was a contributing factor in bringing about the Balfour Declaration. Indeed he was anxiously waiting with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in an ante-room in Whitehall to hear the outcome of the cabinet discussion proposing a Jewish State, which was finally issued on 2 November 1917.

But everything else lay in ruins. The Station at Atlit, abandoned and ransacked.

He was in America on a political campaign, under the instruction of Weizmann, on a mission for the Zionist Federation when he heard for the first time in January 1918, of Sara’s torture and death, along with the cruel fate of Nili.

‘The sacrifice has been paid,’ Aron writes in his Diary

‘The sacrifice has been paid,’ he wrote, with a heavy heart, in his diary. He carried grief and guilt over Sara’s death till the end of his days. Why had he not been able to save her when there was still time? Why indeed?

When he requested the Zionist Organisation to be involved in their work in Palestine he was turned down in no uncertain terms: ‘How can we have on the Zionist Executive a man known to be a British secret agent?’ they said.

But his friend Dr. Weizmann, who was busy negotiating with the British Government on that long road to a State, greatly valued Aron. And so it was that in April of that year, Aron found himself returning at last to Palestine from Cairo, on the railway which the British Army had built through the Sinai, with help from his own advice.

‘We are now crossing without danger, that same evil desert that has taken from us the vibrant life of our Avshalom’ he wrote to Rifka. ‘Our opponents can say what they want, but Absa had his share in the success of the English, and the approaching realisation of our aspirations.’

To this, I must add, thank you dear Aron...

Aron had already heard in Egypt about the rest of the family. Of his brothers - Zvi’s imprisonment and his return as an invalid and of Sam’s outburst which cast a shadow on Nili's morality. He was told too that his father was dead.

In that letter to Rifka he wrote of his greatest disappointment: ‘that with regard to the Station, nothing remains of the work of the last twenty years... It will be necessary to start everything afresh.’

On his return the leaders of the Yishuv wanted to stop his entry. And when he did appear they refused point blank to sit at the same table with him. This robust, brilliant man was made to crawl in the dust.

'My books have been used to wrap butter in Damascus'

Aron wrote then with sorrow but no self-pity: ‘My life’s work has been destroyed. My collections have been scattered to the four winds, the library has been demolished. My books have been used to wrap butter in Damascus.’

He would never know that after his death, brother Sam would help locate what was left of his lost library.

He continues: ‘And after all that has been done to us - not a single word of sympathy from the self-appointed leaders of the community... who claim they cannot forgive me for the danger in which they might have found themselves because of me. A real boycott. A man who gave the British the aid I gave them is lost from a moral point of view, and there’s no room for him in decent society.’

Shunned and ignored he turned to the Mandate who consulted him about the demarcation of the northern boundary of Palestine. He had a clear and strategic vision of a border that would include the sources of the Jordan, Litani and Yarmuk rivers, to ensure adequate irrigation. Hydro-geology and the greening of the land, two of his obsessions and his enduring legacy. On a journey to Palestine in April of that year, Chaim Weizmann and Aron discussed the need to establish a Jewish secret service and Weizmann called on Aron to present his work at the Versailles Peace Conference in preparation for drawing the borders of a Jewish State. And so it was that Aron returned to London to present those reports and serve with the Zionist delegation to Paris in early 1919.

A Fateful Aeroplane Crash on 15th May 1919

He was on his way to the Peace Conference as an advisor, with a despatch case containing maps of his proposed border, when he was lost in a fateful aeroplane crash on 15th May.

A full five days later, the British papers wrote, in a small column, way below the headlines: ‘Captain Elgie Blyth Barwise Jefferson and his civilian passenger Aaron Aaronsohn, an ardent Zionist, were lost when their de Havilland crashed into the English Channel off Boulogne in foggy weather.’

Aron's stout body was never recovered. He was forty four years old. Like Moses, he would never get to see the Promised Land of a Jewish State.

Conspiracy theories of sabotage sprouted like wild wheat, but were never confirmed - that anti Zionists whether British or Arab had a hand in his too premature demise. The New York Times of May 1919 reported: ‘AARON AARONSOHN KILLED; Agricultural Expert Drops with Airplane in London-Paris Flight’. The Detroit Jewish Chronicle followed with: ‘The Passing of a Great Scientist The scientific world today mourns the passing of one of its great leaders. In the death of Aaron Aaronsohn, who was recently killed in an aeroplane accident while flying from London to Paris, the world has lost a man whom perhaps none other has done more for the cause of Zionism.’ His obituary in the American Botanical Gazette, declared it as an untimely tragedy. Another article of the time utilised more emotive language: ‘As wheat cut down too soon, He is cut down; But we, his people reap forevermore the harvest of his planting...’

Aron Obituary from the Botanical Gazette

The details of that last flight make for interesting reading. Rifka had come to London to see Aron, intending to go on to Palestine to reunite with the dear father. Aron asked her to wait for him and that they could go together after he had completed his address to the Peace conference. Rifka, however, could not wait - after so many months away in America - and she returned home to her father.

Book by Patricia Goldstone showing Map Submitted to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919

Aron’s map was submitted to the Peace Conference. Aron having been inexplicably denied a seat at this seminal event.

At that august gathering, Walter Gribbon - now a Colonel - declared: ‘The Jews must remember that no man has done more than Aron to make the conquest of Palestine by the British possible.’ The very able author, Patricia Goldstone, notes too of our hero that he was: ‘The man who might have created peace in the Modern Middle East.’

On that last morning, on his way to the airfield, Aron dropped in at the War Office for a pre conference chat with Colonel Gribbon. It is not known what was discussed. The chat was apparently cordial.

My intrepid sister, Tsila, who had come to London on her way back home, as well as many of Aron’s London friends, had begged him not to go on the flight, fearing the dangers of what were called ‘antagonistic actors’. Aron, as we know, poo-pooed the risks. Tsila went with him to the airfield to see him off. As Tsila later said, the RAF plane flew off, laden too with bags of diplomatic mail - but came back minutes later. The propeller had ‘a problem’ and while mechanics ‘fixed’ it, she spoke again to Aron, begging him not to go. Stubborn Aron ignored her advice.

The plane taxied on the runway and took off again. A fog - of war and weather - billowed over the French side of the Channel. When the RAF plane disappeared, according to two French fishermen, all that was found floating on those tossing waves, were the sodden bags of mail. An official War Office inquiry found nothing amiss. That report, rather mysteriously disappeared from the official archives and the maker of that report, Lieutenant Colonel Primrose, resigned two months after that fatal crash .

For a number of years those in the know in Palestine, blamed Britain for the ‘accident’. It was pointed out that the over zealous Aron’s views on the dividing up of Palestine were at odds with British ones - there was some prevaricating preceding that famous Balfour Declaration - and that they were fearful that Aron would hold them to their word and cause a stink if it was not honoured.

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Aron & the Desert Aster Named for him

Aron is remembered by the many plants known for him, including the yellow, desert aster which grows on the arid, salt-washed soils of the Judean and Samarian deserts - the rather nondescript, 'Aaronsohnia factorovskyi', native to the hills of Palestine. A nomenclature he shares with botanist, Eliezer Faktorovsky, who also had a claim to the plant's discovery, another giant of Hebrew botany, who experienced illness and scarcity, and passed away too, in the prime of his life.

The Last Picture of Aron Onboard a Cross Channel Ferry

The saga of the Aronsons and their colleagues became the subject of lengthy and acrimonious debate within the Zionist movement, providing a rallying call for the Right during the inter-war years. The Left reacted very negatively to this and refused for many decades to accord Aron the recognition that many considered he deserved.

Books and a series of commemorative postage stamps recall this larger than life man of pre State Israel. In 1941 a book ‘The Secret of La Manche’, purporting to investigate the strange circumstances of Aron's death in the Channel was published, but few were interested enough to read it. And Aron’s memory plunged to the bottom of a dark and foggy sea and was all but forgotten...

Aron's Legacy & ‘The Secret of La Manche’

It was only after the Six Day War that Aron’s vital role in the victorious campaign against the Turks - helping the British operational staff in Cairo and ultimately securing Allenby’s legendary entrance to the city of Jerusalem, was at last recognised. Providing, as might be expected, the pretext for the State to generate a new narrative of victory that would lead to many further successes and notable failures, a great expansion of territory and the headaches that came with that, the reunification of Jerusalem and the revival of national consciousness and pride.

It would also lead inevitably to the many horrors to come. Destruction of dozens of villages and the shameful massacre of their inhabitants, ensuing Arab hatred, ousted and fleeing refugees, pan Arabism, Palestinian terrorism, bombs, more wars, Jewish ultra nationalism and in your own fraught day, the massacres of October 2023 and the hideous spectacle of ruin and destruction in Gaza.

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Haim Abraham & his Second Wife Miriam Franco

Of my rival, Haim Abraham, Sara’s erstwhile husband, a more prosaic epilogue. While Sara was supplying her information to the Allies and risking her life, he would stay in Germany for most of the war, only returning to Istanbul when it was all over. Seven years after my extraordinary darling’s death, he married again to a nice, ordinary lady, Miriam Franco, born in Constantinople but of Italian nationality. Just before the next war they applied for citizenship to Palestine and immigrated in August 1932. They lived a comfortable life in Bat Galim in Haifa, a wealthy neighbourhood with Bauhaus-designed home and lovely gardens. Haim continued to to run his import business between Germany and Turkey, under the name ‘House Abraham’. He remained in contact with what was left of the Aronson family, visiting the widow of Sam/Shmuel, Miri, on many occasions. This information from Ran Aaronsohn, who was Aron’s grand-nephew, and Haim’s descendant, Daniel Abraham. Haim, much lauded for his Zionism and his philanthropy, died in January 1954, having fulfilled his dream of a return to Zion, and seeing no contradiction in his work in Germany at the time of his former wife’s fight against them.

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And what of little Ayla? The colonised native of the land, patronised by her masters, exploited by her mistress, mistreated by the men of her own tribe, erased from history and our story. Does she ever seek revenge or must this wait for many generations to surface in future intifada and decades of hatred and despair?

Ayla, the Beauty with the Heart-Shaped Face

Ayla, the beauty with the heart-shaped face ended up in a refugee camp near Tulkarm. A Bedouin of the Arab-el-Turkeman tribe, a scandal erupted, involving her sister Diba who was milking a cow, when a horse kicked the cow, and the cow kicked Diba, in the head and killed her. It was rumoured in the settlement that lovely Ayla had been killed but it wasn’t Ayla it was Dibi murdered by her own brother Mustafa who believing she was pregnant, hit her on the skull with a spade. There was never any cow, nor was she pregnant - a malignant, enlarged spleen, being the cause of her brother’s ‘honour killing’. Ayla was so upset at her sister’s death that she refused to marry, despite the many suitors that sought her hand. Ayla apparently remained a virgin for the rest of her life although there was talk of a married man with whom she carried on an adulterous love affair and that this was the real reason she never married. She ended up in Nur Shams refugee camp, not the tents which this might denote but a slum of crooked buildings and narrow streets running with sewage and trash. It was here that the Arabs of Tantura and Zammarin landed up after escaping in 1948 to Jordan. Many returned from Jordan to Nur Shams and there Ayla lived out the rest of her life. She died, toothless, senile and fat, a woman whose memories had faded with age and despair, but who still loved her food. She did however still remember her sister Dibi and that unfortunate death and her murderous brother, Mustafa, who was killed racing a horse he had stolen from the settlers; justice of sorts...

The reason that neighbouring Fureidis was left alone, an anomaly, and a complicated one. Fureidis then supplied workers for the fields and orchards of Zikhron and those old settlers didn’t want their supply of labourers to be halted by any displacement or expulsion. In the spring of 1948, when the new State was turning the tables on their enemies, it was decided to ‘encourage’ the Arabs to flee to Jordan but to keep the Fureidis workers - if they laid down their weapons.

The alternative was to take them and their guns by force. The Fureidis elders were summoned and told of the army’s imperative. They answered in the affirmative, but with a proviso. They wanted the army to come with a loudspeaker to announce their plans, so that it would look like the Fureidis inhabitants were not a party to the decision, and when the army did come, those wily elders looked as surprised as it was possible to be. An indaba took place and the elders told the village that they had no choice but to accept. It is rumoured that the inhabitants of that place, when they are not selling their delicious humus and falafels to the Zikhronites, are still debating who should get which house in their more affluent neighbourhood. It is said too, that everyone in the village knew of the planned Hamas attack of cursed October 7th...

Tantura was not so lucky. It was part of an Arab enclave cutting off the road from Tel Aviv to Haifa. Following attacks by local Arab villages on Jewish traffic on that road, the Haganah leadership decided to ‘expel or subdue’ the village. At the beginning of the 1948 war, the wealthier families had fled to Haifa and after the fall of the city, many villagers fled to Tyre by boat. Some one thousand two hundred inhabitants remained in the village, continuing to tend their fields, orchards, and eke out a living as fishermen. The story was that in exchange for their arms they would be permitted to keep their village and its fields. The people of Tantura were ready to surrender in early May but not prepared to relinquish their arms. They said they would rather flee than surrender and be disgraced. The world of Islam would never forgive them if they gave way and so the terrible thing happened.

The village was targeted in the early stages of the War of Independence - or the Nakba - the ‘Catastrophe’ - the nomenclature, depending on which side of the divide one was on. Its houses were looted and its Arab inhabitants expelled and dozens of men massacred by the Palmach underground Alexandroni Brigade.

Women & Children Expelled from Tantura

The last of the villagers, mainly women and children - and very probably Ayla - were expelled to expedient Fureidis and from thence to Tulkarm. The Tantura massacre was first documented in the 1950’s, decades before a recent documentary revealed testimony from several veterans of that War of Independence, affirming that a massacre, of somewhere between ‘several to two hundred’ Palestinian victims, had taken place at that time.

Ya'akov Epstein, local council member of Zikhron Ya’akov, who visited Tantura shortly after the operation, reported seeing bodies, but said nothing of a massacre. Epstein was a friend of Tantura's mukhtar, and had attempted to intercede on behalf of the villagers, shouting at the Jewish soldiers, and crying, saying that he did ‘not expect such a day and such a happening to our neighbours’. There were reports of young men, going berserk in a frenzied killing spree. A diary of the operation, by Alexandroni soldier, Tulik Makovsky, affirms ‘… that our boys know the craft of murder quite well, especially boys whose relatives the Arabs had murdered... or those harmed by Hitler... They took their private revenge, and avenged our comrades who had died at their hands, against the snipers.. ’

Many years later, a local inhabitant, Yahya Al Yahya, published a book on Tantura recording the names of at least fifty two Palestinian dead. The occupation of the village was followed by looting. Some of the items recovered by the Haganah included ‘one carpet, one gramophone ... one basket with cucumbers ... one goat’.

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After the war of 1948, Kibbutz Nahsholim and Moshav Dor were built on land on the outskirts of al-Tantura. The earliest residents were Palmach members who had so recently come from Europe and Kibbutz Nahsholim was established by a group of Polish immigrants just southeast of the ancient tel in June 1948. The Polish Jews had escaped slaughter in the Shoah and were not worried by ghosts. Initially they moved into the abandoned Arab houses in the village but left after building more suitable housing further down the coast, where there were perhaps fewer ghosts. According to local legend, when bulldozers tried to knock down the local shrine of a sainted man, Sheikh al-Majrami, the blades of the bulldozers broke.

Dor Beach - Then & Now

Here where ancient traders, conquerors, and pilgrims had made landfall, the kibbutz grew bananas, avocado and cotton, and raised fish in ponds. Later, a plastics factory manufactured irrigation equipment. A delightful art studio set up by a talented artist, occupied one of the last of the old buildings - a quaint, dilapidated, wooden structure, sent by Germany as reparations after the Shoah. My author recalls many happy summers on that little beach, a Shavuoth festival with a procession of red tractors and little boys and girls dressed in white with crowns of flowers on their curls. An evening picnic with a pink and blue sunset illuminating the jagged, karkur rocks at the end of the bay and a happy band of revellers playing didgeridoos and drums as the sun plunged into the dark waters.

A beach resort of dubious architectural merit arose like giant, plastic skulls, on the green, watered lawns, lawns which according to some, conceal the bones of previous unlucky inhabitants. I would like not to believe that these unhappy victims were buried in mass graves, one of them presently beneath the parking lot of nearby Tel Dor beach.

Today, men on paddle skis and canoes surf the waves where archaeologists discovered hidden treasures, a Phoenician port, Greek figurines of goddesses, Roman architecture and pottery shards, Persian dye works, a Byzantine basilica, a Mamluk fort, Ottoman coins and floor tiles, a ship wreck from Islamic times, carrying Turkish walnuts in Egyptian jars, Napoleon’s canon balls abandoned after his defeat at Akko and in more recent times, the so-called the 'Jesus Boat' dated to the time when the Gentile Messiah walked on water and preached peace.

Lithe, young women in bikinis, swim alongside plumper, religious women of both tribes, Arab and Jew, in modest, full length clothing and head coverings. Little children, slathered in sun cream by anxious parents, enjoy picnics of pita and 'nak nik' - from the Arabic نقانق - ‘naqaniq’ - for sausage - with that ubiquitous humus va tahina, unpacked on picnic blankets by Israeli Arab mothers and Survivor grandmothers who still bear tattoos on their arms.