Aaron Aaronsohn (1876–1919) was a Romanian-born Ottoman agronomist, botanist, and political activist famous in agronomist circles as the discoverer of emmer (triticum dicoccoides), “the mother of wheat,” but perhaps better known to Jewish history as the founder and leader of the Jewish NILI espionage network during World War I.
Born in Romania, Aaron was brought by his parents to Eretz Yisrael (1882), then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, where they were among the founders of Zichron Yaakov, where Aaron’s five siblings were born. He was not Jewishly observant and there is no evidence of his attending synagogue, observing Shabbat, or participating in Jewish holiday rituals, but his Zionism was secular and pragmatic and his religious philosophy, rooted in a deep connection to Jewish history and Eretz Yisrael, centered around a belief that the revitalization of Jewish life could only be effected through a return to the land. Although Aaron spoke Hebrew and Yiddish at home, he became conversant in English, Arabic, Turkish, French, and German, which would later prove useful in his spying activities on behalf of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael.
At age 13, the young man was brought to the attention of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who sponsored his attendance in a French agricultural four years later. Aaronsohn returned to Eretz Yisrael to work in Metulla, then a new colony in northernmost Israel, but he left his agricultural work there to establish an enterprise for importing different varieties of seeds. He founded two companies, the first a business for importing and marketing agricultural machines, including reapers, harrows and combine harvesters, and the second a company that sold gasoline-operated pumps, a centrifuge for separating cream and making butter, and fertilizers. He also was perhaps the first to botanically map Eretz Yisrael and its surroundings, and he became a recognized leading expert on the subject.
In 1902, Aaronsohn went to Germany to continue his agricultural and research studies and, while attending the Universities of Berlin, Munich, and Bonn, he learned that leading scientists there were focused on identifying the progenitor of wheat and how it had been cultivated. When he returned to Eretz Yisrael, he was determined to locate this primitive cereal and, four years later, while preparing a detailed agricultural map of the Upper Galilee, he went as far as Mt. Hermon and discovered triticum dicoccoides, a monumental find for agronomists and historians of human civilization. He found that this emmer wheat could grow well both as low as 500 feet below the Mediterranean Sea near a tributary of the Jordan and as high as 6,000 feet above sea level on Mt. Hermon, and geneticists have subsequently proven that wild emmer is, indeed, the ancestor of most domesticated wheat strands that is still cultivated on a large scale today.
This discovery made Aaronsohn world-famous, and in 1909, he was invited by the Department of Agriculture to visit the Unites States. While there, he published a paper in which he noted the topographic, climactic, and agricultural similarities between Eretz Yisrael and California, and he recommended that some cereal crops from Eretz Yisrael be introduced to California and adjacent southwest American states. As a result, he was offered the agriculture chair at the University of California, Berkeley but, eager to return to Eretz Yisrael, he declined.
A plan to establish an agricultural institute in Eretz Yisrael had been discussed at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel (1903), but no concrete action was taken. While in the United States, Aaronsohn made some important contacts in the American Jewish community, including with some leading philanthropists, who agreed to finance Aaronsohn’s efforts to establish such an institute. In February 1910, he stablished the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit at the foot of Mt. Carmel, which was chartered under the laws of the state of New York, the major purpose of which was to experiment with wild wheat and to develop commercial wheat processing. At the station, he did far more than that: he also built up a large collection of geological and botanical specimens; conducted innovative research in drought resistant farming; tested crops; and established a notable library of some 27,000 volumes, all of which earned him even greater fame.
Aaronsohn purposely selected Atlit as an area which was, as he put it, “renowned all over the country for its sterility.” His aim was to demonstrate that if such land could be made arable only through effecting improvements in the soil without the use of chemical fertilizer, then all Eretz Yisrael could be turned into arable farmland.
Aaronsohn’s advocacy of the employment of Arabs on Jewish farms in general, and at his Experiment Station in particular, triggered great friction with Zionist circles in the Yishuv, particularly with Jewish laborers and teachers, who saw no future for the Yishuv if it was to be dependent on non-Jewish labor. (He would later change his mind when he became more familiar with the Arab disdain for human rights and justice and came to understand that it was impossible to work with Arabs to promote Jewish interests, and he advocated a plan to convince Arabs in Eretz Yisrael to emigrate to Iran.)
In the face of great personal danger, Aaronsohn protested vehemently to Jamal Pasha, the commander of the Turkish Army in Syria, against Pasha’s “scorched earth” policy in the area. After a plague of locusts infested the area, Pasha appointed him chief inspector in combatting the plague (1915) and he authorized him and his team to travel around Southern Syria, including what is now Israel. Aaronsohn made detailed maps of the areas they surveyed – but he also collected strategic information about Ottoman camps and troop deployments that would later play perhaps the leading role in Allenby’s successful defeat of the Ottoman Empire and liberation of Jerusalem.
Aaronsohn’s encounters with Ottoman officials during this time – including dealing with corrupt Turkish officials, witnessing first-hand the Turkish persecution of Jewish settlers, and learning of the Armenian massacre of Turkey – all contributed to his growing awareness that Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael could be advanced only through liberation from the Ottoman yoke and bringing Eretz Yisrael under British rule. In this regard, he was very much at odds with the general view of the Yishuv that the future of Eretz Yisrael was tied up with the Turks; in fact, the vast majority of the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael was determined not to confront the powers that be, let alone to play any role in bringing down the Ottoman Empire.
Two of the Yishuv’s greatest leaders, Ben Gurion and Ben Zvi, had explicitly written to Jamal Pasha to express their strong ties to the Ottoman Empire. Chaim Weizmann bore particular hostility against Aaronsohn, and when he repeatedly urged him to “come within the fold,” Aaronsohn became so upset that he threatened to disband NILI (see discussion below), knowing that the British would take his side – which, because he had become so valuable to them, they did. Moreover, Aaronsohn did not endear himself to Jewish leadership in Eretz Yisrael when he pulled no punches in making clear that he would not be beholden or subordinate to the leadership of the international Zionist movement led by Weizmann, and he utterly rejected all efforts to bring NILI under the umbrella of the Zionist leadership.
The Yishuv and its leaders, well-aware of the magnitude of the 1915 Ottoman genocide in which it killed over a million Armenians, had every reason to expect that the Jews of Eretz Yisrael would be treated no differently. They accordingly viewed Aaronsohn’s association with the British against the Ottomans as an existential threat and he was stigmatized by many as a great danger to the Yishuv, with many mocking him as “the Spy.” Moreover, Aaron, a staunch and vocal enemy of socialism, earned great enmity from the dominant socialist and worker’s parties in Eretz Yisrael. Aaronsohn and NILI were virtually boycotted by the majority of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael, and, even today, Aaronsohn, who played such a crucial role in the birth of Israel, has largely been treated as no more than a footnote to history and, sadly, remains largely unknown.
Centered in Zichron Yaakov – one of the first modern settlements in Eretz Yisrael, having been established in the 1880’s, where Aaronsohn and his family had settled – NILI, an acronym of the phrase from 1 Samuel 15:29, Netzach Yisrael lo yeshaker (“the Eternal One of Israel will not lie”), was a secret Jewish espionage network founded and led by Aaronsohn which assisted the British in its battle against the Turks and Ottoman Empire during World War I.
With the outbreak of the Great War, the Turks commenced oppressive measures against the Jews of the Yishuv, not the least of which was deportation and, as discussed, the fear caused by the Ottoman murder of masses of Armenians. NILI and Aaronsohn, believing that the Ottoman oppression of the Jews could only be terminated through a British invasion of Eretz Yisrael from Egypt – and, as a bonus, advance Zionist plans to establish a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael – worked to assist the British in launching such an offensive.
Aaronsohn’s agricultural research provided the cover for him and his co-conspirators to move freely about the country under the guise of organizing campaigns against locust infestation. The British initially rejected NILI’s offers to provide intelligence and other help until he brought information to the British in November 1916 about a second planned Turkish initiative to seize the Suez Canal. Aaronsohn successfully crossed Turkish lines and the Sinai to reach Cairo in 1916 and reached the London offices of the British Intelligence Service with this important intelligence and he presented a detailed plan to the British General Staff in the War Office for an intelligence network between the British and NILI. The British embraced the Jewish spy ring and approved a plan for permanent intelligence contact between NILI and the British Egyptian command.
Moreover, Aaronsohn convinced many important British leaders to support the Zionist cause, including Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Pico fame, the 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France that effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence), who would soon prove instrumental in convincing the British to adopt the Balfour Declaration. He is also credited with Justice Louis Brandeis’s transition from a secular assimilated Jew to a passionate Zionist.
Aaronsohn moved to Cairo to assist the British command in planning for the invasion of Eretz Yisrael, and, for most of 1917, he remained there as a liaison while his sister Sara, brother Alexander, close friend Avshalom Feinberg, Joseph Lishansky, and other colleagues in Zichron Yaakov formed the core of the spy organization, with more than twenty others also participating in the group. From February to September 1917, the steam yacht Managem regularly sailed to the coast of Eretz Yisrael near Atlit; Lishansky would swim ashore to collect NILI information and to pass money sent by American Jews to the starving Yishuv. The NILI spies would communicate by signal lights with the British frigate, but they were forced to switch to homing pigeons after German submarines made the trips too risky. It was in this manner that NILI was able to provide General Edmund Allenby, the new regional British commander, with valuable information about Beersheba and the Negev in support of a planned surprise British attack inland, including details on Turkish fortifications, troop movements, railroads, desert routes, weather patterns, and water-source locations.
In September 1917, Ahmad Bek Kat-huda Cehajic, the Bosnian mudir of Qisarva, intercepted one of the carrier pigeons, and, a week later, when the Ottomans were able to decode the message, the NILI operation was exposed – whereupon the leadership of the Yishuv snapped into action by disassociating itself from NILI. The Ottomans commenced a massive effort to find the spies and, in a relatively short time, many NILI members, including its leaders, were discovered, captured, and tortured.
Feinberg, the secretary of Aaron’s Atlit Station and a leading active member of NILI, had been murdered by Bedouins while trying to cross Sinai to Egypt in an attempt to contact the British, but NILI members Lishansky (who had been recruited by Feinberg and passed information to Sara Aaronsohn in Atlit) and Na’aman Belkind, were sentenced to death by the Ottomans and hanged in the public square. In October 1917, Turkish soldiers also surrounded Zichron Yaakov and arrested several Jews, including Aaronsohn’s sister, Sara, who surrendered to spare her aging father from torture by the Turks. After four days of torture, she committed suicide after NILI operatives succeeded in smuggling a revolver into her cell. Aaronsohn learned about these tragic events while in the United States, where he had been sent by Weizmann on a political campaign.
General Allenby’s road to fame essentially began with two failed attempts by the Ottoman Empire during World War I to dislodge the British from the Suez Canal. A furious and determined British military went on the offensive and, after crossing the Sinai desert, stood at the southern border of Eretz Yisrael facing Turkish forces holding the line from Gaza to Be’er Sheva. Despite the British use of advanced weaponry, including the first use of poison gas in the history of Eretz Yisrael, the Turks turned them back. In June 1917, Allenby was sent to Cairo as commander of British forces in Egypt and Eretz Yisrael and with orders from new British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to “capture Jerusalem by Christmas.”
Allenby was severely limited in his efforts against the Turks because many of his troops were sent as reinforcements to the western front in response to the great German offensive in France. However, after two failed battles, he received critical assistance from NILI, which had assumed monumental risks to successfully transmit indispensable intelligence to British military authorities. When Aaronsohn was finally granted an audience with Allenby in Cairo, he presented his plan: through a clever ruse, the general would deceive the Turks into thinking that British forces would attempt yet another frontal attack on Gaza but, instead, they would launch an all-out assault on Beersheba. A reticent Allenby estimated that some 500,000 troops would be required to take Jerusalem, but Aaronsohn’s knowledge and powers of persuasion convinced the General that, in accordance with his plan, the Jerusalem campaign could be successful with far fewer troops. Indeed, Allenby went on to attack and capture Beersheba, forced the Turks to retreat from Gaza, captured Jaffa, and rolled into the Judean Hills and overcame determined Ottoman resistance, to capture Jerusalem.
On the first day of Chanukah, December 11, 1917, Allenby entered Jerusalem, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule. In a gesture of great respect – and in deliberate contrast to the arrogance of Kaiser Wilhelm II who, during a trip to Eretz Yisrael almost twenty years earlier (1898), had insisted on entering the Old City sitting proudly astride a white horse – he famously dismounted from his steed and modestly entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate on foot. Most authorities agree that the British conquest of Beersheba leading to the liberation of Jerusalem would not have been possible without the massive amount of information provided by the NILI spies and Allenby himself would later credit Aaronsohn as “the mastermind of the Palestine campaign.” Upon later hearing of Aaronsohn’s untimely death, Allenby said:
The death of Aaron Aronsohn deprived me of a valued friend and of a staff officer impossible to replace. He was mainly responsible for the formation of my Field Intelligence organization behind Turkish lines . . . His death is a loss to the British Empire and to Zionism but the work he has done can never die.
After the Jews were expelled from Yaffo and Tel Aviv on Pesach (1917), Aaronsohn had attempted to arouse world opinion to intervene in favor of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael and, through NILI, he sent large sums of money to help the Yishuv, but while the Yishuv leaders readily accepted his money, it disassociated itself from NILI. Nonetheless, after the defeat of the Ottomans, the fall of Jerusalem to the British, and the end of World War I, Aaronsohn remained in Cairo and became active in the campaign to increase British and Zionist relations after the historic release of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917.
In September 1918, Aaronsohn was again sent to the United States to raise funds for long-term loans for Yishuv farmers; to obtain American assistance for a drainage project in Jerusalem; to plan for the social and economic rehabilitation of Eretz Yisrael, and to generally encourage American participation in the Zionist enterprise. He became one of the experts consulted for the purpose of demarcating the northern boundary of Eretz Yisrael.
In February 1919, he attended the Paris Peace Conference and appeared before the Council of Four at Versailles, where he participated in discussions on the future of Eretz Yisrael and its borders. Vehemently rejecting any suggestion of partitioning Eretz Yisrael, he envisioned a boundary that would assure the inclusion of the sources of the Jordan, Litani and Yarmuk rivers, and he pushed for a border as far north as possible, an approach that became the official Zionist baseline presented to the Conference. Ever the agronomist, he asked President Wilson’s special counsellor in Paris to incorporate a particular field into the Jewish state because it contained a unique species of a wild plant that, he maintained, Jews would preserve with great dedication and the Arabs would neglect.
During the conference, Aaronsohn left for London for a brief visit before deciding to hurry back to Paris. On May 15, 1919, he was a passenger on an RAF de Havilland mail plane scheduled to fly in bad weather, but, under undetermined circumstances – there were any number of rumors of foul play, and some authorities blame the British government, but there is no evidence to support this proposition – he was killed when the plane crashed over the English Channel off Boulogne, and his body was never found. Aaron’s research on the flora of Eretz Yisrael and Transjordan, as well as part of his exploratory diaries, were published posthumously.
Years later, when Israel conquered the Sinai during the 1967 Six Day War, an elderly Bedouin led an IDF officer to a spot known locally as Kabir Yehudi (“the Jew’s grave”), where one lone date palm grew. There, the remains of Avshalom Feinberg were exhumed and identified; the tree had evidently sprouted from a date seed that was in his pocket. Even today, there is a longstanding controversy regarding NILI’s “irresponsibility” in not coordinating its operations with the Zionist leadership, thereby endangering the Yishuv. The issue was officially resolved nearly fifty years after Feinberg was shot in the Sinai when, in November 1967 – over the objections of at least some Israelis – his remains were reinterred on Mount Herzl with full military honors and with eulogies delivered by the Speaker of the Knesset the chief chaplain of the IDF.
In 2014, Haifa initiated a project to revive Aaronsohn’s farm and, besides restoring the original buildings, the city established advanced research facilities, including a well-equipped greenhouse and outdoor plantations. Beit Aaronsohn, the Aaronsohn home in Zichron Yaakov where hundreds of photos, original letters, explanations and NILI dioramas are on display, has been preserved as a museum and memorial. Givat Nili is a moshav in West of Zichron Yaakov; there is a Nili settlement in the western Binyamin region; many streets throughout Israel bear NILI’s name; and, in December 2015, the Israeli Postal Service issued a special stamp in commemoration of NILI’s centenary (see exhibit).
The NILI operations have become an iconic symbol of the supremacy of Jewish intelligence in the eternal struggle to assure the security and wellbeing of Israel’s citizens, as we see even today in Israel’s brilliant operations against Hezbollah and Iran. NILI was not only the product of Aaronsohn’s incredible ingenuity and that of his small group of supporters, but its phenomenal success also underscores the ability and dedication of Jewish defenders to overcome seemingly impossible odds and to prevail even against misplaced Jewish opposition. Sadly, notwithstanding his supremely critical contributions to the Jewish people and to the founding of Eretz Yisrael, Aaron Aaronsohn has been largely forgotten.
