From 1915 to 1917, a Jewish spy ring operated in what was then Palestine, with the express goal of helping the British defeat the Ottoman Turks. At the time, the Ottoman Empire stretched throughout the Levant, and a small group of pioneering Jews, from a family who had arrived in Palestine during the First Aliya in 1882, realised they had the means to help one Empire defeat another.
The members of what would soon become known as the NILI Spy Ring (an acronym for Netzach Yisrael Loh Yishaker, or “the eternal of Israel shall not lie” from 1 Samuel) were transparent in their motivations: they believed the Jewish community in the nascent yishuv would be safer in British hands than in Ottoman. In fact, Nili’s leader, Sarah Aaronsohn, had a very real reason to fear for her people: In 1915, while travelling East from Constantinople back home to her village Zichron Yaakov, she was an eyewitness to what would later become known as the Armenian Genocide.
To Sarah, seeing Armenian corpses piled high alongside the railway lines as she traversed the Anatolian Plateau foreshadowed what she believed the Ottomans would soon do to the Jews. As the war took shape, the Ottomans grew increasingly suspicious of the Jews of the yishuv, even evicting them from Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Upon arriving home, she and a brave group of Zionist youths set out to defeat the Turks. They would halt the prospect of Jewish suffering.
Their mission was not a popular one. At the time, the war had just begun, and it was wholly unclear who would ultimately emerge the victor. The vulnerable yishuv Jews sought protection by whomever could guarantee it, whether that was the Turks or not. In fact, David Ben Gurion, then a young labour leader, tried to raise a Jewish army to fight alongside the Ottomans in the war. The leaders of the yishuv disagreed with the Nili team’s geopolitical assessment, and feared that Nili’s exploits in support of the British would physically endanger their community in Palestine. Sarah’s fellow villagers pleaded with her to stop.
Nevertheless, Sarah and her team, which included, among others, her siblings Aaron, Rivka and Alexander, friends Avshalom Feinberg, Liova Schneerson, and Josef Lishansky, and a broad network Jewish Palestinian “spies”, had faith in their mission. They believed the British were the key to their freedom, safety, and redemption, and they risked their lives in pursuit of this goal.
Members of the team made perilous crossings through the Negev and Sinai Deserts to reach the British in Egypt. If they were unable to cross by land, they crossed by sea, sometimes travelling through rough Mediterranean conditions to reach Egypt, Europe and London, to report to the British on Ottoman troop and armament movements.
Thus was the spirit of the early olim. They were pioneers of the land, those who travelled to Palestine from Europe before seeing the land they had bought, with the goal of planting, farming, growing, building, and establishing themselves in their ancestral homeland. They were mavericks, and were the first of Ben Gurion’s “New Jews”.
Sarah was a modern woman, who spoke several languages, hunted on horseback, was a good shot, and could go toe-to-toe with any man in the village discussing politics. She sought to surround herself with those from whom she could learn, and, like Moses himself, had leadership forced upon her, while not seeking it out herself.
Sarah’s writings, and those remaining from her family and friends, show not only the zeal with which they lived their lives, but the Zionist passion embedded in their thoughts and actions. Indeed, they were the ascendants of the First Aliya. Their courage led the way for several immigration waves which would, in but several decades, lead to the re-establishment of the Jewish State.
It is not today - nor has it ever been - easy to be a Zionist. From the earliest moment when God told Abraham “lech lecha”, go forth to the land that I have promised you, where you will grow and establish your nation, pursuing the goal of Zionism, to live as a Jewish people free in our homeland, has been a challenge.
But this is not a challenge that has gone unanswered. Our eyes and our minds have always faced East.
As we begin to observe the holiday of Passover, we are reminded of the most critical moment in Jewish history: the Exodus from Egypt. The Exodus was the catalyst that led to our receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai, and it is when we, the Jewish people, became a nation.
During Passover we celebrate freedom. But it is not just a vague ideal of freedom that we celebrate, nor is it even primarily the freedom from Egypt that we celebrate: is the freedom to pursue our own goals, to determine our own futures, and to make our own choices. And what did the nation of Israel do with that new found freedom? They made their way to their homeland, to Eretz Yisrael. They continued in pursuit of this goal even when they were told the journey would take 40 years, and that they, the generation that left Egypt, would not be privileged to enter that land themselves. They knew however that their children would, and that promise of the next generation’s redemption drove them forward.
The land they sought with their new freedom, with their liberty, and the land they touched with their feet and their lips 40 years later, is the land we, the Jewish people, have been praying towards, have been dreaming of, and have been aspiring to, every day for the last 3,500 years. The goal of being a people free in the Land of Israel, the goal of Zionism, is a fundamental principle of the story of Passover and is an innate element of the Jewish story.
For 3,500 years, we have not only sat at seder tables and declared that next year we will celebrate in Jerusalem. We as a people developed our land, built our Temple, re-built our Temple, thrived in exile, dreamed of returning, and in 1948, re-established our sovereignty after two millennia in the wild. We have fought like hell ever since to keep what is ours.
It was just before that most recent step of redemption however, that a young group of Jews, those Nili spies, tried their hand at the pursuit of Jewish liberty. In doing so, they joined a long line of Jewish heroes throughout history who have done the same.
In 1915, in a letter to Sarah, Avshalom wrote:
If we shall fall before we reach our goal.
If we should not be privileged to see
Our people safe returned to the ancestral home,
A nation proud and strong and free,
Then to our sons and daughters we bequeath
Our places in the ranks of liberty.
Avshalom knew that he was fighting for a goal - Jewish freedom and sovereignty - that he may not live to see. But the goal propelled him and his fellow spies forward, knowing that theirs was a fight for the ages.
Avshalom died in January 1917 in a gun battle in the Sinai Desert. Sarah, the “Flame of Israel”, killed herself in October 1917 rather than perish at the hands of Ottoman torturers. She died three weeks before the signing of the Balfour Declaration that guaranteed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and two months before General Allenby marched into Jerusalem, the British having defeated the Ottomans.
It was Sarah’s intelligence, and the efforts of the Nili spy ring, that not only led the British to victory over the Ottomans, but that changed Jewish history and laid the foundations for a reborn Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael.
Our development as a nation, as a people, and as a religion, is innately tied to our connection to, and striving for, the Land of Israel, Zion. The work of those who have come before, those who have strived for our liberty, and who have given us the opportunity to affirm “next year in Jerusalem” at the end of our seders, and mean it, strengthens us.
Like them, we are tasked with safeguarding the Land of Israel for the next generation so that we are never again slaves in Egypt.
About the author: Adam Hummel is an immigration lawyer in Toronto, Canada, and a member of the Jewish Diplomatic Corps of the World Jewish Congress
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This was very well put. I appreciate Mr. Hummel's choice to start by explaining the modern situation before comparing it to the biblical situation. From what I have consumed, it is usually in reverse order with the biblical story being told first. This is a good choice because the NZC is trying to build a new modern Zionist and so they must promote the new modern zionist stories. But, at the same time, it doesn't really matter all that much which is told first because they are both the same story. We are forever leaving Egypt until we are home. Chag Pesach sameach!