SPIES IN PALESTINE

Pulitzer Prize nominee James Srodes recounts the dramatic life of Sarah Aaronsohn and her family. It’s a story filled with spies, presidents, and unspeakable loss, and it shines a new and bright light on the extraordinary woman who undertook an historic task and helped create modern Israel.

She’s been called the Jewish Joan of Arc and she’s almost certainly “S.A.,” to whom T.E. Lawrence dedicated his renowned biography Seven Pillars of Wisdom. She is Sarah Aaronsohn, the dynamic leader of a ring of Jewish spies working for the British in WWI during the time of Turkish-rule. Aaronsohn’s prominent family allowed her great freedom, and cover. She formed and led the group’s clandestine operations, smuggling information to British agents offshore. When the Ottomans ferreted out the leadership of the spy ring in 1917—because of a carrier pigeon—they arrested her. After four days of torture, Sarah managed to get to the bathroom in her home, where she’d hidden a pistol under a tile. She killed herself.

Sarah Aaronsohn was a 21st-century woman living in a nineteenth-century world. In the 1880s; Sarah Aaronsohn and her siblings were born as part of the first wave of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, in the province of Syria-Palestine. By the outbreak of WW1 in 1914, the settlers had come a dramatic distance in creating the Israel of their Biblical prophecies. But when the Ottoman Turkish Empire sided with Kaiser Wilhelm II and the other Central powers in World War I, the Jewish settlements faced cruel oppressions.

Author James Srodes describes how the Aaronsohns, one of the most prominent families in the province, came to commit themselves and their comrades to the allied side and how they also formed the NILI espionage organization to spy against the Turkish army.

Late in the war, in 1917, Sarah assumed command of the spy network as the group’s penetration of the Turkish army reached a critical juncture. The intelligence gathered by the network was crucial for the British in liberating Palestine in what would be the first dramatic victory for the allies. Sarah’s tragic end would prove important in holding the victors to their promise of a new Jewish state.

Spies in Palestine is an extraordinary look at a woman who lived and fought well before her time.

James Srodes is the author of "Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, Franklin: The Essential Founding Father and On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World."Srodes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World and is available for interview.