The World War I battlefield was not exclusive to Europe's trenches. Palestine was also in the mix.

Controlled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries, Palestine was a ripe area for England to move in. The Jews who lived there was split: would Great Britain prove to be a better master than the Turks?

Aaron Aaronsohn (great name?), for one, thought so. He saw the Turkish genocide in Armenia and did not want a repeat in Palestine. A botanist (he discovered a type of wheat), he knew the ins and outs of the region. He used that in his new career as... a spy.

Aaronsohn organized Nili, a spy network that was run by much of his family (sister, brothers, brother-in-law). Under the guise of fighting locusts (remember, he was a botanist), Aaronsohn was able to obtain information about Ottoman armies and send it to the Brits.

Nili did not and well: after a carrier pigeon(!) was intercepted, the organization was destroyed, its leadership killed. Aaronsohn survived that only to perish in a plane crash soon after the war.

Despite the demise of the network, it served its purpose: England used the information for a surprise attack, taking Gaza and eventually all of Palestine.

And everything has been hunky-dory in that region since.