and his brother, Zvi. He had done his calculations. He figured out that if Zvi were to hire out the wagon and mules for work in Pardes Hannah, the earnings would allow Reuven Paicovich to live comfortably. After spending the night at Kefar Hasidim, Allon and his wagon arrived in Haifa in the morning. He sped to the eastern train station where his brother Eliav worked, only to be reprimanded: how had he taken it in his head to make the dangerous trip from Kefar Tavor to Haifa?! But this was nothing compared with Eliav’s fury when he heard what Allon had done. Beside himself, he ran to get Moshe, the eldest brother and his superior on the railway. Allon now felt the wrath of both brothers. How dared he, without consulting anyone, eradicate the toil of decades at a single stroke? Worse still, Reuven had to hear of it while hospitalized. Allon chose to let his brothers inform their father. He took the mule wagon and continued along the coastline from one brother to another, from Mordekhai in Binyamina to Zvi in Netanya, being met everywhere with shock and rage. The further he journeyed, the more the magnitude of what he had done sank in. He was terrified by the thought of the inevitable encounter with his father. But Paicovich’s reaction was surprisingly mild. After hearing what Allon had done, he was silent for a moment. Then, he turned to his sons: “And you let him travel alone in these times?”50 By the time Allon came to visit, Paicovich had no scolding or preaching for him. Whatever anger he may have felt succumbed to relief that the boy was unharmed, despite his rashness.51
Neither his brothers’ fury nor fear of his father’s reaction made him regret the deed: by selling the farm he had purchased his freedom, and nothing equaled his sense of liberation. He dispensed with self-reckoning; it had been a campaign for his own self opposite his father’s great shadow. And, as in every campaign containing an Oedipal component, Allon emerged with a sense of victory mingled with guilt. In time, the guilt produced Bet Avi. The triumph produced Yigal Allon.
Chapter 3
Ginossar
Allon’s posthumous papers contained a draft for the opening of an autobiography beginning with his move to Ginossar: “The heavy truck pulled up at a … junction, one of the roads leading to the settlement of Migdal. The genial driver from Kibbutz Kefar Giladi parted from me with a warmth underlined by wishes for full integration into the kibbutz. … I hefted my heavy knapsack onto my back and crossed the road on foot towards the young kibbutz. I crossed the Rubicon, and did not look back.”1
Yigal’s crossing of the Rubicon meant forsaking his father’s world for that of his young friends. The generation gap deepens in times of revolution and rapid change. Even if parents belonged to Eretz Israel’s founding generation of brave, hardy revolutionaries, so great were the differences between them and their children that communication became forced and superficial. Things were worse still in the case of most of the parents, who had only recently disembarked on Jaffa’s shores. Their understanding of what was going on in the country was limited, their lives passing in a kind of partial fog of bewilderment and incomprehension.
It is little wonder, then, that the youth bred in Jewish Palestine regarded themselves as a tribe apart from their parents and adults in general. Their primary frame of reference was the peer group. It, in every sphere, determined the behavioral norms, from articles of fashion to styles of speech, from the approach toward school to the attitude toward parents. The power it exerted on its members—virtually tyrannical—was seen as an expression of their release from adult authority, of an exodus from bondage to freedom. The peer group, or hevreh as it was called, was a company of willing partners to a particular path, a specific lifestyle.
“Good” hevreh went to live on a kibbutz. Going to a kibbutz entailed identifying with a youth group. Such was the force of the perceived generational differentiation that it lent the sense of togetherness an emotional bond reserved in other societies for tribe or family: here, the hevreh were the tribe. Those who didn’t “belong” felt like outsiders, out of place, ostracized.
The fact that Yigal went to a kibbutz was above all a mark of belonging to the hevreh. Graduates of the Kadoorie school had no doubt that joining a kibbutz was the right thing to do. Choosing Ginossar was accidental. Kadoorie had a visit from Yehoshua Rabinowitz (Baharav), a member of the Ha-Noar Ha-Oved (HNHO) kevutzah (group)2 at Migdal. He spoke to the graduates about the hardships of life at Migdal in the Ginossar Valley, about the attempts to settle on the PICA lands along the Sea of Galilee at the mouth of Wadi Amud—an area that teemed with lawless gangs and where no Jewish plowman had ever set foot. He painted a picture fraught with tension and hazard: shortly before his visit, armed bands had fallen upon members working in Migdal’s orchards and wounded one of them. Knowing his audience, he overstated the perils: night after night, there were gunshots, he said. Their imagination lit, Kadoorie’s hevreh decided to go to Migdal.3
A young kevutzah, subsequently known as Kevutzat Ha-Noar Ha-Oved Migdal, had arrived at the colony of Migdal in 1934 to work and wait for a leasehold to a collective settlement of its own. The nucleus consisted of graduates of Tel Aviv’s school for workers’ children who had gone on to study agriculture at the Ben Shemen Youth Village.4 Most of them had trained on hakhshara farms of Hever Ha-Kevutzot and preferred to keep a neutral profile in terms of affiliation with a kibbutz movement. In 1935, they were joined by a group from Kibbutz Ein Harod that sought a connection with the Histadrut’s HNHO youth organization as a preliminary to tying up with the Kibbutz Me’uhad (KM) movement. For years, the veteran core at Migdal, associated with Hever Ha-Kevutzot, held sway: they too identified with HNHO, but they carefully guarded their independence of any kibbutz movement or stream.5
In the Plain of Ginossar, the PICA owned some five thousand dunams (1,125 acres; 500 ha) of land. Part of this was tilled by Arab villagers from Abu-Shusha, next to Migdal, and part was tilled directly by the PICA under its own manager with the help of Arab laborers. At the eruption of the Disturbances, the PICA realized that the solitary Jewish manager was in danger. It now agreed to a proposal from Abraham Hartzfeld of the Histadrut’s Agricultural Center to lease lands to Kevutzat HNHO, Migdal, and the group was hired to turn over the soil and uproot the wild blackthorn north of the plowed area. During the work there was tension in the air. On one occasion, the guard was late in spotting a gang attacking from Wadi Amud, and one of the plowers was wounded.6
When Yigal arrived in July 1937, several months after his friends from Kadoorie, the course of the kevutzah had already been decided: in February 1937 Kevutzat HNHO, Migdal signed a contract with the PICA; the kevutzah was to buy the hay the PICA had sown at Ju’ar (Ginossar’s Arabic name) for Palestine £250 and harvest it.7 The entire plain north of Migdal had not a single Jewish settlement and served as a transit route for bands from Syria and Transjordan. This lawlessness aroused the kevutzah’s slim hope that it would be permitted to settle on these lands. The reason it gave was that it would guard the hay from arsonists; the goal, however, was to set down stakes in the plain, in the hope that the PICA would subsequently find it hard to dislodge the group. Abraham Hartzfeld was party to the calculations and encouraged the ketvutzah.
On the eve of Purim, March 1937, a convoy set out from Migdal to the cultivated area and, within days, the members of the ketvutzah had raised a tower-and-stockade settlement—one of the hallmarks of that frenzied period: some ten dunams of land were fenced off, and within this area a watchtower was thrown up, a gravel-filled fence was built, and one hut, then another, were knocked together, along with a few tents. The small camp, it was explained to the PICA official, was necessary to protect the site.8 The PICA’s Palestine director, who was based in Haifa, forthwith notified the members of the kevutzah that as soon as they had gathered the produce they were to dismantle the guard post and hut and get off the land.9 The kevutzah—now called Kevutzat Ginossar for the first time—made no promise.10 Meanwhile, Hartzfeld stepped up his pressure on the PICA to settle these young pioneers who had shown such dedication and readiness to defend the land in those
