were neither highbrow nor cultivated but a young brigade of daring volunteers. Apart from a handful of writers and poets who sprang up from within, most had little use for the trappings of culture or social graces. And yet their defining experience, which was to stay with them throughout their lives, became the cultural inspiration of the young. The type of person spawned by the Palmah was not without fault. There was about them a callow rawness, an upstart’s brashness, the shallowness of men of action, the intolerance of the self-absorbed. They judged both themselves and others mercilessly, knowing no compassion. Yet they were also capable of openness and high-flying idealism, extraordinary acts of friendship and comradeship, reticence and loftiness, humility and dedication. They had a measure of pride that in their youth took the form of arrogance and over the years was widely translated into independence and self-sufficiency, a personal autonomy, so to speak. Many of the Palmah veterans flowed with the times, changed their lifestyles, forgot the ideals of their youth. All, however, retained that core sense of belonging and fellowship formed on those heady, faraway nights of campfires, coffee, and song. Those who detached themselves from the past were spared the anguish of recent decades when the old kibbutz order collapsed, taking with it values that had been the bedrock of their lives.
Others, such as the Palmah’s erstwhile intelligence officer, Zerubavel Arbel, never resigned themselves to the change. In an interview I had with him at Kibbutz Maoz Haim in order to write Yigal biography, he described, with wonder and wistfulness, the yawning gulf between himself and his father, whom he held in affection. The intellectual parent, a teacher at the historic Herzliya High School, and the son, who had built the IDF’s field intelligence, were separated by an unbridgeable chasm of lost Jewish culture. The father was vastly more educated; the son was far handier in physical wisdom and the lore of action. Theirs, in microcosm, is the story of the generation gap between founding fathers and native sons in the land of Israel. It was the native sons and their devotees who shouldered the task of establishing the state of the Jews.
Arbel, like many Palmahniks, loved the land of Israel with his very fiber, knew its every wadi, its every groove. The Bible occupied a place of honor, and he read it like a guide book for its history and geography. He led me to a lookout over the Jordan Valley to point out the route taken by the Jabesh-gileads on their way to Beisan (Beit She’an). The biblical story is brief: the Philistines came upon the bodies of King Saul and his sons, slain in the battle on Mount Gilboa. They cut off Saul’s head, stripped him, and hung him and his dead sons on the walls of Beisan. When the news reached the men of Gilead across the Jordan River, they walked all night long to Beisan, took down the bodies, buried them in their own land, and fasted for seven days. They had never forgotten the young Saul’s goodwill when he saved them from Nahash the Ammonite. For Arbel, this final kindness, the last rites the Gileads performed for Saul, was a founding myth: again and again he would gaze at the route the Gileads took that night, cherishing their noble gesture to a defeated king fallen on the sword. For Allon, too, the story of Saul was a central motif. He loved the biblical character who had begun life like Cinderella and had ended it like the hero of a Greek tragedy. It was the tale of a lad towering head and shoulders above his people, worn down by political squabbles, by a savagery and chicanery he could not deal with. Was Arbel intimating that Allon’s fate was a modern version of Saul’s tragedy? Perhaps he was underlining the importance he himself attributed to a biography of Allon—the last rites for a dead commander who in his youth had delivered the people of Israel and won the hardest of Israel’s wars.
I chose not to tell Allon’s whole life story but only his story until the end of the War of Independence, the “War of Liberation” as that generation called it. The war was a watershed between Yishuv society and statehood. Whatever the continuity between them, the Yishuv and the state represented totally different human, social, and cultural entities. The main account thus stops in 1950 with the conclusion of Allon’s military career. It was the end of an era both in his personal life and in Israeli realities. It was the end of one era, and the start of another.
Allon’s story is not about the victors of a historical narrative but about those consigned to oblivion in Israel’s public discourse. Those who perished on the upward climb without making it to the top also deserve a voice in collective memory. For without the story of the forgotten, history would be incomplete. This book stands as the last rites to them, the fallen of the first generation of native sons.
Chapter 1
Mes’ha: The Beginning
When Yigal Allon, born Paicovich, reached bar mitzvah age, he, like all the boys at Kefar Tavor/Mes’ha, was called up to the Torah. Yet the ritual merited no mention in his memoirs. Instead, he recorded the test of courage his father put him to that day. Yosef Reuven Paicovich—known by all as Reuven—summoned the boy to the silo and said, “By putting on phylacteries you still do not satisfy all the main commandments; today, you are a man and, from now on, you will have your own weapon.”1 With these words, he handed the boy a semi-automatic Browning.
Allon could not contain his excitement. But there was more. That night, Reuven sent him out to guard a remote field on the colony’s northern edge. Known as Balut in Arabic, Allon in Hebrew, after its oaks, the field abutted the convoy route from Transjordan to the Mediterranean. To reach it, Allon had to walk some five kilometers. He arrived at about 8 P.M. with fear as his constant companion: it was his first stint of guard duty on his own. He took cover amid rocks and oak trees, starting at every sound and rustle in the fields. He fervently hoped that the robbers would rest from their labors this night, but it was not to be: just after midnight a passing convoy came within earshot. He saw three men get off their horses and start stuffing sacks with the sorghum that had been gathered. Reuven’s instructions had been very clear: should thieves come, Allon was to let them go about their business at first; then, he was to call out warnings in Arabic and, then, shoot to miss in order to avoid escalation. He was permitted to shoot to hit only if they drew near. Allon recounted: “I followed all the instructions. I got over my fright. And Father’s orders too made sure [that I would do] as I was told.”2 Far from being alarmed by Allon’s calls, however, the bandits dug in and returned the battle cry. Allon shot into the air; he was answered by the cocking of guns. He had no instructions left, and his thoughts came hot on the heels of one another: Should he shoot to hit? Should he flee under darkness? What if he hit one of them? What if he himself were hurt? All at once, help materialized. His father came storming in from the side, spitting and spewing curses in heavily accented Arabic and firing above the robbers’ heads. Just like in a western, the robbers jumped onto their horses and made off. Yigal Allon summed up: “My joy was double that night: not only did I meet the test, but Father saw me do it. I can’t imagine how I would have looked him in the eye had I not acted as I did.”3
It was a rite of passage in a frontier community where all adult men carried arms. Initiation into male society demanded proof of courage, symbolizing a value system imparted from father to son. Reuven Paicovich may have had a greater dose of courage and belligerence than his fellow villagers, but this does not diminish the transformation that had taken place in the value system of Jewish men who had settled the wilds of Galilee only twenty years earlier.
Yigal Allon was born in a small village at the foot of Mount Tabor and spent most of his first twenty years there. His early experience, as seen through the eyes of a boy, was described in Bet Avi (My father’s house): it was a world of intimacy with the land, of the fragrance of baking bread, of the delights of the threshing floor on a summer night, of neighborly squabbles and brawls, of tests of courage and displays of physical prowess. The village depicted by the adult Allon was bathed in the magic that maturity lends to childhood. The farther he wandered from Mes’ha, the more his descriptions benefited from the distance of time and place, toning down imperfections and enhancing the charm of his salad days.
The Paicovich family saga began in Grodno, White Russia, at the crossroads between Vilna in the north and Bialystok in the south. Its Jewish community, one of the most important in Lithuania,
