One cloud-free Sabbath morning in the early summer of 1920, as most of Mes’ha’s old-timers stood in the synagogue wrapped in prayer shawls, the serenity was shattered by a lad bursting in with the cry that the entire herd had been stolen. The residents of Mes’ha were shocked. Such a thing had never happened before—not even under the Turks. For it to happen now—in the British era—when the troublemakers seemed to have retired and stopped harassing the colony … They quickly pulled themselves together, quit their prayers and the synagogue, and, undeterred by the holy Sabbath, set out in hot pursuit. Paicovich was not at the synagogue, and the news of a robbery on this tranquil morning hit him like a bomb at home. Zvi hastily grabbed for his weapons in order to join the other young men in the chase. Reuven held him back momentarily, for fear of the Gom. But Zvi paid no attention. Paicovich, as the chairman of the council at the time (by his own report), went to see to the colony’s defense against a possible raid by the Bedouin neighbors to the north: the robbery and chase could well whet their appetite for an attack on the disconcerted village. The robbers had come from Transjordan and scurried to get back across the Jordan under cover of Wadi Bira, driving the herd eastward. In their flight, they ran into an ambush laid by Mes’ha’s “posse.” One of the robbers was killed in the dust-up, and others appeared to be hurt. Mes’ha also suffered losses: Moshe Klimantovsky, the son of a widow who managed her farm alone, was slain. Two others were wounded: Nahman Karniel and Zvi Paicovich.
Figure 2. Allon in the arms of the husband of his Arab wet nurse. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allon family.
With Yigal in his mother’s arms—so the story goes—his mother and father stood outside their home anxiously awaiting news. All at once a rider came into view. It was Zvi; he had left home on his feet only to return atop someone else’s horse. “S’iz gornisht, imi” (“It’s nothing, my mother”), he shouted, his shirt soaked in blood. Chaya fainted. Horse and rider continued on to the pharmacy, but before he could get there, Zvi also fainted. Vigilant neighbors rushed to dismount him and dress his wounds. Mes’ha’s pharmacy served as a clinic and even an infirmary, and Zvi lay there for several weeks before being transferred to a hospital. It was a year before he returned to farm work.
The loss of the handsome, amiable Klimantovsky cast a pall over Mes’ha the next day. The two other casualties hovered between life and death and the air was heavy with the stillness of the grave. It was unexpectedly disturbed by noise on the northern road, not far from Paicovich’s home. He took his rifle and went out to investigate. A horde of merry Bedouin were firing guns and riding toward the village. Thinking them a wild mob come to finish yesterday’s piece of work, he planted his feet on the main road, cocked his rifle, and faced them, a man alone. He warned them not to try to enter the village. Nearly falling over themselves, the Arabs explained that they were on a wedding procession, a fantasiyeh in honor of the bride’s coming to the groom, and no one had the right to block the main road that ran through Mes’ha. Paicovich would have none of it—the village was in mourning, he said, the wounded required quiet, and the bereaved families could not abide the rowdiness; the procession would not pass through Mes’ha! Having said this, he was not a man to back down from what might have been an unnecessary confrontation. Some of the merrymakers soon recognized him and spread the word that it was wiser not to lock horns with al-Insari. The procession turned toward a byroad.69
Reuven’s intrepid stance and Zvi’s injury nourished many a tale, magnified by the fact that a year later, Klimantovsky’s sister married the second Paicovich son, Mordekhai. The episode contained all of the ingredients of the Wild West, including the sense that the authorities could not be relied on to ensure the safety of the settlers.
Its wider context, however, is virtually absent from descriptions by the residents of Mes’ha. In this period, the whole of the Galilee—Lower and Upper—was in turmoil. But the connection to Emir Faisal’s deposition in Damascus by the French escaped Mes’ha’s notice. To the settlers, the raid from Transjordan was a local clash; it was not related to the serious skirmish that had taken place at Tzemah a month before (on 23 May 1920) between the Indian army stationed there and Bedouin attempting to invade from the desert. The people of Mes’ha saw the raid as more of the same, as an extension of the constant battle over grazing land and water sources: a conflict between the lawless and the law-abiding folk. It rankled them that their Arab neighbors—far from coming to their aid—had actually helped the robbers. Nevertheless, the nationalist awakening washing over the colony in those days did not make them view their neighbors as having the same aspirations. The perceptions of Wild Galilee were still paramount.
In the thick tension following the incident, Jewish settlers in the Galilee and the Jordan Valley submitted a strong protest to the military governor in Tiberias for the lapse in peace and security. As a result, the Indian army was stationed at colonies in the Upper and the Lower Galilee, and, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty and fear of war, calm was gradually restored and life reverted to its normal course.70
This unsure interval highlighted Mes’ha’s virtues and faults. The courageous stance on life and property, the unhesitant enlistment of the young in battle, reflected the great distance traveled by former denizens of Lithuanian shtetlach to Eastern Galilee’s untamed frontier. Nearby colonies equally stood up to the test: Yavne’el, for instance, made immediate provisions to supply Mes’ha with a daily shipment of milk (preboiled, of course, so as not to spoil on the way). In contrast, when it was suggested that farming be organized communally, with everyone working together on a different field each day, the residents of Mes’ha could not get their act together: those with nearer fields balked; those with better work animals refused to help neighbors whose beasts were a cut below.71
Paicovich was among the main victims of the robbery, losing five cows and five bulls. Only one other farmer lost more, and only two others matched him72—meaning that his was one of the more prosperous farms in the village.
It was, in many respects, a peak period in Mes’ha’s history and in the Paicovich annals. In the war years, as noted, grain fetched high prices and Mes’ha had plenty of grain. In 1917–18, the rain was generous, producing a bumper crop. Afterward, a constant decline set in, both in harvests and prices.73 Successive drought brought on a plague of field mice that ate away at the meager yields for three consecutive years. Settlers had to borrow money from government sources and the ICA.74 Attempts to diversify cereal farming with dry orchards failed. Only olives and almonds could be grown without irrigation. The vines had succumbed to disease during World War I, almonds were economically unviable, and even olives, so common in Arab villages, did not do well at Mes’ha.
In the Jewish Yishuv in those days, the Third Aliyah immigration wave enlarged the population and injected a boost of initiative, action, and building. Innovation and experimentation were the name of the game, whether in agriculture and industry or in new settlement forms, such as the cooperative moshav, the kvutza or large commune (the forerunner of the kibbutz), or the “labor battalion” (contract workers who lived in collective equality). The times were infused with a burst of youthful energy and the joy of creation. But not at Mes’ha. It seemed to have sunk into slumber, hardly touched by the changes sweeping over the Yishuv. And yet, for a short moment it too seemed to come alive, in the “war of the generations” in the colonies of the Lower Galilee. But victory went to the “old.”75
The triumph of conservatism over renewal found expression in the old farming methods. Mature farmers had little interest in new inventions or mechanization. Uneducated and naturally suspicious, they had no use for the new-fangled notions banging at the doors of their small world. In particular, they were wary of anything that smacked of “bolshevism”; to them, it stood for everything that nipped individual independence and freedom of action.
The question of Jewish labor lay at
