Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira
released on bail paid by their parents.
Like almost everything else in that period, the trial of Kadoorie’s youngsters turned into a national brouhaha. The JA-PD engaged the Haganah’s hotshot attorney, Aharon Hoter-Yishai, and paid his legal fees of Palestinian £8.34 Hoter-Yishai listened to the youngsters and told them what to say in court. After talking with them for half an hour, he chose Allon to act as the key witness. This appears to be the earliest evidence about the sort of impression Allon made on strangers. Hoter-Yishai chose a lad he judged to be above the rest: handsome, credible, articulate, naturally shrewd, and with a good grasp of the situation. If the brawl did not distinguish Allon from the others, his court appearance crowned him spokesman and ringleader.35 In the courtroom, Allon claimed self-defense against trespassers and physical assailants. This version, buttressed by the personality of Hoter-Yishai, who overawed the prosecutor, was accepted by the British judge and the boys got off scot-free.36
In the summer of 1936 Kadoorie was shut for security reasons and the students were sent home. The truth was that the boys were not eager to stay to defend the school when their parents’ farms were in danger. Studies apparently resumed in December and on 24 March 1937, Kadoorie’s first graduating class completed its studies. Allon was nineteen.
Many of the pupils had joined the defense forces during the school’s closure. Sini served as a ghaffir (a temporary police guard) at the village of Kefar Javetz, under a British sergeant. Brandsteter and Allon were guards in the bloc of Tiberias and the Lower Galilee, under Nahum Shadmi (Kramer) of the colony of Melahamiya. The duties seemed to be the same at every location: guard duty by day and defense patrols by night. “Since we have arrived, there have not yet been any shots”—Sini grumbled in his letter to his parents—“let’s hope this will change or I’ll die of boredom.”37 By his lights, the situation did not improve even though the ghaffirs at Kefar Javetz served as “a mobile squad to danger spots,” that is, they were the spearhead of the defense forces. “As for my spirits, one should not hope for any improvement before one decent attack because I am being consumed by idleness,” Sini continued to carp two weeks later.38
Allon didn’t complain. As ever, Mes’ha offered stirring pursuits of Arab marauders. The chase was the same as it had always been except that now Yigal proudly boasted a guard’s headgear (the kolpak—a tall fur hat), his possession of live ammunition was legal, and killing was permitted. At night, he and his friends would head for Mes’ha’s fields to douse fires, putting themselves at risk from sniper shots from Arab gangs.39 On these escapades he did not appear exceptional.
At this stage in their young lives, the boys regarded the fights, chases, gunshots, and danger much as though they were aspects of a thrilling game. Their parents may have worried about them, but they themselves had not yet experienced loss, and the danger was intoxicating, a boost of alertness and a burst of adrenalin. Only youths untried in the pangs of war could write to his parents as Sini did.
The glory of defense service aside, agricultural settlement retained its rank as the crowning achievement of practical Zionism in Eretz Israel. Out of twenty-two graduates of Kadoorie’s first graduating class, seventeen aimed to be farmers. The others chose either to study further—mainly agriculture, abroad—or to enter public service.40 Many of them regarded higher studies as near treason.41 In those few months between the resumption of studies and the end of the first graduating class, when the young men talked about plans for the future, one of the ideas touted was the establishment of a fifty-unit farm. As graduates of a government school, they hoped to be in line for assistance: to obtain a holding, preferably on state lands in the Beisan Valley frontier, where both water and danger were abundant. Their eyes lit up at the thought of promoting the national good while treading a common path. In January 1937, thirteen members of the first two graduating classes organized and applied to the Government of Palestine for a piece of land.42 The signatories included Arnan Azaryahu (Sini), Joel Prozhinin, and Yigal Paicovich.
The application was denied. The government replied that it did not intend graduates of Kadoorie to found a settlement of their own; rather, they were to fan out across the country and use their knowledge to boost agriculture as a whole. Furthermore, any assistance given to Jewish Kadoorie graduates would have to be matched for Arab Kadoorie graduates, entailing an expenditure beyond its means. In general, there were little available land, and the government preferred to place what there was at the disposal of the JA to use as its discretion.43
Amos Brandsteter did not sign the application. He knew very well that he would be returning to his father’s farm in Yavne’el. Not so Allon. His memoirs say that he entered into the plan half-heartedly.44 Nevertheless, his signature was the first step in his break with Kefar Tavor.
Kefar Tavor may have been home, but certain aspects of it caused him distinct discomfort. He never invited any of his friends to his house. Not even Ada ever crossed the threshold. If a friend happened to accompany him on his way home, he made sure that he did not come inside but waited for him outdoors. He seems to have been ashamed of the poverty, which is strange since poverty was not looked down upon, especially not in his circles. Ada was puzzled by his behavior: true, her own family occupied a fine home at the time, and her father earned the enormous salary of Palestine £500 a year, but this was one period in a long life that had known hardship and struggle. For Ada, poverty carried no social stigma. This was not so for Allon: he regarded it as a blot, as something to be hidden.45
Perhaps, it was the shabbiness, not just the poverty, that accounted for his attitude. The house was run down, having gone without a woman’s touch for years. Rickety walls stood unrepaired, no ornaments or luxuries of any kind graced the premises. Within these bare walls, there lived an old man and a boy. Allon’s home was not like any of those of his friends, not even the poorest among them.
Since Kadoorie, he saw Mes’ha with different eyes. Compared with Ada, its plain, simple girls held no charm for him. Compared with the modern agriculture he learned at Kadoorie, Mes’ha’s farming methods, including his father’s, appeared terribly backward. Even the local school, which he remembered fondly and had built up before his new friends, had lost its luster.
Allon, in Bet Avi, attributes his leaving Mes’ha primarily to the ideological changes in him during his second year at Kadoorie: “The ideological consideration began to vie within me with natural sentiment,”46 “the social-moral uniqueness of kibbutz life; the qualitative standard of living; equality and mutual responsibility” were values that drew him with magic strings to the concept of the kibbutz, he said. “From day to day, I became increasingly convinced of the justice of the kibbutz way for the Yishuv, the nation and human society, and from day to day my desire to belong to it grew.”47 Was this really the case? Ideology was not discussed at Kadoorie. Among themselves, the boys would prattle on about soccer, girls, security actions. The question of a kibbutz composed of Kadoorie graduates came up only in their last few months. But it was not an intellectual conviction, merely the way of life favored by the country’s top youth. Few of Kadoorie’s graduates had been exposed to the enriching food for the soul served up by youth movements. They lacked the values education absorbed by members of youth movements. In this sense, there was very little difference between the youth of Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir and the youth of Ha-Noar Ha-Oved at Kadoorie. The latter’s onsite activities amounted to twice yearly visits by a movement coordinator. The socialist-Zionist bricks that built the ideological foundation and motivation for kibbutz life were not inherent in Kadoorie’s cultural world.
Allon grappled with the decision in talks with Ada and even more so in his letters to her. He seemed to find it easier to express his reservations in writing. Unfortunately, the letters have been lost, but their substance was clear enough and confirmed by the accounts of his friends. Ideology played a marginal role. The decisive factor was his feeling that Mes’ha was a dead end; a curtain on the new horizons he had glimpsed since coming to Kadoorie. A return to Mes’ha was a life sentence of retrogression, of poverty without compensation or challenge, in a backwater marginal to the great drama unfurling in the country. Apart from his sense of guilt at abandoning his father—and shattering the old man’s hopes that the child of his old age would carry on the family