Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira
Galilee in the early 1930s; it finally fell in a battle termed by Ben-Gurion “the Arabs’ Tel Hai”—a reference to the legendary, heroic stand of Jewish defenders against Arab attackers at the country’s northern tip. In 1935 the Arab press rattled with news of an attempt by Haganah to smuggle in arms. Britain’s Parliament thwarted efforts by High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope to set up a legislative council in Palestine. The Jews grew stronger and the Arab population more frustrated. Added to this were the political tensions in the Middle East due to the Italo-Ethiopian war in the autumn of 1935, which exposed the underbelly of the British lion. And yet, when the eruption came, the Yishuv was not prepared for it—not emotionally or organizationally or militarily.
The Yishuv was informed by the key ethos and concept of upbuilding: the Yishuv as a whole and the Labor movement in particular saw themselves as the builders of the country. The right to the land was won by working it; ultimately the land would belong to those who “redeemed” it from the wastes, who transformed a wilderness into a living home. In the Yishuv’s self-image, its key mission was peace, bringing progress and prosperity to all of the inhabitants. This “defensive ethos” rested on the belief that the land could be acquired by peaceful means. It was closely related to the other two ethoses of upbuilding and making the desert bloom, and all that they entailed.
To go from this dream to the Arab Rebellion was a rude awakening. The Yishuv believed that its life was at stake. It had to learn how to fight, and at once. Hereafter, the emphasis shifted to developing means of resistance, a test and effort that drew the top talents. Emotionally, the changing priorities were more digestible to the generation that had just come of age and was less committed than the founding generation to the ethos of upbuilding. “You may wonder, Father, at the military spirit that has come over me”—wrote Israel Galili to his parent. “Not so. The wish to live, the instinct to do something and the love of freedom are what led me now to view Jewish enlistment in the Haganah as the immediate center of gravity.”1
The first shortcoming exposed by the Arab Rebellion, then, was the Yishuv’s lack of an ethos in support of fighting. The second shortcoming exposed by it concerned organization and management. The importance of the military arm of the national liberation movement—the limited, underground Haganah—and the need to place it at the disposal of the movement’s political echelon, represented by the Jewish Agency (JA) and the Zionist Executive, was late to be recognized and hard to acknowledge. The Arab Rebellion upturned traditional thinking and acting, and yet consensus, though vital, remained elusive.2 Formed in 1920, the Haganah was still not central to national consciousness or priorities. Internally, it was riven by political rivalry. Only in 1939 did the various political parties in the Yishuv finally agree to form a Haganah National Command to oversee the Haganah’s activities. It was composed as a steering committee of civilians, equally representing the Left and the Right, and it lasted until statehood.
The third deficiency was military capability: military leaders had no answer to the challenge posed by the Arab onslaught. Security personnel clung to a military conception of passive resistance; in the event of Arab attack, settlements were to hold the assailants at bay until the British army arrived to disperse them. It was considered an achievement just to prevent the aggressors from entering a Jewish settlement. The Arab Rebellion, characterized by prolonged aggression, confounded the settlements and the security establishment. Daily life and functioning were disrupted by the need for nighttime guard duty and the frequent alarms raised against ambushes. In addition, transportation came under attack. For the first time, the Arabs tactically resorted to obstructing traffic routes. The roads became perilous and vehicles passing through Arab areas did so in organized convoys.
Mostly, the Arabs chose the cloak of night for their operations. As dark descended, dread set in: what would the night bring—shooting at windows, the burning of fields, the chopping down of trees, or an attack on the whole settlement? A single volley of shots was enough to banish sleep from an entire community, rousing everyone to their positions. Guards sped to high lookouts, a spotlight—if there was one—sliced through the darkness, and mothers tried to soothe children while hiding them beneath the beds. The settlement fence served as the defensive border. Beyond it stretched the black of night commandeered by the assailants. From their posts, defenders would see fields being torched and watch their sweat and toil go up in smoke. Common wisdom had it that it was better to incur damage to property rather than to the body. The assumption was that the Disturbances would soon die down. Until then, the Jews were to prepare for self-defense but take no undue risks.
This conception reflected a mixture of ideology and a lack of combat skills. The desire to avoid escalation in the Jewish-Arab national conflict, to refrain from bloodshed, and to have peace were ideological components. Soon, an additional consideration came into play: the Jewish political leadership had had its fill of riots and inquiry commissions that came to investigate the causes and left with conclusions placing aggressors and defenders on an equal footing. The leadership wished to highlight the one-sidedness of the Disturbances—Jews were being attacked without retaliating, and it was incumbent on the government, which was responsible for law and order, to come to their defense. Furthermore, following every wave of unrest, the British tended to make political concessions to the Arabs. By highlighting the guilty party, the leadership hoped to make it tricky for the government to reward the aggressors at the expense of the Zionists. Indeed, despite Arab demands to the contrary, Jewish immigration did continue this time as the government refused to bow to violence. Added to this was another political factor: the prospect of incorporating Jews into the defense network and creating a legal military force under British command. The longer the Disturbances lasted and the more severe they became, the political advantages of this policy of restraint, as it was known—taking no initiative for either assault or counterterrorism—overshadowed its conceptual roots.3
Still, there was the purely prosaic military incapability and lack of an operational response to the new Arab tactics. In Allon’s view, “Initially, the consideration of restraint stemmed simply from the unavailability of a force [able] not to [show] restraint.”4 The truth is that even the “big wide world” did not know how to deal with guerilla warfare at the time. The British army, too, from whom the Jews learned the ins and outs of war, found itself hard put to cope with night raids by small units vanishing back into their villages. Response was slow to develop.
It remains a moot question of who actually imparted the new theory of war to the Yishuv’s young. Opinion is divided over Yitzhak Sadeh and Elijah Cohen (Ben-Hur), on the one hand, and Orde Wingate, on the other. What is certain is that in the years 1937–39 the combat methods of Palestine’s Jews were radically revamped, spelling a veritable revolution.
Heralding the turning point was the appearance in the Jerusalem Hills of the mobile squad, which moved from point to point as needed rather than being stationed at any one spot. The unit was soon issued a vehicle and, in stark contrast to the helplessness and inexperience of frontier settlers, it whisked people with military experience to trouble spots.5 This was the start of what became known as “going beyond the fence”: no longer accepting passive resistance inside a settlement while abandoning fields and orchards, but defending the entire area right up to nearby Arab villages. Arabs were no longer the sole masters of the night and fields; these now became part of the Jewish arsenal as well. To this end, small units were created to be able to move quickly and quietly. The ammunition also changed since only short-range weapons could be used at night, employing brief but concentrated firepower. The submachine gun made its debut alongside the grenade, the preferred weapon of nocturnal combatants. Capping these developments was the art of the ambush, which utilized the night and fields to strike and fire at entrapped armed bands.
Yitzhak Sadeh, one of the fathers of the mobile squad, claimed that he had acquired his knowledge of sorties in the Russian army, both in a reconnaissance unit during the First World War and, more so, in the Red Army during the Civil War.6 Those training schools had taught him a number of basic principles—unconventional frameworks, improvisation, mobility, and optimization of manpower and weapons.7 The solution that took shape was elegant in its simplicity and, in retrospect, seems almost self-evident. Sadeh’s greatness was that he arrived at it from within, in collaboration with colleagues and followers. He grasped the nature of the revolution and was able to infuse