Kadoorie’s small world suffered also from a tension of its own. Zemach inspired admiration from the pupils, but he was less able to manage the teaching staff, and his relations with some of them soured.23 In his view, he owed allegiance to the British authorities who had appointed him to head the school. Precisely because he had always been a Zionist and had been nominated by the JA-PD, he sought to show one and all, and particularly the British, that he comported himself correctly as warranted by a state school.24
His prudence in dealings with the British was not to the liking of teachers, employees, and even pupils. Wagging tongues began to accuse him of being overly solicitous about British money and British property, and they found willing ears among the students. Matters came to a head with Zemach’s decision to dismiss the teacher Siegfried Hirsch. In his memoirs, Zemach attributed the decision to the latter’s frequent, unjustified absences. Hirsch apparently managed to persuade the pupils that he was being fired for being involved in the Haganah and because Zemach, a British lackey, objected to the Haganah operating in the school framework.25
The reaction of the pupils came close to rebellion. They resolved to intercede to rescind Hirsch’s dismissal. To do so obviously meant to bad-mouth Zemach before the British. Their national responsibility aroused, the staunch champions decided first to consult the man who would be most interested in hearing about the ousting of a nationalist teacher from Kadoorie—that is, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the JA Executive. The natural candidates for the mission were two council members affiliated with Labor, Prozhinin and Sini. One fateful day, Sini telephoned Ben-Gurion’s home, introduced himself as the son of a man known to Ben-Gurion, and said that he and a few others from Kadoorie’s graduating class wished to discuss a serious issue with him. Sini explained that they could come only in the late afternoon or evening; Ben-Gurion replied that he would see them whenever they came. And so it was: the two lads snuck away from Kadoorie after the day’s activities and hitchhiked to Tel Aviv, arriving around midnight. Ben-Gurion greeted them in his pyjamas and heard them out in silence. They then gave him the draft of the petition they meant to send to the authorities, and he promised to consider the matter.26
Memory can play false. According to our heroes, the episode ended with Ben-Gurion’s apparently burying the document. As it turns out, however, the affair was serious. The student council took two extreme actions: first, it sent off a letter to the high commissioner asking that Hirsch’s dismissal be revoked. Second, it sent off a formal petition to the JA-PD, declaring that “the students’ faith in the [school] leadership had been thoroughly shaken” and demanding that the Yishuv leadership and those in charge of the school “look into the situation and reverse it.” The letter was signed by the twenty-four pupils of Kadoorie’s first graduating class.27 For Zemach, it was a slap in the face.
The first signatory was Allon, and the petition even looks like it was written in his hand. He still belonged to Maccabi Ha-Tza’ir and was not chosen to approach Ben-Gurion. But—eagerly or not—he was a full partner to the student conspiracy against his benefactor. Throughout this difficult period for Zemach, Allon continued to come and go in his home as he pleased. In his talks with Ada, the subject never came up, not once. Zemach was truly upset: not only had Allon placed himself against him, on the side of the teacher and pupils, but he had done so in secret, without telling him about it. “Yigal was a Mes’her bokhur” (a Mes’ha sonny) Zemach noted, filling the epithet with all his scruples about behavior he considered treacherous, ungrateful, and cowardly.28
The last peace-time activity to take place at Kadoorie was the trip of the graduating class to Egypt. It was to cap the end of studies and inaugurate a tradition of graduate trips to a neighboring country also under British rule, except that reality intervened and the school trip in early 1936 was apparently the only one of its kind. Arab riots soon broke out, upturning everything. Zemach had meant to lead the trip, and the students were to be the guests of Egypt’s Department of Agriculture. But after learning of the student rebellion, Zemach announced that he would not be accompanying them. Nevertheless, he made sure to tell the council that it was responsible for the students’ behavior and it was to make sure that they not disgrace the Yishuv.29
In April 1936, the Arab Rebellion erupted. (It was known in the Yishuv as the 1936–39 Disturbances.) It set into motion a new era, eventful and fateful for the Jewish Yishuv, which had known demographic growth, economic boom, and steady reinforcement since 1932. All of these developments had been viewed by the Arabs with dismay. While they too enjoyed prosperity, it could not compensate for their apprehension that the land was slipping away from them, changing virtually overnight from an Arab to a European country. The Rebellion was aimed at halting the process, at preventing the Jews from becoming the dominant factor in Palestine.
Tension was thick. Life at Kadoorie went on, but the environs seethed. The pupils felt left out of the action: the school was protected by British police, and despite its relative isolation it was not in any danger. The boys were asked to keep to themselves and avoid unnecessary sparring with Arabs. This was the local translation of the Yishuv policy of restraint, adopted in the face of the Arab revolt and terror. Jews were to demand British protection rather than embark on vengeance or retaliation. In practical terms, this meant holing up within Jewish settlements, never straying beyond the fence. Fields and barns were torched, trees cut down, years of toil lost—with no reaction. There were reasons for this policy: the Yishuv leadership hoped that this time—unlike the course they had chosen in 1929—the British would be unable to portray the unrest as a clash of two peoples; it was eminently clear that the blame lay with the Arabs and their resort to violence. The British government would have to defend the Yishuv from attack and, perhaps, even issue it the necessary means of defense. The hope was that the Yishuv would be allowed to set up a legal, Jewish defensive force, supervised and financed by the British. None of these considerations of high policy made it any easier for the boys of Kadoorie. They itched to be let loose for daring, heroic, patriotic exploits.
At the start of May 1936, a few weeks into the riots, Kefar Tavor’s water facility was set alight about 150 meters from Kadoorie’s fence. The arson was committed at night when the pupils were dead to the world, hearing nothing. The two resident policemen did not allow the pupils to be woken in order to extinguish the fire, either because—as they said—they did not want the tracks of the perpetrators blurred or because the firefighters would make excellent targets in the light of the flames. In the morning, the boys rose to a sooty pump, a broken motor, and a burned-down building. Here was an exploit indeed right under their noses—and they had literally been caught napping. Great was their shame, which was made worse by the rejoicing of Arabs released from custody after the scouts failed to discover anything.30
One summer day, a-Zbekh shepherds were spotted leading their flocks up Kefar Tavor’s fields next to Kadoorie. The fields were Paicovich’s, at Um-Jabal. Allon and a few of the boys and laborers ran to grab hoes to chase off the trespassers. The shepherds started to retreat, then stopped, raising instead the Arab alarm, the Faza’a. Bedouin flocked to the scene and soon outnumbered the contigent from Kadoorie. But the boys stood their ground. They conducted an orderly battle of retreat and even managed to wound seriously two of the Arabs; they themselves incurred no injuries. Meanwhile, the action had been discerned at Kadoorie. Led by Zemach, the teachers took two of the rifles on the premises and set out as reinforcements. Allon described the fight as a battle he had headed, organized, and directed. This leadership role is not remembered by other participants. In any case, it seems that Yigal called out to the teachers to fire in the air to miss, for fear of escalation. He had absorbed Mes’ha’s long-standing code: caution lest blood be spilled, yet resolve to give as good as one got.31
But this was not yet the end. A-Zbekh Arabs complained to the authorities of aggression and the police descended on Kadoorie to detain the pupils involved.32 They, including Allon, were carted off to jail in Tiberias. The adventure did them no harm and certainly added to their peer prestige. Allon was proud to have carried on the family tradition: both his father and brothers had been “privileged” to imprisonment