In the Plain of Ginossar, the PICA owned some five thousand dunams (1,125 acres; 500 ha) of land. Part of this was tilled by Arab villagers from Abu-Shusha, next to Migdal, and part was tilled directly by the PICA under its own manager with the help of Arab laborers. At the eruption of the Disturbances, the PICA realized that the solitary Jewish manager was in danger. It now agreed to a proposal from Abraham Hartzfeld of the Histadrut’s Agricultural Center to lease lands to Kevutzat HNHO, Migdal, and the group was hired to turn over the soil and uproot the wild blackthorn north of the plowed area. During the work there was tension in the air. On one occasion, the guard was late in spotting a gang attacking from Wadi Amud, and one of the plowers was wounded.6
When Yigal arrived in July 1937, several months after his friends from Kadoorie, the course of the kevutzah had already been decided: in February 1937 Kevutzat HNHO, Migdal signed a contract with the PICA; the kevutzah was to buy the hay the PICA had sown at Ju’ar (Ginossar’s Arabic name) for Palestine £250 and harvest it.7 The entire plain north of Migdal had not a single Jewish settlement and served as a transit route for bands from Syria and Transjordan. This lawlessness aroused the kevutzah’s slim hope that it would be permitted to settle on these lands. The reason it gave was that it would guard the hay from arsonists; the goal, however, was to set down stakes in the plain, in the hope that the PICA would subsequently find it hard to dislodge the group. Abraham Hartzfeld was party to the calculations and encouraged the ketvutzah.
On the eve of Purim, March 1937, a convoy set out from Migdal to the cultivated area and, within days, the members of the ketvutzah had raised a tower-and-stockade settlement—one of the hallmarks of that frenzied period: some ten dunams of land were fenced off, and within this area a watchtower was thrown up, a gravel-filled fence was built, and one hut, then another, were knocked together, along with a few tents. The small camp, it was explained to the PICA official, was necessary to protect the site.8 The PICA’s Palestine director, who was based in Haifa, forthwith notified the members of the kevutzah that as soon as they had gathered the produce they were to dismantle the guard post and hut and get off the land.9 The kevutzah—now called Kevutzat Ginossar for the first time—made no promise.10 Meanwhile, Hartzfeld stepped up his pressure on the PICA to settle these young pioneers who had shown such dedication and readiness to defend the land in those hard times, for this was the most effective way to ensure Jewish ownership over the land and make good use of the water-rich fertile soil in the area.11
By the time Allon arrived, it was no secret that the PICA did not share Hartzfeld’s viewpoint. He treated the PICA’s holdings as national land; it regarded the Ginossar camp as trespassing. Yet the young men and women clearly had no intention of leaving, continuing to hope for some sort of accommodation. The PICA wasn’t interested: it wanted the kevutzah off its land. The Agricultural Center tried to placate the PICA, taking care not to dent its prestige or mar relations with the Rothschilds, the company’s owners. Ginossar’s members were also prepared to placate the PICA—as far as lip service went.
The PICA had the law on its side, along with the financial power of a large settlement company and the force of political pressure: so long as the conflict with Ginossar remained unresolved, the national institutions, including the Jewish Agency (JA) and the Agricultural Center, could not assist the young settlement. The budgetary stranglehold caused Ginossar severe hardship in the early years and was a direct result of the PICA’s pressure. Nevertheless, the PICA’s public position was also the source of its weakness: it was no ordinary private company; rather, it was driven by Zionism and was not immune to the influence of settlement bodies and Jewish public opinion. There was thus little chance that it would use force to evict this kevutzah of fine young people, even if they were squatters. Nor was it reasonable that it would appeal to the law since turning to the British could provoke an outcry.12 The Ginossarites bet on the PICA’s feeble reaction, and relations settled into a regular pattern: an attempt was made to negotiate; the kevutzah acknowledged its wrongs and promised to behave better in the future if the PICA forgave it its sins and recognized the status quo; the PICA refused to relinquish its holdings, demanding the kevutzah’s removal; and negotiations collapsed. But every such failure led to further encroachment by the kevutzah, to another fact on the ground in blatant, audacious defiance and total disregard of the PICA’s objections.
The determination of the young to stay at Ginossar no matter what was echoed in their battle cry of “Ginossar and only Ginossar.” Apart from the site’s beauty, which chained them with love, its farming potential was enormous. “Better that we sit here waiting for this land for a year, two, three, five, for even then we will draw more from this soil than from any other,” said Israel Levy, then Ginossar’s central figure.13 As time passed, the bond to the land only tightened. Time was in their favor, for each passing day there meant another patch tilled, another pipe laid, one more birth, one more burial.
When Allon came on the scene, the pattern of the dispute over Ginossar’s illegal camp was already set, and he took an extreme position on the matter of placating the PICA. When it became clear that the clash would squeeze the group financially, Allon made a statement at one of the assemblies that became Ginossar’s catchphrase: “We will sow two hundred dunams of wheat and ten dunams of onions and we’ll eat bread and onion.”14 This bravado—undoubtedly nourished too by his great love for the bulb that showed up in his every salad—summed up Ginossar’s resolve.
Allon seems to have been eager for the confrontation with the PICA. He could not have been oblivious to the difference in Ginossar-PICA relations and those between Mes’ha’s old-timers—his father included—and the PICA. Mes’ha’s farmers had faced the PICA cap in hand. In contrast, Ginossar’s young were the active element, pushing the PICA into a resigned, passive corner. The role reversal between initiator and submitter, between the party in control and the party forced to knuckle under, must have put a song in his heart.
A few months later, at the height of the Arab Rebellion in August 1938, Ginossar’s land-grab aims took another step forward: one weekend, as the PICA official in charge indulged in his Sabbath rest, the kevutzah mobilized to install a small pumping station, pipes, and an irrigation line from the Sea of Galilee to a 20-dunam tract; the group also planted a vegetable garden. The PICA issued a strenuous protest: the group was to remove the pipes and uproot the tomato plants.15 Two weeks later the PICA received an inordinately courteous letter requesting its permission to create a winter vegetable garden at Ginossar—an idea “that can shore up our stamina in these troubled times and further bolster our readiness to preserve the integrity of the PICA’s lands at Ju’ar as we have done to date.”16 The letter ended with the disingenuous hope that when the PICA decided to settle these lands, it would look on the Ginossar kevutzah as a suitable candidate. In vain did the PICA protest and threaten legal action.17 The kevutzah blithely went about its business, affably ignoring the company.
In the autumn of 1938 the Arab Rebellion peaked and the local security situation badly deteriorated. In one incident, an Arab gang fell upon a Jewish neighborhood in Tiberias and, meeting no opposition, killed, wounded, and plundered (see the next chapter). As far as security personnel were concerned, this only made the small settlement point on the Kinneret shore all the more important. Meir Rotberg, of the Haganah High Command, applied to the PICA not only to leave Ginossar in place but to enlarge it (11 October 1938).18 He was seconded by the Haganah’s district commander, Nahum Kramer