Times were tense and confrontations between the Jewish Yishuv and the British authorities were frequent. The British had crushed the Arab Rebellion with an iron hand. But, at the same time, they embarked on a policy aimed at winning Arab goodwill or at least ensuring quiet by stymieing the development of the Jewish National Home. The White Paper produced by Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald and promulgated in May 1939 severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchase of land and announced the intention of his majesty’s government to establish an independent state in Palestine in another ten years, a state with an Arab majority. The transition from Jewish-British cooperation during the Arab Rebellion to Jewish-British confrontation entailed painful adaptation: it meant a change of tactics and going underground. The Ginossar affair slipped into these new relations. The routine report by and recording of the ten members at the police station now led to an official investigation, followed by detention and imprisonment in Acre jail to await court martial. Things looked grim: first, there was the fact of being tried in a military court rather than a regular one; and second, it soon turned out that not a single Arab suspect had been apprehended. Still, Ginossar’s members were not overly perturbed about the outcome: after all, it had been a clear case of self-defense, an incident like dozens of others that had taken place during the Rebellion. Nor was the Jewish Agency’s Political Department (JA-PD) especially worried, though it did engage the services of two top attorneys.
Allon was well-known to the villagers of abu-Shusha. Having lived his whole life among Arabs, he had been the natural candidate to negotiate with them on the spring water. In addition, he seems to have had friends in the village; according to one version of the battle, during the fighting, Mukhtar Hamis, who was later killed, saved Allon’s life by preventing shots from being fired at him.50 The villagers of Abu-Shusha swore that he had been among the assailants, but there was no corroborating evidence. At the trial, he served as an aide to the defense, especially on the military aspects: weapons, shooting, field movements, and so forth, details that were vital to the court proceedings but obscure to the lawyers.
In the end, the excellent defense of the able lawyers performed no magic and Ginossar’s ten members were sentenced to long prison terms. The verdict came as a shock: no one had expected a conviction or, certainly, so draconian a sentence. It was a harsh blow to tiny Ginossar, which was stripped suddenly of ten of its prominent, active members, including a core of its founders, among them Israel Levy and Yehoshua Rabinowitz, the farm manager and mukhtar respectively. In October 1940, Ginossar’s external secretary, Absalom Zoref, was also put out of commission. While walking in the fields near Acre in the hope of catching a glimpse of his jailed friends there, he came across three Arabs and was stabbed in the stomach. Zoref was laid up in the hospital for months before the wound healed.51 Ginossar was a ship without a helm, and Allon had little choice but to come to its rescue. Thus began his intensive period at Ginossar.
Allon was the key figure on the kibbutz for about a year and a half. One indication of his vital presence was a letter of protest dashed off by Israel Levy from prison to Ginossar when he learned of Allon’s recruitment for work with the Haganah (June 1940): “Ginossar’s plight makes it necessary for Yigal to play a role at home, and he, too, morally and socially, must fight to be available to the kevutzah in its special circumstances, nor can the [national] institutions ignore this demand.”52 In this period, Allon left his mark on Ginossar. It was the only time in his life that he was actively involved in the kibbutz.
The goal he set for himself was for the kevutzah to gain control of all the PICA’s lands not tilled by Arabs in the Jordan Valley. He began with a small step. One night, members of the kevutzah were recruited to plant 10 dunams (2.25 acres, 1 ha) of bananas, adding to the 200 or so sown dunams they had already cultivated. The PICA responded with a legal suit against Ginossar’s officials, including Allon. Public opinion, however, was with Ginossar. It granted the act legitimacy, which was symbolized by the fact that Hartzfeld spent the seder night of Passover 1940 with Ginossar’s prisoners in Acre, while the Labor leader and mentor Berl Katznelson chose to spend the holiday with the young kevutzah.53
As soon as the holiday was over, Hartzfeld wrote the PICA saying that, in view of the kevutzah’s courage and stamina, he could not accept its removal from the land; he suggested that the PICA resign itself to the situation, recognize Ginossar’s right to settle there, and even lease to it 600 dunams of Ju’ar land for the war period so that it could farm it legally.54 When France fell, and contact between the PICA’s executive in Haifa and its head office in Paris was cut off, Hartzfeld stepped up the pressure.55 The Haifa office refused to take responsibility without instructions from Paris, although it did agree to Ginnossar’s request to drop the banana suit.56 Allon had just promised the PICA not to venture beyond the 200 dunams cultivated by Ginossar, yet he immediately presented the members of the kevutzah with an expansion plan.57 The first stage called for constructing a concrete building, a sign of permanence, unlike the rickety shacks and tents that could be easily taken down. The pretext was security—a building to shelter children in times of emergency.58 To Allon and his friends, this was merely and clearly a further stage in the battle with the PICA, a test of how far Ginossar could go. Meanwhile negotiations proceeded with the PICA on formally regulating relations between them.
The PICA’s response was eventually forthcoming. Ginossarites spotted the PICA’s tractors overturning the soil around them, and they feared a plot. Had a Jewish settlement with no less right to the land than Ginossar reached an agreement with the PICA, leasing from it the lands that Ginossar believed should come to it? The fear was real and the settlement in question was the colony Migdal.
The PICA had in fact leased 250 dunams (62.5 acres, 25 ha) to Migdal. Allon now showed his mettle. Young and unknown, he nevertheless displayed leadership and resolve, calling on his powers of persuasion to recruit tractors from kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley. The tractors moved into action at the close of the Sukkot holiday, plowing all that could be plowed in the whole PICA area. The outcry was not long in coming: Ginossar, this time, had acted not against the PICA—which was naturally suspect in the Yishuv’s Zionist eyes—but against a small, poor colony. After much haggling, the two sides agreed to accept Berl Katznelson’s arbitration and the land was divided in two: the part on the west side of the road went to Migdal; the part on the east to Ginossar. The agreement was sealed on 2 December 1940 with the signature of Yigal Paicovich. Berl Katznelson’s handwritten endorsement in the margin gave it the weight of his authority.59
The affair highlighted some of Allon’s valuable qualities. He was eager to do battle with the PICA, which he appraised to have no fighting spirit. He was prepared to resort to piracy and subsequently to stand behind it.60 At the same time, he grasped the importance of public opinion and took pains to explain Ginossar’s position in the press and before the Yishuv’s institutions. He also showed an understanding of Migdal: in public he may have contended that it did not require the disputed lands; off the record, he acknowledged its real need. This, apparently, was one of the reasons that he agreed to compromise in contrast to his staunch and steady defiance of the PICA.61
The Migdal affair threw him into close contact with Berl Katznelson, one of the key Labor leaders. The determined kevutzah fighting for its right to till the land kindled Berl’s interest. He had most probably had a soft spot for Ginossar even earlier, for its refusal to join any single kibbutz stream and fiercely maintain organizational independence. Katznelson, campaigning at the time to unify all the kibbutz streams into one movement, felt affection and kinship for these young people who were actually living his doctrine. When, to add to their woes, ten of their members were arrested, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, he spent the 1940 Passover seder with them. He also helped them obtain a loan of P£200