Allon’s case was typical of the way that Sadeh recruited his “soldiers”: Allon began his formal career in security work in the summer of 1936. That August, he was inducted into the Jewish Settlement Police (JSP),9 an auxiliary force formed by the British to help furnish defense for Jewish settlements throughout the country. It was the common track for young Jews: here, draftees were trained in the use of arms and kept on the alert to come to the aid of beleaguered settlements, escort convoys, or provide cover for farmers working in the fields. The JSP served two masters: one, British and official; the other, the Haganah and underground. This hardly made their lives any easier. On the contrary, often it resulted in entanglements that demanded all of the diplomatic skills of Yehoshua Gordon, their commander and the liaison between the two chains of command.10 In any case, many of rural Palestine’s young men, including Allon, received their initial training in the JSP’s paramilitary framework.
Yigal’s military activity was more or less a natural outgrowth of his childhood involvement in the ritualistic squabbles between the residents of Mes’ha, notably his father, and the a-Zbekh Arabs. For him, as for other residents of Mes’ha, the notion of holing up within Mes’ha’s walls while Arabs destroyed fields and orchards was foreign and unreasonable. Mes’ha’s villagers had always “gone beyond the fence” without any explicit policy. Allon carried with him the memories of the 1929 Disturbances, when his father went out to guard and left him, an eleven-year-old boy, all alone. He would scramble up to the attic, remove the ladder to keep the rampagers away, and wait with an axe in hand, a provision Reuven had made for his self-defense. The mere thought of having to use the “weapon” had made him queasy and given him nightmares.11 But that had been years ago. The sense of helplessness of that experience was now replaced by robust action.
Figure 8. Allon as a sergeant of the Jewish Settlement Police, 1937.
Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Haganah Archives, Tel Aviv.
Allon, early in his career in the JSP, caught the eye of Nahum Kramer (Shadmi), the commander of the Tiberias bloc of the Haganah. In no time at all, Allon was appointed the commanding officer of the tender, an eight-man van outfitted with rifles, guns, and usually a Louis machine gun, along with—contrary to British orders—“illegal” grenades. In theory, the vans were financed by bloc settlers for their defense and placed at the disposal of the bloc’s settlement police. In practice, the vehicles were purchased by the JA executive. The British had no objection to the JSP improving its mobility; they themselves would sometimes use the vehicles and manpower during the Arab Rebellion. But the pretense was kept up that the vehicles were a local initiative for settler needs in order to ward off possible accusations about the JSP’s dual command. The vans were considered the height of operational advancement at the time, and their effects were certainly felt in the field. They were soon converted into armored cars impregnable to the light firearms used by Arab rebels. Every bloc had its own van and commanding officer, who was appointed by the bloc commander.
Allon already had the reputation of a shrewd, daring young man in the JSP when he met Yitzhak Sadeh. His description of the encounter approached the biblical: in the summer of 1937, as he was turning a threshing sledge—monotonous work ordinarily done by Arab laborers who, however, were staying away because of the Rebellion—a boy ran up and summoned him to his father’s house. The boy was the son of Mes’ha’s Haganah commander, and Allon, he said, was wanted because of the arrival of a high-ranking Haganah officer. Allon’s first impression of Sadeh was disappointment: he was tall, portly, balding, and spectacled, and he had an oleaginous growth on his forehead; he looked sloppy in shorts, drooping knee socks, and frayed sandals, and, if this were not enough, he was missing several teeth. Not thus had Allon imagined the military hero.12
The Haganah had just decided to set up a new subdivision of field companies and Sadeh was recruiting promising candidates. He had managed to persuade the Haganah’s senior cadre that the field companies should operate under their own command, drawing manpower from all over the country.13 He was looking for recruits with a track record and he inducted members of the mobile squads and young men who had made a name for themselves in the JSP. This is how he came to Allon.
He suggested to Allon that he join the new national contingent and bring along his friends from Mes’ha. Yigal may have found Sadeh off-putting, but he agreed at once: he had been selected for an elite unit and any other response was inconceivable. Under Sadeh’s instructions, he mustered his peers at dusk for a night exercise and the group set out through the dark fields. Sadeh, in front, hardly set a good example: his foot managed to find every stone, every twig, shattering the silence. And yet, the solid figure striding at the head of the column radiated confidence. The purpose of the exercise was to lay an ambush near the Maghrebi village some four kilometers from Mes’ha. The ambush was laid, the flanks secured and prayers offered for the sighting of an armed gang. The prayers went unanswered. Sadeh ordered “his troops” to fire several volleys in the air toward the village and return to Mes’ha. In Allon’s yard, he sat them down around a small campfire to sum up: the goal, he said, was to harass the Arabs so as to end their mastery of the night. Surprise attacks in Arab areas would force them to assign manpower for village defense, hampering their offensive capability in Jewish areas. There was to be no personal terror against Arabs—he stressed—but attack was to be answered by attack, forcing the Arabs onto the defensive.14
For Allon and his friends it was an epiphany: “Fragmented thoughts that had long flashed through our minds suddenly came together in a full-blown doctrine. We were all impelled by a terrific feeling and we knew instinctively: he’s the man.”15 Though this description may have been colored by subsequent encounters between the two men, there is no denying the strong impression Sadeh made on the boys champing at the bit. Here was an adult who spoke little and did a lot; who not only did not shrink from danger but was eager for battle; who proposed simple, obvious, bold, and effective operational strategies. And above all, he had the charisma to imbue confidence in his followers and shower them with love. The romance between Sadeh and the Yishuv’s young began with the field companies and spawned a new generation of active warriors.
In the months following, Allon was busy dismantling his father’s farm and moving to Ginossar. He continued his duties in the Tiberias bloc of the JSP under Nahum Kramer and was soon called up by the field companies for a five-day officers’ training course at Kibbutz Ayelet Ha-Shahar.16 It was the Haganah’s first practical course in field weapons and fieldcraft. The focus was on battle drill. It included target practice with guns, and grenades, the use of machine guns, and an introduction to sabotage. Hours were spent on fieldcraft and night walking.17 The cadets learned to devise a plan of action, allot and organize manpower and equipment, read maps, set up inter-unit communication, reconnoiter, and, above all, to lead men in battle.18
The course was aimed at producing squad commanders to train bloc personnel. At Ginossar, for example, Allon then gave a course on the friction grenade, which to detonate properly required a few seconds’ delay between releasing the safety pin and hurling the grenade. Allon would stand next to the learner and have the latter count to ten before letting it fly, while the rest of the pupils took cover behind mounds of earth—just in case. In one of the drills, an apprentice left out the counting. He released the pin and made ready to throw the grenade. Everyone tensed. Allon clamped the man’s arm and prevented the motion. The pupil struggled to get free. Allon coolly continued the count to ten and only then did he allow his charge to continue. None of those present ever forgot the incident.19