Reuven’s intrepid stance and Zvi’s injury nourished many a tale, magnified by the fact that a year later, Klimantovsky’s sister married the second Paicovich son, Mordekhai. The episode contained all of the ingredients of the Wild West, including the sense that the authorities could not be relied on to ensure the safety of the settlers.
Its wider context, however, is virtually absent from descriptions by the residents of Mes’ha. In this period, the whole of the Galilee—Lower and Upper—was in turmoil. But the connection to Emir Faisal’s deposition in Damascus by the French escaped Mes’ha’s notice. To the settlers, the raid from Transjordan was a local clash; it was not related to the serious skirmish that had taken place at Tzemah a month before (on 23 May 1920) between the Indian army stationed there and Bedouin attempting to invade from the desert. The people of Mes’ha saw the raid as more of the same, as an extension of the constant battle over grazing land and water sources: a conflict between the lawless and the law-abiding folk. It rankled them that their Arab neighbors—far from coming to their aid—had actually helped the robbers. Nevertheless, the nationalist awakening washing over the colony in those days did not make them view their neighbors as having the same aspirations. The perceptions of Wild Galilee were still paramount.
In the thick tension following the incident, Jewish settlers in the Galilee and the Jordan Valley submitted a strong protest to the military governor in Tiberias for the lapse in peace and security. As a result, the Indian army was stationed at colonies in the Upper and the Lower Galilee, and, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty and fear of war, calm was gradually restored and life reverted to its normal course.70
This unsure interval highlighted Mes’ha’s virtues and faults. The courageous stance on life and property, the unhesitant enlistment of the young in battle, reflected the great distance traveled by former denizens of Lithuanian shtetlach to Eastern Galilee’s untamed frontier. Nearby colonies equally stood up to the test: Yavne’el, for instance, made immediate provisions to supply Mes’ha with a daily shipment of milk (preboiled, of course, so as not to spoil on the way). In contrast, when it was suggested that farming be organized communally, with everyone working together on a different field each day, the residents of Mes’ha could not get their act together: those with nearer fields balked; those with better work animals refused to help neighbors whose beasts were a cut below.71
Paicovich was among the main victims of the robbery, losing five cows and five bulls. Only one other farmer lost more, and only two others matched him72—meaning that his was one of the more prosperous farms in the village.
It was, in many respects, a peak period in Mes’ha’s history and in the Paicovich annals. In the war years, as noted, grain fetched high prices and Mes’ha had plenty of grain. In 1917–18, the rain was generous, producing a bumper crop. Afterward, a constant decline set in, both in harvests and prices.73 Successive drought brought on a plague of field mice that ate away at the meager yields for three consecutive years. Settlers had to borrow money from government sources and the ICA.74 Attempts to diversify cereal farming with dry orchards failed. Only olives and almonds could be grown without irrigation. The vines had succumbed to disease during World War I, almonds were economically unviable, and even olives, so common in Arab villages, did not do well at Mes’ha.
In the Jewish Yishuv in those days, the Third Aliyah immigration wave enlarged the population and injected a boost of initiative, action, and building. Innovation and experimentation were the name of the game, whether in agriculture and industry or in new settlement forms, such as the cooperative moshav, the kvutza or large commune (the forerunner of the kibbutz), or the “labor battalion” (contract workers who lived in collective equality). The times were infused with a burst of youthful energy and the joy of creation. But not at Mes’ha. It seemed to have sunk into slumber, hardly touched by the changes sweeping over the Yishuv. And yet, for a short moment it too seemed to come alive, in the “war of the generations” in the colonies of the Lower Galilee. But victory went to the “old.”75
The triumph of conservatism over renewal found expression in the old farming methods. Mature farmers had little interest in new inventions or mechanization. Uneducated and naturally suspicious, they had no use for the new-fangled notions banging at the doors of their small world. In particular, they were wary of anything that smacked of “bolshevism”; to them, it stood for everything that nipped individual independence and freedom of action.
The question of Jewish labor lay at the heart of the controversy between the “progressives” and the “conservatives.” Everyone agreed that the colony was too small and the Jewish settlers so few as to threaten its existence. Mes’ha’s street retained an essentially Arab character, as in the period of the Second Aliyah. The number of Arabs living there was certainly no less—and sometimes even more—than the number of Jews. The cattle robbery of 1920 gave the Jews of Mes’ha a moment of alarm that their Arab neighbors, including the friends and kinsmen of their harats, would join forces with the thieves. In 1921, thirty-two Jews were reportedly hired as annual workers at Mes’ha, apparently on the same conditions as harats. They soon organized evening Hebrew classes, and outside lecturers included them on their circuit.76 All of a sudden Mes’ha was part of the Yishuv. Yet in less than a year, the number of Jewish workers dropped to nine, after having inspired a local counterculture: a Bnei Binyamin club, an organization of second-generation settlers, was founded in the colony, and most of Mes’ha’s young joined it. Culturally, it did not amount to much. But it accented—and exacerbated—the rivalry between farmers, who considered themselves middle class, and Jewish laborers, who leaned toward the Zionist Left.77
By 1921 it was clear that the dry farming of cereals could not support hired labor, whether Jewish or Arab, and that a radical solution was needed for the colonies’ woes—to reduce the size of the farm units and switch over to intensive farming.78 Of course, no one had the energy to tackle the farmers, the ICA, or the objective conditions. The lack of internal cooperation and the unwillingness of the farmers to establish a representative organization with financial and electoral clout prevented the Galilee’s settlers from constituting the political force that could have improved their lot.
In the eyes of the young Yigal, however, these were the best years. With the exception of his eldest brother, Moshe, who, after his release from British wartime imprisonment, left Mes’ha to work on the Haifa railway, the whole family was together. His mother, Chaya, showered the fair child of her “old age” with love and pampering, while Reuven, too, was not immune to his charms. On one heart-stopping occasion, Reuven, driving a mule-wagon laden with goods, spied Yigal alone in the fields. Unable to rein in the animals because of the weight of their load, he cried out from afar for the child to move out of the way, but to no avail. Yigal slid beneath the wheels. Only after he saw that the child had suffered minor cuts was Reuven able to breathe again. But the incident was apparently traumatic enough for him to recall it fifty years later.79 Yigal’s version of the same incident was different: Reuven, he said, commanded the doctor to save the child or he would have his head.80
Those happy years were dominated by the mother’s quiet presence. The adult Allon described his parents’ home—with its scents and dishes, with the serenity of a Sabbath eve descending on it, as the hub that it was for the colony’s guards and guests—as a short season of motherly grace. It was soon taken from him: after finishing her housework one Friday, Chaya sat down to rest, keeled over, and lost consciousness. The doctors summoned to her bedside did not hold