Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira
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Название: Yigal Allon, Native Son
Автор: Anita Shapira
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
Серия: Jewish Culture and Contexts
isbn: 9780812203431
isbn:
Ruth’s sights were set on working in the cowshed. But city girl that she was, she did not take easily to physical toil and so did not meet the challenge at Tel Yosef. At Ginossar, she again tried her hand in the cowshed. Later, she was proud to be assigned to fieldwork. In the early years, she fell prey to various illnesses, including typhus and malaria. There were emotional difficulties too: she lacked the mentality and social traditions of Yishuv society, which was predominantly “Russian”; and moreover, there was the shame of hailing from the country of the Nazis. She felt inferior to the young native Jews around her—and they certainly did not go out of their way to make things any easier. She eagerly adopted the pinafore, the embroidered blouse, and the elastic-bottomed shorts, an outfit that was almost a status symbol of the new society. The desire to “assimilate” was strong, and even if there was little sensitivity to or understanding of the woes of an individual, a foreigner, an orphan, there was something spellbinding about Ginossar’s young society: it had the air of a band of boys and girls on a desert island; a whole world that consisted only of themselves.41
All of the girls at Ginossar were attracted to Yigal: apart from his reputation as a farmer and warrior, he was handsome, nice, cheerful, and good-hearted.42 It was only natural that his choice would be Ruth, the “star” of the German group, as his friends said.43 He was everything an immigrant girl could wish for: his manly qualities aside, he was native born, a sabra personified, and well-ensconced in the society to which she aspired to belong. Their very different cultural backgrounds added mystery and charm to the relationship. But they had also undergone a similar experience—a severance of roots: Allon from Mes’ha and its world; Ruth from the land of her birth and parental home. For both, Ginossar held out the promise of a new start, hope for a future not lodged in the past.44
A mere few months separated Allon’s break with Ada Zemach and his attachment to Ruth. Was this an indication that he had been hurt by Ada’s refusal to join him on the kibbutz? Whatever the case, his relationship with Ruth was on an entirely different footing: With Ada, he had been older and more experienced in affairs of the heart, even as he was her inferior socially and culturally. With Ruth, he was the dominant partner from the start, having the social and cultural edge as well. Neither was broadly educated and, in this sense, they were equal. But he, of course, had the added advantage of a native over an immigrant.
They must have been the best-looking couple at Ginossar if not in the whole Jordan Valley. They soon moved into a family room, which meant half of a room in a hut along with another family and the infamous “third.” Formal marriage, according to the laws of Moses and Israel, took place later, apparently around 1939, in a mundane atmosphere stripped of the romance surrounding their move to the family room. One day, after work, Allon and Ruth simply drove to a rabbi in Tiberias accompanied by two members of Ginossar who served as witnesses. The rabbi lent them a ring for the ceremony and that was that.45 There were no relatives present, not his father or brothers, not her sisters.
Ruth soon understood that Allon would be away a lot, yet it never even entered her head to complain. Security came first and everyone was enlisted, in spirit if not in fact. Security work epitomized the apex of commitment and lent an aura to both the volunteers who performed and those who were close to them. Allon was well liked by the members of the kevutzah even though in the difficult years of 1938–40, he spent little time at Ginossar.46 And then something happened that suddenly brought him home.
Figure 7. Yigal and Ruth Allon. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allon family.
Ginossar took advantage of the eruption of WorldWar II on 1 September 1939 to further extend its vegetable tracts and planted fields. The pretext was that the emergency made it necessary to farm every bit of land lest wartime imports be stopped and/or the Arabs worked the lands and thereby gained rights to them.47
Up until that time, the Arabs of the Ju’ar village of abu-Shusha had used part of the waters of the Rabadiyeh spring and left the rest to flow into the Sea of Galilee. Like some of the village lands, the spring was the property of the PICA though the Arabs held it and Ginossar sought to obtain legal rights to it. The members of Ginnosar began by talking to the villagers and even reached an agreement: after the abu-Shusha lands were irrigated, the waters were to be channeled across Ginossar lands. But the Arabs broke the agreement and diverted the spring waters to the wadi on the approach to the village, from there to spill into the lake. The diversion was accomplished by placing a large rock in the channel to direct the flow. After the agreement was broken several times, the British stationed its Jewish Settlement Police (JSP) to guard the water.48 On 27 October 1939 a mobile, three-man JSP patrol was attacked. One member was hurt and his firearm was stolen. The guards shot into the air to raise the alert and call for help. A squad was organized at Ginossar with Allon (who had been recalled from Tiberias, where he served at Haganah’s headquarters) commanding the counterattack. At nightfall, the toll was three wounded Arabs and two dead, including abu-Shusha’s mukhtar himself—Sheikh abu-Fais Hamis, a notable landowner.
After the battle, the JSP guards among Ginossar’s members reported to the Tiberias police station to furnish an account of the incident. They said that an armed gang had assaulted the guards, that the others had rushed to their defense, and that the Arabs were hit in the course of the fighting, with one of the guards also wounded. Ten of Ginossar’s members were recorded as having taken part. Allon, who was no longer attached to the JSP, was not included on the record: had he admitted to possessing nonlegal arms, he could have faced life imprisonment or even hanging.49
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.
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