Yigal Allon, Native Son. Anita Shapira

PICA’s help, a group of Mes’ha’s farmers got together to purchase a jointly owned tractor.

      Following sterile attempts and sterile investments by the PICA, finally, in 1932, Mes’ha’s homes and farmyards were supplied with running water. An entire saga can be written about the water problem, informed by Mes’ha’s bungling in making its demands and the PICA’s in meeting them; the former suffered from articulation problems, the latter from technical incompetence. The efforts to install a functioning system went back to 1926 and were a resounding failure, which was virtually imitated in 1932. Given the day-to-day hardships endured by the settlers, one can sympathize with their bitterness and suspicion of the PICA, although this hardly excuses their passivity or inability to organize for the common good.⁹¹

      The early 1930s were full of improvements at Mes’ha. In 1933, electricity came to the village. As usual, there were grumblers who refused to contribute to the required funding, but, in retrospect, all welcomed it.⁹² In addition, the opening of the Kadouri Agricultural School in 1934 made it necessary to pave a road to Tiberias and Afula.

      Following Yavne’el’s success, Mes’ha seemed to accept the new farming arrangements. For its part, the PICA helped in the acquisition of a tractor and planned for a combine as well. Paicovich had no part in the tractor’s purchase. He continued to toil alongside his harat.⁹³

      Paicovich’s conservatism may have been one of the reasons that, one by one, his sons quit the farm. Zvi settled in Netanya and even Eliav, the only farmer among them, gave up agriculture and moved to the city. Allon’s explanation was that they could not obtain holdings at Mes’ha. This is inconsistent with the fact that there were about a dozen abandoned farms at Mes’ha, and the colony was desperate to increase its dwindling population. Besides, Paicovich’s holding alone was certainly large enough to support two families, albeit based on the new cultivation methods. The trouble was that he was set in his ways and refused to hear of change. In the stifling atmosphere of a gloomy home and backward farm, the brothers chose to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

      Their departure was a blow to Paicovich. He had envisioned an entire neighborhood populated by an extended Paicovich clan. Now, here he was at the start of the 1930s, in a house with only his youngest son, Allon.⁹⁴

      The young Allon was left with a dour father who cast a giant shadow and was the fount of kindness and correction, love and frost, closeness and remoteness, a man for whom any show of affection was a sign of weakness. The mature Allon wrote little of this time, but, reading between the lines, one senses a wistfulness. When the boy hurt himself falling from a galloping horse, he received no embrace or sympathy; instead, he was told to get right back on (without the saddle that had torn) and take himself to the pharmacy. Allon tried to put off the ride to the next day. Reuven wouldn’t have it. Remarked the adult Allon: “He loved me, I knew that, but in his reactions he was always reticent and Spartan.”⁹⁵ The fact that Allon was the child of his old age took some of the edge off his relentlessness. Moreover, he grew increasingly conscious that Yigal alone, of all his sons, was still on the farm—his last hope. He blamed himself for the boys’ departures, pinning it on his own restrictiveness. Yet he did not spare Yigal; the boy could be sure of a hiding if he neglected farm duties or schoolwork.⁹⁶ Allon’s awe of his father was mixed with a constant desire to please him, to acquit himself with flying colors in the tests he set him.

      Figure 3. Allon as a child in Me’sha. Photographer unknown. The Davar Collection. Courtesy of the Lavon Institute for the Study of the Labor Movement, Tel Aviv.

      Growing up in his father’s shadow, Allon was filled with admiration for al-Insari’s unflinching stance in the clashes with Arab neighbors that made up the rhythm of life. The brushes with robbers sparked no particular animosity. On the contrary: just as there were Arabs who stole, there were Arab harats who shared the family farmyard. One account tells of Allon being nursed by a harat’s wife. In time, his natural playmates were the harat’s children. During summer vacation, he would spend two weeks with a family of Arab friends at Kafr Ein Mahl, near Nazareth, basking in all the pampering and attention he lacked at home.⁹⁷ Scaling the Tabor with his father, the two would sidetrack to a Bedouin tent and a warm welcome from neighbors with whom they had exchanged blows. The frontier code of conduct valued valor, daring, resolve.

      Young Allon’s world was circumscribed by Mes’ha’s narrow horizon and anti-intellectual society. Education was not a consideration in the PICA’s selection of settlers, and frontier society, by its very nature, values physical attributes over “spiritual” qualities. Allon painted Paicovich as a cultured frontiersman with a love of books and reading.⁹⁸ This portrait too seems to have been drawn by wishful thinking: Paicovich’s letters to the PICA, like others from Mes’ha, were written in broken Hebrew, although there is no doubt that he respected education and made sure Allon was not remiss about his studies.

      Allon was a conscientious pupil. An extant letter that he wrote when in second grade, to an ill teacher, is illustrated with a picture at the bottom showing Allon himself sick in bed.⁹⁹ In 1928, at the age of ten, he wrote a poem and a composition for the school newspaper. The composition is a specimen of the high-sounding language of the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah) upheld at Mes’ha’s school—one could not have too much of it.¹⁰⁰ He contributed also to the quiz section, suggesting riddles that required a fair mastery of the Bible. The raw material for the newspaper must have been vetted by a careful eye because a letter he wrote two years later to the teacher Ephra’im Derekh shows quite a few errors of style. The Haskalah’s flowery phraseology features here as well: “Out of doors, the wind wails,” Allon wrote, “and I am seated alongside whispering embers and writing you the letter.” The letter sheds light on the curriculum: arithmetic class was not up to scratch. The pupils (the fifth grade, apparently) learned a series of topics, from grammar to crafts, together with the eighth. For Bible studies, it was common to memorize whole chapters. The children wrote a good many compositions. Allon’s special writing talent was on “My Family Memories” and “My Favorite Animal.” He comes across as a nice, obedient child, amiable to his teachers, scholastically ambitious, without any sense of rebellion.

      Mes’ha in the 1920s did not attract enviable schoolmasters. Top teachers chose to live in the city or in the villages of Labor settlement. In 1933, the school won the high commissioner’s prize for raising silkworms and gardening. The awards did not solve the problems of a leaking roof in winter or a plague of flies in summer. In the 1930s, an effort was made to improve the school’s exterior and install an ornamental garden, which even won the Wauchope Prize. The children threw themselves into the task eagerly. Not so the parents, who considered gardening and ornamentation as a whole an unjustified waste of precious water.¹⁰¹

      Even if the school did not really broaden the children’s vistas, it apparently left its stamp in several areas of study: Bible studies, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. It was in fact a “nationalist” curriculum, aimed at bonding the child to the people and the land, especially the latter. In general, Jewish history in Exile was depicted as one long chain of persecution. In Allon’s imagination the Crusades were so tied to the Inquisition that when he traveled to Nazareth with his father he was careful not to bend down near a church lest it be understood as kneeling before the cross. He had no such misgivings about Islam, having learned in school that Muslims were tolerant of Jews, with the emphasis on Spain’s Golden Age.¹⁰² The Bible was the local history book: Saul and his sons; the prophetess Deborah; Barak, the son of Avinoam; Yael and Sisera; Gideon—all had waged their campaigns within an arrow’s shot of Kefar Tavor. The Bible was the source of legitimacy for an instinctive sense of ownership felt by youth rooted in the country’s soil.

      Figure 4. Class of elementary school, Mes’ha. Allon sits in the middle line, first from the right. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allon family.

      The myth that had the greatest impact on young Allon was the story of Saul, to which he returned again and again: the lad