I had the great honor of working with Yigal Allon (1918-1980) – the man who was appointed commander of the Palmah at the age of 27 and became one of the heroes of the War of Independence at the age of 30 – during the last two and a half years of his life.
I had met Yigal just after Labor’s defeat in the 1977 elections, when I was working as a research assistant for Lord Nicholas Bethell on his book The Palestine Triangle, about the last 10 years of the British Mandate.
We interviewed Yigal at the Foreign Affairs Ministry several days after the elections. Like other Labor leaders, he was in a complete state of shock. After realizing that I was Israeli, he suggested that I should return to interview him after things calmed down a bit. I arrived the following September and stayed with him until his death on February 29, 1980.
After the establishment of the state, Allon was a member of the Ahdut Ha’avoda party – the most hawkish member of the labor movement – and then the Labor Party.
Some of Ahdut HaAvoda’s members actually joined the supporters of Greater Israel after the 1967 Six Day War. In the years 1961-1977, Allon served in various ministerial posts, the last of which were as education and culture minister and foreign minister.
When Allon passed away prematurely at the age of 61, I was asked by The Jerusalem Post to write one of the eulogies published in the paper.
Inter alia, I wrote: “Serving Yigal was a labor of love. He made each of us who worked for him feel that we were indispensable and used to greet us as if he was pleasantly surprised that we had bothered to turn up. If he erred with us, it was in never chastising us when we erred.
“He himself was willing to listen to criticism. On several occasions, I asked for permission to play court jester and say some harsh words – to which he always replied, ‘Why as court jester? Why not just as a friend?’
“Yigal left so much undone. But it is as if he made us, who worked closely with him, promise to go on struggling for the things he believed in: a society imbued with social and national values, love and respect for labor, political morality, religious pluralism, peace based on a territorial compromise which will both cater for Israel’s security and offer a satisfactory solution to the Palestinian problem.” (Jerusalem Post, March 2, 1980).
Working with a myth can be difficult, especially since living myths are frequently unbearable egocentrics. That was not the case with Yigal, who was a mensch, open minded, and with the ability to make anyone he happened to be talking with feel that he/she was important.
Yahrzeit of Yigal Allon
AS YIGAL’S yahrzeit approached this year, I started thinking how I could describe to him the events of the last 16 months if he were suddenly to turn up. To my horror, I suddenly realized that he would have great difficulty understanding what I was talking about.
At the beginning of 1980, when Yigal passed away, Menachem Begin had been prime minister for less than three years: the first Likud prime minister ever. Yigal was still in the habit of thinking of the Likud as the offspring of the Irgun, which he viewed as a former terrorist organization, and frequently spoke of its members as “dissidents.”
The character of current Likud leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would have been completely outside his frame of reference as a potential Israeli leader, and Netanyahu’s refusal to take responsibility for the events of October 7, 2023 as completely unthinkable.
After all, prime minister Golda Meir hadn’t hesitated when she resigned office in April 1974, just over six months after the Yom Kippur War ended.
Hamas, the terror group that initiated the current war, was only established in 1987. Hezbollah was established in 1982. Though Rabbi Meir Kahane made aliyah in 1971, Kahanism was still in diapers in 1980, and Otzma Yehudit Itamar Ben-Gvir was an unimaginable figure in Israeli politics.
While the national religious population was at the beginning of a process of extremism, it was still part of the basic national mainstream. Yigal couldn’t have imagined anything like today’s Religious Zionism and its leader, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Last, but not least, the number of ultra-Orthodox in Israel when Yigal passed away was around 155,000, and haredi evasion of military service was a non-issue.
I did, however, find one issue that Yigal would have understood without difficulty, which is the aspiration of extreme right-wingers in Israel to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and Judea and Samaria, and annex them to the sovereign State of Israel.
Toward the end of the War of Independence, Yigal had tried to convince prime minister David Ben-Gurion that the IDF should conquer parts of the West Bank. Though this was militarily feasible at that time, Ben-Gurion rejected the idea, largely due to the demographic problem it would entail.
However, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, Yigal rejected any thought of Israel holding on to most of the territories it had occupied, for the very same reason Ben-Gurion had rejected it in 1949.
In May 1978, Yigal wrote that, in the course of an excursion to the Golan Heights on the fifth day of the Six Day War, he reached the conclusion that while the results of the war had literally saved the people of Israel from an unsavory fate, doubts had crept into his mind “regarding the realization of our historical right to the whole of western Eretz Yisrael now that victory was in our hands...”
THE OUTCOME of this was the Allon Plan, based on the principle that within the territory of Mandatory Palestine (western Eretz Yisrael and Transjordan) there should be two states: a Jewish state that would include pre-1967 Israel, a united Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, the Latrun area; and a Jordanian-Palestinian state that would include Jordan east of the River Jordan, and most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a demilitarized zone.
Under this arrangement, Israel was to remain in military control of the Jordan Valley, and in the Jordanian-Palestinian state, the two sides of the Jordan River were to have been connected by a passage around Jericho.
This idea was actually discussed in October 1974 by former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon with King Hussein I of Jordan at a secret meeting in Aqaba. However, the subsequent Arab Summit Conference at Rabat declared that only the PLO could negotiate a settlement over Palestine – not Jordan.
The Allon Plan is probably unfeasible today for demographic, political, and security reasons, though it is certainly no more pie in the sky than some other permanent settlement plans floating in the air these days, including Trump Gaza.
Over the years, the writer has held academic, administrative, and journalistic positions, the last one (1994-2010) in the Knesset Research and Information Center. She has published articles on Zionism, European politics, current affairs, and Israeli politics, and several books in both Hebrew and English, the last of which was Israel’s Knesset Members – A Comparative Study of an Undefined Job.