Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography by Anita Shapira

Author:Anita Shapira [Shapira, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780812203431
Goodreads: 22143982
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2007-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 11. A Jewish-Arab alliance: Allon and Abu Yusuf of the Arab el-Heb Bedouin, 1948. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Allon family.

Operation Yiftah concentrated on two chief tacks. One was the opening of roads: from Tiberias to Rosh Pinnah and from Rosh Pinnah to Dafna and Kfar Szold. The other was the capture of Safed. Both sides of the road along the Ginossar, Jordan, and Huleh rift were inhabited by thousands of Bedouin. Allon resorted to psychological warfare once more. Using his connections with regional Jewish mukhtars, he had them whisper into the ears of Arab notables: look, awesome forces have arrived, the Jews will crush the Arabs in the Huleh, you would do well to leave. The ruse worked: in a matter of days, the Huleh area was virtually empty, and with hardly a shot having been fired. Seizure of the area south of the Huleh was left to the First Battalion under Laner. The operation took less than a day; “the tents were systematically torched, the houses demolished, the flocks sent to the rear, the population sent eastwards.” All day and all night a sea of flames rose skyward. Only the tents of the Arab-el-Heb remained. For all of his love for an Arab cauldron, Yigal had no qualms about clearing the area: the road to the northern Eastern Galilee stayed open and safe until the end of the war. Moreover, by evacuating the population, the forces “created an empty expanse impeding infiltration between Syria and Safed.”54 Operation Broom (Matateh), as it was called, created a contiguous, Jewish-controlled territory in the Eastern Galilee. It was the prelude to the capture of Safed.

The battle for Safed entered the folklore of the War of Independence via a saying attributed to Moshe Podhortzer regarding Safed’s Jewish community: “Safed was saved by deed and miracle: the deed was that yeshiva boys recited Psalms day and night. The miracle was that the Palmah arrived.”55 The sense of miracle stemmed from the town’s Jewish-Arab balance of forces. In addition, there was the traumatic memory of the Arab massacre of local Jews in the 1929 Disturbances and the profound fear of a recurrence. According to rumor, the mufti intended to come from Lebanon to settle in Safed and establish a Palestinian government there. Allon, unlike most of his peers and social milieu, retained a warm spot for Safed’s pious Jews. Their enlistment to help the Palmah build fortifications and their sharing of their food with the Palmah had not passed unnoticed. The fact that Safed’s rabbis permitted work to proceed on the Sabbath and Passover for the sake of the town’s defense reflected mutual trust. After the first aborted attack on Safed, General Hunt Stockwell the British commander of the northern part of Palestine, had suggested to Allon via Moshe Carmel that he evacuate the Jewish population. Allon rejected the idea. He also rejected an appeal from the town’s population to evacuate women and children. In his assessment, matters hung by a hair, and evacuation could tip the scales toward defeat.

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