Yigal allon native son a biography book

Dur­ing Israel’s War of Inde­pen­dence, no com­man­der had more con­se­quen­tial suc­cess­es than Yigal Allon. Yet all the oth­er major mil­i­tary fig­ures of 1948 eclipsed Allon in both mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal life— notably his Pal­mach coun­ter­part Moshe Dayan, and his pro­tégé Yitzchak Rabin.

Ani­ta Shapi­ra aims to restore Allon to the pic­ture. She depicts a fig­ure root­ed in the Yishuv, whose instincts and val­ues no longer fit the new era of the state. 

The book is anchored by the sto­ry of the Pal­mach in the 1940’s.

Shapi­ra describes the many insti­tu­tion­al con­tra­dic­tions built into this new reg­u­lar, mobile armed force, and she puts Allon at the scene of all the major con­flicts over the mis­sion and char­ac­ter of the Pal­mach from its incep­tion to its merg­ing into the IDF.

She argues that the out­look of Allon and many oth­ers was formed in small set­tle­ments, where secu­ri­ty an