Yigal Allon

Former Minister of Defence

(1918 - 1980)

Yigal Allon was born in Kefar Tavor in the Lower Galilee in 1918 and passed away in 1980. In 1937, he graduated from the Kadoorie Agricultural School, and in the same year, became a founding member of Kibbutz Ginnosar.

Allon's activities in underground defence began during the Arab riots of 1936-1939, when he served as Commander of one of the field units of the Haganah. In 1941 he was among the founders of the Palmach, the commando unit of the Haganah and he became its commander in 1945.

During the War of Independence, Allon commanded decisive operations in all parts of the country. He came to be regarded as the most experienced field commander in the Israel Defense Forces and left his stamp on the standards that characterise Israel's army officers.

After the War of Independence, Allon studied at the Hebrew University and at Oxford. Turning his attention to political activity, he became one of the leaders of the Ahdut ha-Avodah political party, and in 1954 was elected to the Knesset. From 1961 to 1968 he served as Minister of Labour, where he improved the state employment service and introduced legislation on labour relations. In June 1967, he was a member of the inner war cabinet that mapped out the Six-Day War strategy.

In 1968 Allon became Deputy Prime Minister in the government led by Mapai (now Labour Party). Allon presented a plan to then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for a settlement with the Palestinians, which came to be known as the ‘Allon Plan'.

The Allon Plan was predicated on the premise, in line with UN Security Council Resolution 242, that Israel required minimal defensible borders, and that the pre-June 4, 1967 borders (i.e., the 1949 armistice lines) were indefensible in the long-term and offered Israel no strategic depth. The Allon Plan envisaged a peace plan that required Israel to relinquish the main Arab-populated areas of Judea and Samaria to Jordanian political jurisdiction, while retaining under Israeli military control a narrow, thinly-populated strip along the Jordan River. This strip would start in the North near the Syrian border, continue down through the Jordan Valley and the Judean desert, and connect further down with the Negev. Israel would control a strategic zone in the eastern West Bank running up from the Jordan Valley to the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. This area would allow Israel's small standing army to hold off an assault from a combination of Arab states to Israel's east for enough time for Israel to mobilise and deploy its reserve forces, which constitute the bulk of Israel's military power.

For these "secure borders" (defensible borders), Allon envisioned that Israel would need some 700 square miles of the 2100 square miles that make up the West Bank (about one-third). Additionally, Allon wrote in July 1967, that Israel needed to include the road connecting Jerusalem to the Dead Sea as well as a widened Jerusalem corridor west of Ramallah and stressed the importance of Greater Jerusalem. These additions could easily bring the Allon Plan to about 40 percent of the West Bank.

In 1969 Allon became Minister of Education and Culture. In 1974, he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the separation-of-forces agreements with Egypt and Syria and from 1974 to 1977 he was Minister of Foreign Affairs. From 1977-1980, he was a member of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Security and Chairman of the Knesset Sub-committee on Lebanon.

In 1978-80 Allon was Chairman of the World Labour Zionist movement. He died from a heart attack in 1980 and was buried in Kibbutz Ginnosar.

(Sources: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Jewish Agency for Israel)