“I have no property, I have no capital; my greatest asset is my friends.”
–Yigal Allon
Yigal Allon, a native of Israel and the Galilee, strongly attached to this country and its landscape, was a founding member of Kibbutz Ginosar, an active participant in the pre-state settlement movement, an officer in the Palmach, a minister in the government of Israel, a leader and a friend.
With his sudden death in 1980, Yigal Allon’s many friends determined to establish a memorial center at his kibbutz. For this purpose, Yigal Allon’s schoolmates from the nearby town of Kaduri, fellow members of Ginosar, comrades from the Palmach (the precursor of the Israel Defense Forces), people from the kibbutz movement, Knesset members and ministers all joined together. The Israeli government, headed at the time by the late Menachem Begin, contributed substantially to the initial stages of the undertaking.
The initiators sought a form of memorialization befitting Yigal Allon’s personality and versatility on the one hand; and expressing his ties to the Galilee, where he grew into manhood, worked, built his home and raised his family on the other Many prominent individuals contributed to the extensive discussion of the contents and nature of the memorial project. These included Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon and Amos Horev. As Ben-Aharon summed up: “Yigal Allon was everything: a warrior, a settler, a friend of the Arabs in the Galilee, a diplomat, a friend and a family man. Yigal Allon loved to emphasize the fact that he was a man of the Galilee.” Thus, there seems no more appropriate theme for the museum than “Man in the Galilee.”
