February 29, 1980
Yigal Allon, retired general and politician, dies in Afula at age 61.
Born in 1918 in Kfar Tabor, Allon began his military career in the Haganah and commanded the Palmach from 1945 to 1948. He applied his military expertise not only in helping win the 1948-49 War of Independence, but also in delivering an incisive 1952 analysis of the war. Likewise an accomplished Israeli politician, he was elected to the Knesset in 1954, where he remained as a parliament member until his death. During his political career he served as minister of labor, immigrant absorption, culture and foreign affairs and as deputy prime minister. For three weeks in 1969, between the death of Levi Eshkol and the elevation of Golda Meir, Allon was the interim prime minister.
After the June 1967 war greatly expanded the territory controlled by Israel, he proposed what came to be known as the Allon Plan. In various iterations, the plan envisaged Israeli retention of a series of settlements and military installations along the Jordan Valley as buffer to protect against an Arab land attack from the east.
(Thank you to Deborah Engel Kollin, Lisa Rothstein Goldberg, Marcia Weinstein and Diana Wolff for suggesting this entry via our Facebook and MailChimp contest.)
