Moshe Dayan
(
Hebrew:
מש×" ×"יין) (
May 20,
1915 –
October 16,
1981), was an
Israeli military leader and politician. The fourth
Chief of Staff of the
Israel Defense Forces (1953-1958), he became a fighting symbol to the world of the new
State of Israel.
Moshe Dayan was born in a
kibbutz ("
collective farm"),
Degania Alef ("Degania A"),
Palestine, near the
Kinneret Sea of Galilee. His parents were
Shmuel and Devorah who were Jewish immigrants from
Russia, and he was the first child born in the newly established community. At age 14, he joined the
Haganah, the underground Jewish militant group which was at a very early stage in its history. He was greatly influenced by the military teachings of the
English pro-
Zionist officer
Orde Wingate when Dayan was a sergeant prior to
World War II.
|
Birthplace and home of Moshe Dayan, Kibbutz Degania Alef, during the 1930s |
He was arrested by the British ten years later in 1939 (when the Haganah was outlawed), but released after two years in February 1941 as part of the Haganah's renewed cooperation with the British during
World War II. On June 7, 1941, while attached to the
Australian 7th Division, which was fighting
Vichy French forces in
Syria, Dayan lost his left eye in action when he was hit by a rifle bullet by a sniper while scanning enemy positions with his binoculars. After making a partial recovery, Dayan began wearing the black
eyepatch that became his trademark. On the recommendation of an Australian officer, Dayan received the
Distinguished Service Order, one of the
British Empire's highest military honours.
During the
1948 Arab-Israeli War, Dayan occupied various positions of importance, first as the commander over the defensive effort in the Jordan valley; he was then given command over a number of military units on the central front. He was extremely well-liked by Israel's founding Prime Minister,
David Ben-Gurion and became his
protege, together with
Shimon Peres (the future Prime Minister).
After the 1948 war, Dayan began to rise rapidly through the ranks. From 1955 to 1958 he was the
Chief of Staff of the
Israel Defense Forces. In this capacity, he personally commanded the Israeli forces fighting in the Sinai during the October-November 1956
Suez Crisis.
In
1959, a year after he retired from the IDF, Dayan joined
Mapai, the leftist block in Israeli politics, then led by
David Ben-Gurion. Until
1964 he served as the minister of
agriculture. Dayan joined with the group of Ben-Gurion loyalists who defected from Mapai in
1965 to form
Rafi.
Levi Eshkol, then Prime Minister disliked Dayan; however when tensions began to rise in early
1967, Eshkol decided to hand over the position of Minister of Defense to the charismatic and popular Dayan in order to raise public morale and widen his government's coalition base by establishing a unity government.
|
Defense Minister General Moshe Dayan (center), flanked by Chief of Staff General Yitschak Rabin (right) and General Uzi Narkiss (left), enter Old Jerusalem in 1967 |
Although Dayan did not take part in most of the planning before the
Six-Day War of June 1967, his appointment as Defense Minister contributed to the Israeli success. Following the war, Dayan, whose traits did not include particular modesty, invested PR efforts to take credit for much of the fighting to himself. During the years following the war Dayan enjoyed enormous popularity in Israel and was widely viewed as a potential future Prime Minister. At this time Dayan was the leader of the hawkish camp within the Labor government, opposing return to anything like Israel's pre-1967 borders. He once said that he preferred
Sharm-al-Sheikh (an Egyptian town on the Southern edge of the
Sinai Peninsula overlooking Israel's shipping lane to the
Red Sea via the
Gulf of Aqaba) without peace to peace without Sharm-al-Sheikh. He modified these views later in his career and played an important role in the eventual peace agreement between Israel and
Egypt.
After
Golda Meir became Prime Minister in
1969 following the death of
Levi Eshkol, Dayan remained Minister of Defense. He was still in that post when the
Yom Kippur War began catastrophically for
Israel on
October 6,
1973. As the highest-ranking official responsible for military planning, and in particular for examining the intelligence apparatus, it is of little doubt that Dayan, who became the symbol of victorious complacency following the Six-Day War, bears a part of responsibility for the Israeli leadership having missed the signs for the upcoming war. In the hours preceding the war, Dayan opted for not carrying out a full mobilization or carrying out a preemptive strike against the Egyptians and the Syrians; partly because he assumed that Israel would be able to win easily even if the Arabs had attacked and, more importantly, he did not want Israel to appear as the aggressor, as it would have undoubtedly cost them the invaluable support of the United States (who would later send a massive airlift to rearm Israel in what would a be a major turning point of the war).
Following the heavy defeats of the first two days, Dayan's views experienced a radical turn; he was close to announcing "the downfall of the "
Third Temple" at a news conference, but was forbidden to speak by Meir. He also began to speak openly of using
weapons of mass destruction against the Arabs.
|
Israeli Defense Minister General Moshe Dayan (foreground with eye-patch) with General Ariel Sharon (left rear with white head-bandage) during the Yom Kippur War |
To Dayan's credit, he had managed to recover his self-control and direct Israel's fighting during the rest of the war. Although the Agranat Committee Report published after the war did not lay substantial responsibility on the political layer to which Moshe Dayan belonged, a wave of public protests led to the resignation of both him and Golda Meir.
According to those who knew him, the war deeply depressed Dayan. He went into political eclipse for a time. In 1977, despite having been re-elected to the
Knesset on the Labor Party list, he became Foreign Minister in the new
Likud government led by
Menachem Begin. While Dayan never formally joined the Likud, this move was still seen as a betrayal by many of his Labor colleagues. As Prime Minister Menachem Begin's foreign minister, he was instrumental in drawing up the
Camp David Accords, a peace agreement with Egypt. Dayan withdrew in
1980 (joined by
Ezer Weizman who then defected to Labor), because of his disagreement with Begin over whether the Palestinian territories were an Israeli internal matter (the Camp David treaty included provisions for future negotiations with the Palestinians; Begin, who didn't like the idea, did not put Dayan in charge of the negotiation team.)
In 1981, Dayan formed a new party,
Telem, which advocated unilateral separation from the
West Bank and
Gaza Strip. The party received two seats in the Tenth
Knesset (elections took place on June 30, 1981) but Dayan died shortly thereafter, in
Tel Aviv, from
colon cancer. He is buried in
Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where he was raised.
Dayan was very complicated and controversial; his opinions were never strictly black and white. He had few close friends; his mental brilliance and
charismatic manner were combined with cynicism and lack of restraint.
Ariel Sharon noted about Dayan:
He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.Dayan combined a kibbutznik's secular identity and pragmatism with a deep love and appreciation for the Jewish people and the
land of Israel --but not a religious identification. In one recollection, having seen
rabbis flocking on the
Temple Mount shortly after Jerusalem was occupied in 1967, he asked
"what is this? Vatican?" Dayan later ordered the Israeli flag removed from the
Dome of the Rock, and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount over to the
Waqf, a
Muslim council. Dayan believed that the Temple Mount was more important to Judaism as a historical than a holy site. To the more religious Jews, this decision by Dayan represents a deeply profound lost opportunity to address the building of the Third Temple. To the
Ultra Orthodox, this is the biggest and darkest part of Dayan's legacy.
Dayan was also an
author and an amateur
archaeologist, the latter hobby leading to some controversy as his amassing of historical artifacts, often with the help of his soldiers, broke a number of laws. Upon his death his extensive archeological collection was sold to the state.
His daughter,
Yael Dayan is a novelist and followed him into politics and has been a member of several Israeli leftist parties over the years. She has served in the
Knesset and on the
Tel Aviv City Council.
His son,
Assi Dayan, is an actor and a movie director.
*"... we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave and that is a matter of enormous importance."
**Moshe Dayan encouraging the transfer of Gaza strip refugees to Jordan (from Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, 1992, p.434, quoted in Nur Masalha's A Land Without A People, 1997 p.92).
*
List of Israel's Chiefs of the General Staff*
Raz Kletter [2003], "A Very General Archaeologist - Moshe Dayan and Israeli Archaeology",
Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 4.5 (2003).
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