Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan
Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office 20 January 1977 – 23 October 1979
Prime Minister	Menachem Begin
Preceded by	Yigal Allon
Succeeded by	Yitzhak Shamir
Minister of Defense
In office 5 June 1967 – 3 June 1974
Prime Minister	Levi Eshkol Yigal Allon (Acting) Golda Meir
Preceded by	Levi Eshkol
Succeeded by	Shimon Peres
Minister of Agriculture
In office 17 December 1959 – 4 November 1964
Prime Minister	David Ben-Gurion Levi Eshkol
Preceded by	Kadish Luz
Succeeded by	Haim Gvati
Chief of General Staff
In office 1955–1958
President	Yitzhak Ben-Zvi
Prime Minister	David Ben-Gurion
Preceded by	Kadish Luz
Succeeded by	Haim Gvati
Personal details
Born	(1915-05-20)20 May 1915 Kibbutz Degania Alef, Ottoman Empire
Died	16 October 1981(1981-10-16) (aged 66) Tel Aviv, Israel
Political party	Mapai (1959-1965) Rafi (1965-1968) Labour (1968-1981)
Religion	Jewish atheism
Military service
Allegiance	United Kingdom Israel
Service/branch	British Army Haganah Israel Defense Forces
Years of service	1932–1974
Rank	Lieutenant General
Commands	Chief of General Staff Southern Command Northern Command
Battles/wars	Arab Revolt in Palestine World War II Israeli Independence War Suez Crisis Six-Day War War of Attrition Yom Kippur War
Awards	Distinguished Service Order Legion of Honour

Moshe Dayan (Kitaigorodsky) (Hebrew: משה דיין‎; 20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) was an Israeli military leader and politician. He was the second child born on the first kibbutz. As the fourth Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–58), he became a fighting symbol to the world of the new state of Israel. He went on to become Defense Minister and later Foreign Minister of Israel.

Early life

Moshe Dayan was born on Kibbutz Degania Alef near the shores of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in Palestine, within the Ottoman Empire. His parents were Shmuel and Devorah, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Kibbutz Degania Alef was the first kibbutz and had eleven members.

He was the second child to be born on the kibbutz (after Gideon Baratz). He was named Moshe after Moshe Barsky, the first member of the kibbutz to be killed in an Arab attack, who died getting medication for his father. Soon afterward, Dayan's parents moved to Nahalal, the first moshav (settlement) to be established. Dayan attended the Agricultural School there.^{[citation needed]}

Military

At the age of 14, he joined the newly formed Jewish militia known as the Haganah. In 1938 he joined the Palestine Supernumerary Police and became a motorized patrol ("MAN") commander. One of his military heroes was the British pro-Zionist officer Orde Wingate, under whom he served in several Special Night Squads operations.

File:DayanMBoy.jpg

Young Moshe Dayan with his parents

Dayan with Yitzhak Sadeh and Yigal Allon, Kibbutz Hanita, 1938

On 3 October 1939 he was the commanding instructor for Haganah Leader's courses held at Yavniel when two British Palestine Police Officers discovered a quantity of illegal rifles. Haganah HQ ordered the camp to be evacuated. Leading a group of 43 men through Wadi Bira, early the following morning, they were arrested by 12 to 15 Arab members of the Transjordan Frontier Force. Questions were asked about why such a large force were arrested by a much smaller one. Moshe Carmel, the group's deputy commander, was also critical of Dayan's willingness to talk to his interrogators in Acre prison. On 30 October 1939, most of the group were sentenced to ten years in prison. Seven months later Dayan was replaced as the prisoner's representative after it was discovered that moves were being made to get him an individual pardon. On 16 February 1941, after Chaim Weizmann's intervention in London, they were all released.

Dayan was assigned to a small Australian-Palmach-Arab reconnaissance task force, formed in preparation for the Allied invasion of Syria and Lebanon and attached to the Australian 7th Division. Using his home kibbutz of Hanita as a forward base, the unit frequently infiltrated Vichy French Lebanon, wearing traditional Arab dress, on covert surveillance missions.

Injury and eye patch

On 7 June 1941, the night before the invasion of the Syria-Lebanon Campaign, Dayan's unit crossed the border and secured two bridges over the Litani River. When they were not relieved as expected, at 04:00 on 8 June, the unit perceived that it was exposed to possible attack and – on its own initiative – assaulted a nearby Vichy police station, capturing it in a firefight. A few hours later, as Dayan was on the roof of the building using binoculars to scan enemy Vichy French positions on the other side of the river, they were struck by a French rifle bullet fired by a marksman from several hundred yards away, propelling metal and glass fragments into his left eye and causing it severe damage. Six hours passed before he could be evacuated, and he would have died if not for Bernard Dov Protter who took care of him until they were evacuated. Dayan lost the eye. In addition, the damage to the extraocular muscles was such that Dayan could not be fitted with a glass eye, and he was compelled to adopt the black eyepatch that became his trademark.

In the years immediately following, the disability caused him some psychological pain. Dayan wrote in his autobiography: "I reflected with considerable misgivings on my future as a cripple without a skill, trade, or profession to provide for my family." He added that he was "ready to make any effort and stand any suffering, if only I could get rid of my black eye patch. The attention it drew was intolerable to me. I preferred to shut myself up at home, doing anything, rather than encounter the reactions of people wherever I went."

Family

Ruth Dayan, his first wife, divorced Moshe in 1971 after 36 years of marriage due to his numerous extramarital affairs. After the divorce, Dayan remarried. He left almost his entire estate to his second wife, Rachel. In the Israeli best-selling book that followed the divorce, Or Did I Dream The Dream?, Ruth Dayan wrote a chapter about "Moshe's bad taste in women".

Moshe and Ruth's daughter, Yael Dayan, a novelist, is best known in Israel for her book, My Father, His Daughter about her relationship with her father. She 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, and is the current Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, responsible for social services. One of his sons, Assi Dayan, is an actor and a movie director. Another son, novelist Ehud Dayan, who was cut out of his father's will, wrote a book critical of his father months after he died, mocking his military, writing, and political skills, calling him a "philanderer", and accusing him of greed. In his book, Ehud Dayan even accused his father of making money from his battle with cancer. He also lamented having recited Kaddish for his father "three times too often for a man who never observed half the Ten Commandments".

Military career

In 1947, Dayan was appointed to the Haganah General Staff working on Arab affairs, in particular recruiting agents to gain information about irregular Arab forces in Palestine. His brother, Zorik, was killed in fighting, 14 April 1948. On 22 April Dayan was appointed in charge of abandoned Arab property in newly conquered Haifa. To put a stop to the out-of-control looting he ordered that anything that could be used by the army be stored in Haganah warehouses and the rest be distributed amongst Jewish agricultural settlements. On 18 May, Dayan was given command of the Jordan Valley sector and in a nine hour battle his troops stopped the Syrian advance South of the Sea of Galilee.

89th Battalion

In June he became the first commander of the 89th Battalion, part of Sadeh's Armoured Brigade. His methods of recruiting volunteers from other army units such as the Golani and Kiryati Brigades provoked complaints from their commanders. On 20 June 1948, two men from one of his companies were killed in a confrontation with Irgun members trying to bring weapons ashore from the Altalena at Kfar Vitkin. During Operation Danny he led his Battalion in a brief raid through Lod in which nine of his men were killed. His Battalion was then transferred to the South where they captured Karatiya, close to Faluja, 15 July. His withdrawal of his troops after only 2 hours leaving a Givati Company to face an Egyptian counterattack led to Givati commander Shimon Avidan to demand that Dayan be disciplined for breach of discipline. Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin instructed the Military Attorney General to proceed but the case was dismissed.

Jerusalem

On 23 July 1948, on David Ben-Gurion's insistence over General Staff opposition, Dayan was appointed Military Commander of Jewish controlled areas of Jerusalem. In this post he launched two military offensives. Both were night-time operations and both were failures. On 17 August he sent two companies to attempt to occupy the hillsides around Government House but they retreated suffering casualties. On the night of 20 October 1948, to coincide with the end of Operation Yoav further south, Operation Wine Press was launched. Its objective was to capture Bethlehem via Beit Jala. A force of six companies set out but were pinned down by machine-gun fire in the wadi below Beit Jala and were forced to withdraw.

Following the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, 17 September 1948, it was over twenty hours before he imposed a curfew over Jewish Jerusalem and began arresting members of Lehi, the underground organisation believed to be responsible. One reason for this delay was the need to bring loyal troops from Tel Aviv into the city.

Moshe Dayan and Abdullah el Tell reach cease fire agreement, Jerusalem, 30 November 1948

In the autumn of 1948 he was involved in negotiations with Abdullah el Tell, the Jordanian Military Commander of East Jerusalem, over a lasting cease-fire for the Jerusalem area. The following year, 1949, he had at least five face-to-face meetings with King Abdullah of Jordan over the Armistice Agreement and the search for a longer term peace agreement. Following an incident in February 1949 he was court-martialed for disobeying an order from his superior, Major General Zvi Ayalon OC Central Command. He was found guilty by a military court and briefly demoted from Lieutenant Colonel to Major. This did not prevent him from attending the Armistice negotiations on the island of Rhodes and on 29 June 1949 he was appointed head of all Israeli delegations to the Mixed Armistice Commission meetings. Despite being involved in these negotiations Dayan recommended to Ben-Gurion, in September 1949, that the army should be used to open the road to Jerusalem and to gain access to the Western Wall and Mount Scopus.

Southern Command

On 25 October 1949 he was promoted to Major-General and appointed commander of the Southern Command. Most of the staff officers resigned in protest at his replacement of the previous commander, Yigal Allon. The major problem in the south of the country was Palestinians crossing the border, "infiltrating", from the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Hebron hills. Dayan was an advocate of a "harsh" policy along the border. In Jerusalem he had given instructions that infiltrators killed in no-man's-land or the Arab side of the border should be moved on to the Israeli side before UN inspections. Allon had already introduced a 7 kilometre "free-fire" zone along the southern borders. In the spring of 1950 Dayan authorized the Israeli Air Force to strafe shepherds and their herds in the Beit Govrindisambiguation needed area. There were also strafing attacks on bedouin camps in the Gaza area. In early 1950 700 bedouin, 'Azame, were expelled from the South Hebron area and in September 1950 several thousand more were driven from the demilitarized zone at Al-Ajua During 1950 the remaining population of al-Majdal were transferred to the Gaza Strip In a notorious incident, 31 May 1950, the army forced 120 Arabs across the Jordanian border at 'Arava. "Two or three dozen" died of thirst before reaching safety. During 1950 Dayan developed a policy of punitive cross border reprisal raids. IDF squads were sent into the Gaza strip to lay mines. The first retaliation raid on a village occurred 20 March 1950 when 6 Arabs were killed at Khirbet Jamrura. On 18 June 1950, Dayan explained his thinking to the Mapai faction in the Knesset:

[It is] the only method that [has] proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when [the] Arab plants mines on our side. If we try to search for that Arab, it has no value. But if we harass the nearby village ... then the population there comes out against [the saboteur]... and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordanian government are [willing]... to prevent such incidents, because their prestige is [at stake]... as the Jews have opened fire, and they are unready to begin a war ... The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective ... There are no other effective methods.

On 8 March 1951 eighteen were killed at Idna. On 20 October 1951 several houses and an ice factory in eastern Gaza City were destroyed by two companies from Battalion 79 (7th Brigade); dozens were killed and injured. 6 January 1952 an armoured infantry company from the same battalion attacked a bedouin camp, Nabahim, near Bureij refugee camp killing fifteen. Glubb Pasha noted that the objective of this new strategy seemed to "be merely to kill Arabs indiscriminately." Dayan saw it as an "eye for an eye".

At the end on 1951, Dayan attended a course at the British Army's Senior Officers' School in Devizes, England. In May 1952 he was appointed Operational Commander of the Northern Command.

Chief of Staff

1952 was a time of economic crisis for the new state. Faced with demands of a 20% cut in budget and the discharge of 6,000 members of the IDF, Yigal Yadin resigned as Chief of Staff, November 1952, and was replaced by Mordechai Maklef. Dayan was promoted to Head of Operations (G) Branch, the second most senior post on the General Staff, December 1952. One of Dayan's actions in this post was to commence work on the canal diverting water from the River Jordan, September 1953.

During 1953, Prime Minister and Minister of Defence David Ben-Gurion began to make preparations for his retirement from his leadership roles. His choice for the post of Minister of Defence was Pinhas Lavon who became acting MoD in the autumn of 1953. Lavon and Maklef were unable to work together and Maklef resigned. Dayan was immediately appointed CoS, 7 December 1953. This appointment was Ben-Gurion's last act as Prime Minister before his replacement by acting Prime Minister Moshe Sharett.

On taking over command, based on Ben-Gurion's three year defence programme, Dayan carried out a major reorganisation of the Israeli army, which, among others, included:

• Strengthened combat units at the expense of administrative 'tail'.
• Raising the Intelligence and Training Branches of the Israeli Army.
• Surrendering the activities of stores and procurement to the civilian Ministry of Defense.
• Revamping the mobilisation scheme and ensuring earmarking for adequate equipment.
• Starting a military academy for officers of the rank of major and above.
• Emphasised strike forces (Air Force, Armour) and on training of Commando battalions.
• Developed GADNA, a youth wing for military training.

Cross-border operations

In July 1953, whilst on the General Staff, Dayan was party to the setting up of Unit 101, which was to specialise in night-time cross-border retaliation raids. He was initially opposed to setting up such a group because he argued it would undermine his attempts to prepare the IDF for an offensive war. Unit 101's first official operation was to attack, on 28 August 1953, the Bureij Refugee Camp, during which they killed 20 refugees.

By October 1953, Dayan was closely involved with 101. He was one of the main architects of the attack on Qibya, on the night of 14/15 October 1953. The General Staff order stated "temporarily to conquer the village of Qibya – with the aim of blowing up houses and hitting the inhabitants". The Central Command Operation Instructions were more specific: "carry out destruction and maximum killings." The operation was carried out by 130 IDF soldiers of whom a third came from Unit 101. They carried 70 kg of explosives, blew up 45 houses and killed 69 people. The international criticism over the number of civilians killed led to a change of tactics. It was the last large-scale attack by the IDF on civilian buildings. In the future, targets were to be the Arab Legion, the Frontier Police, and the Egyptian or the Syrian armies. Dayan merged Unit 101 with the Paratroopers Brigade and assigned its command to the commander of 101 who had led the Qibya attack, Ariel Sharon.

Dayan had a difficult relationship with Minister of Defence Lavon: There were issues over spending priorities and over Lavon's dealings with senior members of the IDF behind Dayan's back. This came to an end with Lavon's resignation over who ordered the sabotage operation in Egypt that led to the trial of a number of Egyptian Jews, two of whom were executed.

Dayan believed in the value of punitive cross-border retaliation raids:

We cannot save each water pipe from explosion or each tree from being uprooted. We cannot prevent the murder of workers in orange groves or of families in their beds. But we can put a very high price on their blood, a price so high that it will no longer be worthwhile for the Arabs, the Arab armies, for the Arab states to pay it.

Prime Minister Sharett was an advocate of restraint and was not as confident in the effectiveness of the attacks. When seeking approval for operations Dayan down-played the scale of the raids in order to get his approval. There were fewer large scale cross border raids in 1954. Between December 1953 and September 1954 at least 48 Arabs were killed in over 18 cross border raids. Fifteen of the dead were civilians: farmers, shepherds and a doctor; two of the dead were women. With Ben-Gurion's return this changed. On the night of 28 February 1955 Operation Black Arrow (Mivtza Hetz Shahor) was launched against an Egyptian army camp South of Gaza City. The IDF force consisted of 120 paratroops and suffered fourteen dead; 36 Egyptian soldiers were killed as well as two Palestinian civilians. Ben-Gurion and Dayan had told Sharett that their estimate of Egyptian casualties was ten. Four months later, 31 August 1955, despite Sharett's opposition, three paratroop companies attacked the British built Tegart fort in Khan Yunis. The directives of Operation Elkayam called for "killing as many enemy soldiers as possible." The police station and a number of other buildings were blown-up and seventy-two Egyptians and Palestinians were killed.

Armaments

Between 1955 and 1956, Dayan and Shimon Peres negotiated a series of large weapons contracts with France. On 10 November 1955 an agreement was signed for the delivery of 100 AMX-13 tanks and assorted anti-tank weapons. On 24 June 1956, a $80 million deal was agreed involving 72 Mystere IV jets, 120 AMX-13 tanks, 40 Sherman tanks and 18 105mm artillery. The Mystere were in addition to 53 already on order. At the end of September 1956, a further 100 Sherman tanks, 300 half tracks and 300 6x6 trucks were added.

By the beginning of November 1956 the Israeli army had 380 tanks.

Escalation up to the Suez Crisis

With members of 890 Paratroop Battalion after Mivtza Egged, November 1955. Standing l to r: Lt. Meir Har-Zion, Maj. Ariel Sharon, Lt. Gen Moshe Dayan, Capt. Dani Matt, Lt. Moshe Efron, Maj. Gen Asaf Simchoni; Crouching, l to r: Capt. Aharon Davidi, Lt. Ya'akov Ya'akov, Capt. Raful Eitan.

Following the 1955 elections, Ben-Gurion resumed his dual role as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Dayan, who believed in the inevitability of the "Second Round", argued for a pre-emptive attack on Israel's neighbours, particularly Egypt. The two leaders thought war with Egypt could be achieved by provoking an Egyptian response to retaliation raids, which could then be used to justify an all-out attack. On 23 October 1955, Ben-Gurion instructed Dayan to prepare plans to capture Sharm al Sheikh.

On the night of 27 October 1955, an IDF Battalion attacked an Egyptian army post at Kuntilla (Operation Egged), killing 12 Egyptian soldiers. On 2 November, al Sabha, close to the DMZ, was attacked, in Operation Volcano (Mivtza Ha Ga'ash), killing 81 Egyptian soldiers. On 11 December, hoping an attack on Syria would provoke an Egyptian response, Operation Olive Leaves/Sea of Galilee (Mivtza 'Alei Zayit/Kinneret) was launched in which a number of Syrian positions on the Eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee were destroyed. Forty eight Syrian soldiers were killed as well as six civilians. The Egyptians failed to react.

Dayan with Avraham Yoffe at Sharm el-Sheikh (1956)

A Cabinet meeting on 15 December 1955 voted against further provocations and ruled that any retaliation attacks must have full Cabinet approval. The raids ceased for six months. There was one exception: On 5 April 1956, following two earlier incidents along the border with the Gaza Strip in which four Israeli soldiers were killed, the IDF shelled the centre of Gaza City with 120 mm mortars. Fifty-eight civilians were killed, including 10 children. It is not clear whether Dayan had Ben-Gurion's approval to shell the city.

During September–October 1956, as plans began to mature for the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, Dayan ordered a series of large-scale cross border raids. On the night of 25 September following a number of incidents including the machine-gunning of large gathering at Ramat Rachel in which four Israelis were killed, and the murder of a girl south-west of Jerusalem, the 890th Battalion launched an attack on the police station at Husan and nearby Arab Legion positions close to the Armistice lines. Thirty-seven Legionnaires and National Guardsmen were killed as well as two civilians. Nine or ten paratroopers were killed, several in a road accident after the attack.

Following the killing of two workers near Even-Yehuda Dayan ordered a similar attack, Operation Samaria/Mivtza Shomron, on the police station at Qalqilya. The attack took place on the night of 10 October 1956 and involved several thousand IDF soldiers. During the fighting a paratroop company was surrounded by Jordanian troops and the survivors only escaped under close air-cover from four IAF aircraft. The Israelis suffered 18 killed and 68 wounded; between seventy and ninety Jordanians were killed. In the aftermath, Dayan was severely criticized by paratroop officers for alleged tactical mistakes. It was the last time the IDF launched a reprisal raid at night.

As Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Moshe Dayan personally commanded the Israeli forces fighting in the Sinai during the 1956 Suez Crisis. It was during Dayan's tenure as Chief of Staff that he delivered his famous eulogy of Ro'i Rutenberg, a young Israeli resident of the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, killed by Egyptian soldiers who ambushed the kibbutz, in 1956.

Political career

Moshe Dayan
Personal details
Born	(1915-05-20)May 20, 1915 Kibbutz Degania Alef
Died	October 16, 1981(1981-10-16) (aged 66) Tel Aviv

In 1959, a year after he retired from the IDF, Dayan joined Mapai, the leftist party 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. The Prime Minister Levi Eshkol disliked Dayan; however, when tensions began to rise in early 1967, Eshkol appointed the charismatic and popular Dayan as Minister of Defense in order to raise public morale and bring Rafi into a unity government.

Six-Day War (1967)

Moshe Dayan in Vietnam, 1967

Moshe Dayan was covering the Vietnam War to observe modern warfare up close after his political life. In fact, he was on patrol as an observer with members of the US Marine Corps. Although Dayan did not take part in most of the planning before the Six-Day War of June 1967, he personally oversaw the capture of East Jerusalem during the 5 – 7 June fighting. During the years following the war, Dayan enjoyed enormous popularity in Israel and was widely viewed as a potential Prime Minister. At this time, Dayan was the leader of the hawkish camp within the Labor government, opposing a 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. In 1997, years after Dayan died, an Israeli journalist, Rami Tal, published conversations he had with Dayan in 1976. In that conversation Dayan claimed that 80 percent of the cross-border clashes between Israel and Syria in the years before the war were a result of Israeli provocation (Dayan was not Defense minister at the time). He admitted:

I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was.

Also, later, he stated his regrets:

I made a mistake in allowing the Israel conquest of the Golan Heights. As defense minister I should have stopped it because the Syrians were not threatening us at the time [fourth day of the war].

He also portrayed the desire of the residents in the Kibbutzim beneath the Golan Heights that they be captured as stemming from the desire for their agricultural land and not primarily for security reasons. This description was hotly denied by the Kibbutz leaders (the Hula Valley kibbutzim did not get any land on the Golan).

Dayan's contention was denied by Muky Tsur, a longtime leader of the United Kibbutz Movement who said "For sure there were discussions about going up the Golan Heights or not going up the Golan Heights, but the discussions were about security for the kibbutzim in Galilee," he said. "I think that Dayan himself didn't want to go to the Golan Heights. This is something we've known for many years. But no kibbutz got any land from conquering the Golan Heights. People who went there went on their own. It's cynicism to say the kibbutzim wanted land."

About Dayan's comments, Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren has said

There is an element of truth to Dayan's claim, but it is important to note that Israel regarded the de-militarized zones in the north as part of their sovereign territory and reserved the right to cultivate them—a right that the Syrians consistently resisted with force. Syria also worked to benefit from the Jordan river before it flowed into Israel, aiming to get use of it as a water source; Syria also actively supported Palestinian resistance movements against Israel. Israel occasionally exploited incidents in the de-militarized zones to strike at the Syrian water diversion project and to punish the Syrians for their support of the Palestinian resistance. Dayan's remarks must also be taken in context of the fact that he was a member of the opposition at the time. His attitude toward the Syrians changed dramatically once he became defense minister. Indeed, on June 8, 1967, Dayan bypassed both the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff in ordering the Israeli army to attack and capture the Golan.

Yom Kippur War (1973)

Moshe Dayan with President Richard Nixon (1970)

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 6 October 1973. As the highest-ranking official responsible for military planning, Dayan may bear part of the responsibility for the Israeli leadership having missed the signs for the upcoming war. In the hours preceding the war, Dayan chose not to order a full mobilization or a preemptive strike against the Egyptians and the Syrians. He assumed that Israel would be able to win easily even if the Arabs attacked and, more importantly, did not want Israel to appear as the aggressor, as it would have undoubtedly cost it the invaluable support of the United States (who would later mount a massive airlift to rearm Israel).

Following the heavy defeats of the first two days, Dayan's views changed radically; he was close to announcing 'the downfall of the "Third Temple"' at a news conference, but was forbidden to speak by Meir.

Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland (1978)

Dayan suggested options at the beginning of the war, including a plan to withdraw to the Mitleh mountains in Sinai and a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights in order to carry the battle over the Jordan, abandoning the core strategic principles of Israeli war doctrine, which says that war must be taken into enemy territory as soon as possible. The Chief of Staff, David Elazar, objected to these plans and was proved correct. Israel broke through the Egyptian lines on the Sinai front, crossed the Suez canal, and encircled the 3rd Egyptian Army. Israel also counterattacked on the Syrian front, successfully repelling the Jordanian and Iraqi expeditionary forces and shelling the outskirts of Damascus. The war ended in a ceasefire and stalemate, but the Arab attack succeeded in destroying the image of Israeli invincibility and eventually led to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and the subsequent withdrawal of Israeli forces from all Egyptian territory.

Foreign Minister

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 for the , he accepted the offer to become Foreign Minister in the new Likud government led by Menachem Begin. He was expelled from the Alignment, as a result and sat as an independent MK. As foreign minister in Begin's government, he was instrumental in drawing up the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement with Egypt. Dayan resigned his post in October 1979, because of a disagreement with Begin over whether the Palestinian territories were an internal Israeli matter (the Camp David treaty included provisions for future negotiations with the Palestinians; Begin, who did not like the idea, did not put Dayan in charge of the negotiating team). In 1981 he founded a new party, Telem.

Death and legacy

Dayan's grave in Nahalal cemetery

The Telem party won two seats in the 1981 elections, but Dayan died shortly thereafter, in Tel Aviv, from a massive heart attack. He had been in ill-health since 1980, after he was diagnosed with colon cancer late that year. He is buried in Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where he was raised. Dayan willed his personal belongings to his bodyguard.

In 2005, his eye patch was offered for sale on Ebay with a starting bid of $75,000 U.S. dollars.

Dayan was a complex character; 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 had to be rejected; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

He had courage amounting to insanity, as well as displays of a lack of responsibility. I would not say the same about his civil courage. Once Ben Gurion had asked me - what do I think of the decision to appoint Dayan as the Minister of Agriculture in his government. I said that it is important that Dayan sits in every government because of his brilliant mind — but never as prime minister. Ben Gurion asked: "why not as prime minister?". I replied then: "because he does not accept responsibility". (Both quotes from )

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 captured 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 rather than holy site.

Dayan was 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, seemed to be in breach of a number of laws.

In 2005, Moshe Dayan was voted the 73rd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.

Published works

• Diary of the Sinai Campaign, 1967 (paperback reprint: Da Capo Press, September 1991, ISBN 978-0-306-80451-9)
• Living with the Bible: A Warrior's Relationship with the Land of His Forebears, Steimatzky's Agency Ltd, 1978, ASIN B0021OXHOO1978
• Story of My Life, William Morrow and Company, 1976, ISBN 978-0-688-03076-6
• Breakthrough: A Personal Account of the Egypt-Israel Peace Negotiations, Random House, September 1981, ISBN 978-0-394-51225-9

Further reading

• Bar-On, Mordechai. Moshe Dayan: Israel's Controversial Hero (Yale University Press; 2012) 247 pages
• Lau-Lavie, Napthali. Moshe Dayan – A Biography, Dodd Mead, 1969, ISBN 978-0-396-05976-9

External links

• Interview with Moshe Dayan in 1972
• David Ben-Gurion Letter on Moshe Dayan's Appointment as Minister of Defense Shapell Manuscript Foundation
• Moshe Dayan on the Knesset website
• "A Very General Archaeologist – Moshe Dayan and Israeli Archaeology" by Raz Kletter, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, Canada, 2003, 4.5
• Moshe Dayan at Find a Grave