Moshe Dayan — Biography
Moshe Dayan was an Israeli military leader and politician. As commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–1958) during the 1956 Sinai War, and especially as Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967, he became a worldwide fighting symbol of the new state of Israel.
In the 1930s, Dayan joined the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defense force of Mandatory Palestine. He served in the Special Night Squads under Orde Wingate during the Arab revolt in Palestine and later lost an eye to a sniper in a raid on Vichy forces in Lebanon during World War II. Dayan was close to David Ben-Gurion and joined him in leaving the Mapai party and setting up the Rafi party in 1965 with Shimon Peres. Dayan became Defence Minister just before the 1967 Six-Day War. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, during which Dayan served as Defense Minister, he was blamed for the lack of preparedness; after some time he resigned. In 1977, following the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, Dayan was expelled from the Israeli Labor Party because he joined the Likud-led government as Foreign Minister, playing an important part in negotiating the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Dayan was a Jewish atheist or as some would say secular Jew. He spoke Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
Moshe Dayan was born on 20 May 1915 in Kibbutz Degania Alef, near the Sea of Galilee in Palestine, in what was then Ottoman Syria within the Ottoman Empire, one of three children born to Shmuel and Devorah Dayan, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhashkiv. Kibbutz Degania Alef, with 11 members, was the first kibbutz, and would become part of the State of Israel.
Dayan was the second child born at Degania, after Gideon Baratz (1913–1988). He was named Moshe after Moshe Barsky, the first member of Degania to be killed in an Arab attack, who died getting medication for Dayan’s father. Soon afterward, Dayan’s parents moved to Nahalal, the first moshav, or farming cooperative, to be established. Dayan attended the agricultural school there.
At the age of 14, Dayan joined the Jewish defence force Haganah. In 1938, he joined the British-organised irregular Supernumerary Police and led a small motorized patrol (“MAN”). One of his military heroes was the British pro-Zionist intelligence officer Orde Wingate, under whom he served in several Special Night Squads operations. 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 evacuated. Leading a group of 43 men through Wadi Bira, early the following morning, 12 to 15 Arab members of the Transjordan Frontier Force arrested them. Questions were asked about how such a large force was 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 10 years in prison. Seven months later, Dayan was replaced as the prisoners’ 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-led reconnaissance task force, which also included fellow Palmach members and Arab guides, 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.
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 later that year. He is buried in Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where he was raised. Following his death, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, arranged that the yearlong memorial service of kaddish be recited in honor of Dayan. Dayan bequeathed his personal belongings to his bodyguard. In 2005, his eye patch was offered for sale on eBay with a starting bid of US$75,000.
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”.
In 1969, during an address to the students at Technion University in Haifa, Dayan regretted the fact that students are unfamiliar with the Arab villages that once inhabited the land: “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing… a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat — in the place of Jibta, Sarid — in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua — in the place of Tell Shaman. There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
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? The Vatican?” Dayan later ordered to give administrative control of the Temple Mount over to the Waqf, a Muslim council.[98][99]
Dayan was an author and described himself as an amateur archaeologist, the latter hobby leading to significant controversy, as his amassing of historical artifacts, often with the help of his soldiers, seemed to be in breach of a number of laws. Yigael Yadin remarked after one incident: “I know who did it, and I am not going to say who it is, but if I catch him, I’ll poke out his other eye, too.” Some of his activities in this regard, whether illegal digging, looting of sites or commerce of antiquities, have been detailed by R. Kletter from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
American science-fiction writer Poul Anderson published his novel Ensign Flandry at the time when Moshe Dayan’s international renown and admiration for him in Israel were at their highest. The far-future Galactic Empire described in the book includes a planet called “Dayan”, inhabited by Jews.
