Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan (Hebrew: משה דיין‎; 20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) 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 as Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967, he became a worldwide fighting symbol of the new state of Israel. In the...

Moshe Dayan (Hebrew: משה דיין‎; 20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) 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 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 Defense Minister just before the 1967 Six-Day War. During and after Yom Kippur War of late 1973, during which Dayan served as Defense Minister, he was blamed for the lack of preparedness, and he resigned along with the rest of Golda Meir's government in early 1974. 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. Early life 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 Dvora Dayan, Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhashkiv. Dayan was the first child actually born at Degania; Gideon Baratz (1913–1988) had been born in Tiberias. 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. He attended the agricultural secondary school in Nahalal. Dayan was a Jewish atheist. He spoke Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Military career At the age of 14, Dayan joined the Jewish defence force Haganah. He saw action during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. In 1938, he joined the British-organised irregular Jewish 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 the Special Night Squads, participating in several operations. On 3 October 1939, he was the commanding instructor for Haganah commander's courses held at Yavniel when two Palestine Police Force 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 joined the Palmach, which was established as the Haganah's elite strike force, and 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. Eye injury On 7 June 1941, the night before the invasion of the Syria–Lebanon campaign, two Palmach companies were sent in to perform a final reconnaissance of Vichy positions. Their tasks were to cut wires, ambush Vichy patrols guarding bridges, blow up culverts, sabotage roads, and guide Australian troops during the upcoming invasion. The two companies were led by Dayan and Yigal Allon. At the time, Dayan served under the command of British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. Dayan's unit 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. A few hours later, as Dayan was on the roof of the building using binoculars to scan Vichy French positions on the other side of the river, the binoculars were struck by a French rifle bullet fired by a sniper from several hundred yards away, propelling metal and glass fragments into his left eye and causing severe damage. Six hours passed before he could be 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 eye patch that became his trademark. Letters from this time revealed that despite losing his left eye and suffering serious injuries to the area where the eye was located, Dayan still pleaded with Wilson to be reenlisted in combat. He also underwent eye surgery in 1947 at a hospital in Paris, which proved to be unsuccessful. In the years immediately following his eye injury, 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 eyepatch. 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." Haganah promotion and 89th Battalion 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. He served during the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine. Following the Israeli declaration of independence and the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War in May 1948 he continued in his position as a Haganah officer, and susbequently as an officer in the newly-formed Israel Defense Forces. On 14 April 1948, Dayan's brother Zorik was killed in combat. On 22 April, Dayan was put in charge of abandoned Arab property in Haifa following its capture. 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. In a nine-hour battle, his troops stopped the Syrian advance south of the Sea of Galilee. In June, he became the first commander of the 89th Battalion, part of Yitzhak Sadeh's 8th Armored 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 on 15 July. His withdrawal of his troops after only two hours, leaving a company from the Givati Brigade to face an Egyptian counterattack led to Givati Commander Shimon Avidan demanding that Dayan be disciplined. Chief of the General Staff Yigael 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 failed. 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. 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 17 September 1948 assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, it was over 20 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. On 20 October 1948, Dayan commanded the 800-strong Etzioni Brigade during the ill-fated Operation Yeqev, in which the objectives were to join the Harel Brigade in the capture of the mountain range overlooking Beit Jala. The mission was called-off because of misguided navigation, and Ben Gurion's fear of upsetting the Christian world at Israel's capture of Christian sites. A ceasefire went into effect on 22 October. 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. In 1949, he had at least five face-to-face meetings with King Abdullah of Jordan over the Armistice Agreement and the search for a long-term peace agreement. Following a February 1949 incident, he was courtmartialed for disobeying an order from his superior, Major-General Zvi Ayalon OC Central Command. A military court found him guilty and briefly demoted him from lieutenant colonel to major. This did not prevent him from attending the armistice negotiations on Rhodes. On 29 June 1949, he was appointed head of all Israeli delegations to the Mixed Armistice Commission meetings. In September 1949, despite being involved in these negotiations, Dayan recommended to Ben-Gurion that the army should be used to open the road to Jerusalem and 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 of his replacement of 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 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 Govrin 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. 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 on 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 also developed a policy of punitive cross-border reprisal raids in response to fedayeen attacks on Israelis. IDF squads were sent into the Gaza Strip to lay mi