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 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.
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.
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.
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 subsequently as an officer in the newly-formed Israel Defense Forces.
On 14 April 1948, Dayan's younger brother, Zohar "Zorik" Dayan, 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.