STARTING IN THE EARLY 1930s, the Zionists in Palestine faced increasing opposition and organized violence from Arab nationalists. On the night of December 22, 1932, the violence reached Nahalal when an Arab hurled a bomb at a home, killing the Jewish owner and his eight-year-old son. In response, many Nahalal residents decided to join the Haganah, the clandestine Zionist paramilitary organization in Palestine. The Haganah High Command began to supply the moshav with weapons, which were hidden in public caches, and instructors arrived to train the people to use them properly. The Haganah conscripted the moshav’s young men, including Dayan, whose reputation for fearlessness compensated for his youth. He was already familiar with firearms, having cleaned and fired his father’s carbine for target practice from age ten; he would also ride through the fields with his uncle’s hunting gun. In the Haganah, he learned the basic rules of military field conduct, but he would not divulge the details of his instruction, allowing instead the aura of secrecy to intrigue the girls at school.
In the fall of 1934, after the harvest was in on the farm, Dayan and two friends set out along the Jordan River for the southern Negev Desert. Hiking was a popular pastime for Nahalal’s youth, who would trek north to Mount Hermon on the Syrian border and south to Beit She’an along the Transjordanian border, but no farther. At the time, there were no Jewish settlements in the entire Jordan Valley down to the northern tip of the Dead Sea. Inhabited mainly by Bedouins, it was a dangerous expanse for Jewish excursions. Moshe Dayan, at nineteen, pushed the boundaries: the three friends walked roughly forty-five miles along the Jordan River from Beit She’an to Jericho, arriving two days later at the Dead Sea potash works. There, the local Haganah commander stopped the trio and rerouted them toward Jerusalem. Passing Jerusalem, they visited Hebron, where Arabs had massacred the Jewish community only five years earlier. The following day, Dayan and his friends continued their journey via taxi to Beersheba and walked the rest of the way to Gaza. Upon arrival, they were detained by an Arab policeman. The young idealists from Nahalal insisted on speaking Hebrew, one of the three official languages under the British mandate, and demanded to see an officer who understood the language. It took the intervention of a British policeman to resolve the dispute and send the travelers packing on an Arab bus to Jaffa. From there, they walked to Tel Aviv.
Already having a good idea of the value of publicity, Dayan deemed the bold adventure worthy of public attention. The three presented themselves at the Tel Aviv office of Davar, the popular workers’ newspaper, and related their exploits to the editor. The next day, the paper carried an item about the courage and Zionist pride of the young men who had stood up for their right to speak Hebrew. By the time they returned home, their saga was widely known: Davar could be found in every home in Nahalal. For Dayan, the trip had helped shape his identity and understanding of homeland and driven home the importance of belonging.
Moshe Dayan’s fame would soon soar. At the end of 1934, a territorial dispute with Nahalal’s Bedouin neighbors came to a head. The first winter rains sprouted a cover of green over a wadi at the edge of Nahalal, and the Bedouins, as usual, brought their sheep to graze. In its founding years, the members of the moshav had tilled the land intermittently, but for two years the fields had lain fallow. Now, however, the members decided to reassert their ownership and sow wheat and barley. Nahalal’s youth were recruited to finish the job quickly. The Bedouins responded with a barrage of stones. Dayan sauntered along the fresh furrows with a seed sack, sowing with a wave of the hand, seemingly impervious to the steady volley of rocks. When he reached the Bedouins at the head of the wadi, he was greeted with a crushing blow to the head from a heavy club, apparently delivered by his childhood friend Wahsh. Dayan was rushed home, unconscious, with a cracked skull.
Dayan’s intrepidity and injury were the talk of the day. The daily press fanned patriotic passion as Arab “wildness” and “wickedness” were widely condemned, a choice of words to which Dayan was not party. To him the incident was characteristic of the rivalry between farmers and shepherds dating back to Cain and Abel. “It was clear that we and they wanted the same thing,” he later wrote. “This did not make them worse [than us].”1
Seated at Moshe’s bedside after the fracas, his schoolmate Ruth Schwartz looked down at Moshe, bruised and bloodied. “It was my first sense of helplessness in the face of injury,” she later observed, though it would not be her last.2 Her parents, Zvi and Rachel, belonged to Jerusalem’s Jewish elite. Zvi, a jurist, filled various positions in the Zionist establishment, and Rachel, a trained educator, was known for her charitable works. Their home was a salon and meeting place for top British administrators, Zionist leaders, Jewish writers and artists, and members of the Arab aristocracy. Their daughter had spent her early years in London, where she learned English. In 1934, Ruth, a member of the Labor youth movement, entered the Nahalal agricultural school. Compared with Moshe, she was sophisticated and cultured; her friends described her as “wonderful, beautiful, charming, graceful, vivacious, sociable, amiable, energetic, and smart.”3 Moshe was captivated, and the two became a couple soon after she agreed to teach him English.
On July 12, 1935, Ruth, eighteen, and Moshe, twenty, were married in the Dayan farmyard at Nahalal beneath the lush walnut tree the family had planted fifteen years earlier. The guests included Zionist leaders, the entire Nahalal moshav, and members of the Bedouin tribe that was responsible for Moshe’s cracked skull the year before. They had been hesitant to attend, but Moshe sent a personal invitation through one of his friends, and the tribal council approved the request. To them, Mussa, as they called him, was a hero. In the best Bedouin tradition, they danced debkas, played flutes, drummed on darbukas, and fired bullets into the air from galloping horses. Moshe shook Wahsh’s hand in reconciliation.
Ruth’s parents felt that their rustic son-in-law could benefit from some polishing and as a wedding gift presented the young couple with boat fare to England. Ruth and Moshe sailed third class to Marseilles, spent a few days in Paris, and disembarked in London. The plan was for Moshe to study agriculture, but World Zionist Organization (WZO) president Chaim Weizmann had persuaded Professor Harold Laski to accept Moshe at the London School of Economics. In those early days, according to Ruth, “we must have given the impression of a mad couple. We both insisted on wearing sandals irrespective of the European winter. Moshe refused to wear a tie and I refused to wear the dresses that Mother had bought me at Jerusalem’s fancy stores.”4
New opportunities for the young couple were ostensibly imminent, but they did not materialize as hoped. “Moshe hated London from the very first,” Ruth wrote. “He wanted to go home.” He struggled with English, suffered from the London smog, and felt alien in the cosmopolitan milieu. Moreover, letters from home troubled him. The farm was not in good shape, and rioting had erupted across the country. Worry and longing gnawed at him, and, after six months, he packed up. The trip, he acknowledged, had been a failure. “Being abroad oppressed me,” he recalled. “The English I learned allowed me to chat. The LSE classes did not especially interest me. Since my stay in London served no purpose I returned to the farm. I would have liked to study, but it did not work out.”5
They returned to a farm that was not the same as the one they had left. At the end of 1935, while the Dayans were abroad, the youth of Nahalal’s second generation had split from their parents’ moshav and founded a new kibbutz. Though the moshav movement had made impressive strides since Nahalal’s founding, the heart of the early Zionist ethos was the total collectivism actualized by the kibbutz. The young people set up temporary quarters at Givat Shimron, where their parents had first assembled their tents fifteen years earlier. Ruth was enthusiastic, having dreamt of kibbutz life since her early teens, Moshe less so: “Absolute collectivism, group life, and equality did not suit my nature and disposition.”6 Nevertheless, upon returning from London, they joined the group at Givat Shimron, only to be met with skepticism from Moshe’s childhood friends. They deemed him unsuited for collective life, though they agreed to accept him on a trial basis. He was offended, feeling that they knew him well enough to waive the trial period, but for Ruth’s sake he consented. There at the hill site their daughter, Yaël, was born, but Moshe still remained alienated from the kibbutz members. His life’s path would not remain on the kibbutz after all.
In the spring of 1936, Arab-Jewish relations grew more violent and politicized with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. In April, bloody riots broke out on the Tel Aviv–Jaffa border. An enraged mob murdered Jews entering Jaffa on business, and Jewish residents living on the border of the two towns became refugees. The violence quickly spread throughout the country and lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939, targeting both Jews and the British regime. Some eight hundred Jews and several thousand Arabs were killed in armed clashes. Ultimately, the British Army suppressed the revolt. The Arabs, however, had scored a political victory: London decided first to restrict, and then to stop, the immigration of Jews to Palestine and limit the purchase of land by Jews for settlement. Dayan’s military leanings, meanwhile, led him to join the armed forces, where he quickly climbed the ladder of command.
Originally, the Arab Revolt had fostered cooperation between the British Mandatory Government and the Haganah. With few troops in Palestine, the British allowed the Jewish community to establish the Jewish Settlement Police (JSP), a volunteer force to protect settlements, and equipped its members with rifles, machine guns, and small patrol vans. The Settlement Police received a modest salary from His Majesty’s government and donned uniforms replete with Australian slouch hats. Though formally under British command, the JSP was in fact run by the Haganah.
Military units arriving from Britain required trackers to guide them through the unknown and sometimes hostile territory. The regime turned to the Haganah, and Dayan was one of the first scouts the Haganah entrusted to the British. He served as an adviser to the battalion commander and as a scout for soldiers of an itinerant Scottish company based in Afula, not far from the battlefield described in the book of Judges where Devorah and the Israelites defeated Sisera’s chariot-mounted army. Like most of his generation, Dayan saw himself as the descendant of biblical heroes. Inducted into the JSP, he shared a tent with Scottish soldiers his age, wore a policeman’s uniform, and earned a paltry supplement to his Haganah salary. He visited his family sparingly in Givat Shimron.
In the spring of 1937, Dayan earned his sergeant’s stripes and took command of a Nahalal-area JSP mobile patrol consisting of a van and six policemen. As Arab violence escalated, he sided with a cadre of Haganah commanders who advocated going on the offensive, attacking Arab villages and the roads leading to them. The initiatives were steered by Yitzhak Sadeh, a senior Haganah figure who had fought with the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. He had preached a strategy that favored assaults in the countryside to repel Arab fighters and force them back to their villages before they neared Jewish homes. Dayan applauded the approach. He ran his patrol unit aggressively and nimbly, scurrying up and down the western Jezreel Valley to confront Arab violence. At night they set up ambushes near Arab villages and surprised the fighters emerging from their bases.
As part of his training, Dayan attended a sergeants’ course for JSP commanders delivered by the British Army. In addition to conduct, discipline, and drills, the instructors emphasized attention to detail—polished weapons, spruce uniforms, and shiny shoes—all aspects of soldiering that the casual Dayan detested. But he appreciated the importance of military order and made sure to drill his policemen on the parade field.
The sergeants’ course brought Dayan face to face with Yigal Allon for the first time. Allon, also from Galilee, stood out as a talented young commander in the Haganah ranks. He, too, commanded a mobile JSP patrol, in eastern Galilee. In 1948 he would tell Arnan Azaryahu, his aide-de-camp, that he had disliked Dayan from the start. “I enjoyed the course … except for one thing,” he told his friend; “there was an insufferable fellow there who spoiled the whole course for me. His name is Moshe Dayan.”7 Allon and Dayan were studies in contrast. Allon was handsome, affable, and social, always surrounded by friends and admirers. Dayan was introverted and aloof, preferring solitude. The two would frequently cross paths, often clashing, over the next forty years.
At the end of 1937, after several months of calm, the Arab Revolt flared up again. Arab guerrillas were more organized now, controlling extensive areas in Samaria and Galilee. The British implemented tougher measures and expanded their cooperation with the Haganah. By the start of 1938, Capt. Charles Orde Wingate, a Scottish intelligence officer stationed in Jerusalem and sympathetic to the Zionist cause, concluded that the British needed a more aggressive approach to quell the attacks. In June he received permission to establish a new force—the Special Night Squads. Dayan, though not officially a member, frequently participated in their operations.
A devout Christian, Wingate took the fight to the Arabs on their own turf, at night. Wingate’s methods impressed Dayan, who also admired the Scotsman’s free and easy manner. Like Dayan, Wingate loathed pageantry and roll call but insisted on clean weapons and audacity in battle. Whenever he was in the vicinity of Nahalal, he would visit the Dayans, and the two military men would talk for hours. Dayan considered him “a genius, a trailblazer defying convention.”8
The Arab Revolt targeted Zionist efforts to settle the land. The WZO responded with a concerted effort to create new communities. In late 1936, Palestine’s Jews devised the tower-and-stockade method, erecting a new settlement within hours and fortifying it against certain attack. Such frantic efforts required a band of recruits to load a convoy of trucks with resources early in the morning and assemble sheds, tents, and a watchtower soon afterward. They then surrounded the structures with stockade of gravel-filled double panels to protect against gunfire. By dusk, the new settlement would be ready.
One of these hastily constructed outposts, Hanita, would go down in Zionist lore. Established on March 21, 1938, on the Lebanese border, Hanita was surrounded by hostile Arab villages and far from other Jewish settlements. Expecting Arab opposition, the JSP, under Yitzhak Sadeh’s command, secured the operation, and both Dayan and Allon participated in the patrols. Sadeh was photographed with the two young men, his arms on their shoulders. His copy of the photograph contained the scribbled words “l’état major,” a prophecy that these two warriors would constitute the General Staff of the Jewish State’s army one day. Allon never did serve on the General Staff, though in the 1948 war he was the IDF’s most celebrated field commander. Dayan, however, validated Sadeh’s prescience by becoming the IDF chief of General Staff decades later.
As the Arab Revolt abated, contention between the British regime and Palestine’s Jews intensified. Following the publication of the White Paper of 1939, a government-issued document that marked a sharp turn from previous policy, the British severely limited Jewish immigration and ceased cooperation with the Haganah in order to conciliate the Arab world.
In the summer of 1939, the Haganah organized a covert platoon officers’ course with both Dayan and Allon as instructors. The soldiers trained in a remote village in Lower Galilee, but on October 4 two British officers paid a surprise visit and discovered illegal weapons. They noted the violation and left. The Haganah volunteers, fearing repercussions, decided to relocate the course. They departed late at night, and the hike was arduous. When dawn broke they were still deep in hostile, predominantly Arab territory. A British border police unit on patrol spotted them. The Haganah group took cover in the gullies, but an Arab peasant directed the British patrol to them. The patrol apprehended the young Jewish nationalists and brought them to the old Acre Port prison for investigation.
Acre prison served as a main British facility, holding mostly criminals. Among the sordid collection of pimps, crooks, rapists, and murderers detained behind the thick walls of the old, moldy Crusader fortress, Arab guerrillas mixed with members of the Haganah and the Irgun, a Haganah offshoot. The prisoners took walks in the central courtyard and were able to enjoy the fresh breezes from the Mediterranean, but the gallows within the walls served as harsh reminders of the fate that awaited some of the prisoners.
Dayan and the forty-two other Haganah prisoners assumed that the Zionist leadership would intervene and soon have them released, but they were disappointed. The British made a show trial of them, and because there was no question about the events that had occurred, Haganah attorneys focused on motives rather than actions. They claimed that the young men had been training for war against the Nazis, the common enemy. The military judges were not convinced and according to the emergency regulations implemented by the British during the Arab Revolt, the illegal possession of arms merited a death penalty. The judges instead handed down a ten-year prison sentence, still a severe penalty that stunned the defendants, their families, and the Jewish community of Palestine. The British wanted to show the Arab world that they made no exceptions for Jews. Dayan’s young wife, Ruth, was devastated.
“Ten years, meaning 1949,” she wrote to Dayan in prison. “All the expectations, the hopes, the beautiful dreams, all destroyed. Impossible to absorb…. No one said a word. Only a deep hatred of the English took root in our hearts. Can words express the great pain and despair?”9
Dayan, always the pessimist, had not deluded himself. He had prepared for a harsh sentence even before hearing the verdict: the day before sentencing, he wrote a letter to Ruth asking her to send an English-Hebrew dictionary, an English grammar, and English reading material. “Some of the reading material should be in large letters,” he added, “for in the evening it is already dark in the room, especially in winter.” He remained level-headed: “Anyone able to say ‘A’ should be able to say ‘B’ and accept the punishment.”10 Though he could not fight his imprisonment, he took full command of improving conditions within the prison. His fellow inmates elected a committee and put him in charge of liaising with the British.
While Dayan devoted his energies to the day-to-day prison grind, the Zionist leadership worked on reducing the prisoners’ sentence. Their efforts paid off, and the British High Commissioner lowered the penalty to five years. For Dayan, even with the punishment cut in half, the confinement left him in despair. “Memories of the past played a more important part than plans for the future,” he recalled in one of his many letters to Ruth; “the date of release became a matter of faith, severed from objective political logic.”11
As his letters to Ruth revealed, Dayan, a low-ranking Haganah commander at the time, did not see himself as anything more than the leader of a group of prisoners and a simple farmer from a small house in Nahalal. His letters described the humdrum routine of prison life but also unveiled his intimate and affectionate side, which was hidden from the public during his lifetime. “I wake up almost every night remembering you both,” he wrote to Ruth and their baby, Yaël. “If I could relay to you a thousandth of what I feel for you those nights, you would perhaps sense what you both mean to me.”12 No doubt, of all the prison hardships, Dayan was most devastated by his separation from his wife and daughter, the destruction of his family life.
While the Zionists struggled for statehood in Palestine, World War II raged. In early 1941, the British forces in the Middle East suffered a setback. General Erwin Rommel, the distinguished field marshal who led the German and Italian forces in North Africa, transferred the Afrikakorps to Libya. With French Vichy forces controlling Syria and Lebanon—and permitting German air force bases there—the British were once again inclined to utilize the military capabilities of Palestine’s Jewish community. As a result, on February 17, 1941, the British released the forty-three Haganah prisoners, only a year and a half after their arrest. Ruth brought Moshe new clothes and drove him home to Nahalal. She hoped that he would rest and settle into a quiet family life on the farm. That dream was short-lived.
In the spring of 1941, the Haganah created a national standing army to defend the Jewish community against the possible Axis conquest of Palestine. In the north, Yitzhak Sadeh led two companies with Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan serving under him as company commanders. The young officers were neck and neck on the road to advancement. The newly established fighting division soon expanded and became the Plugot Machatz—strike force—better known by its Hebrew acronym, the Palmach. This unit became the Haganah’s elite force in the Jewish people’s struggle for independence in their biblical homeland.
Just as Allon and Dayan began forming their companies, the British requested Haganah scouts and sappers to bolster their army’s invasion of Lebanon to drive out the Vichy forces. Allon’s company was attached to troops on the eastern front, near the Syrian border, and Dayan’s to the Australian 7th Division on the western front, along the Mediterranean coast. Dayan assembled some thirty poorly trained but eager fighters at Hanita and enlisted the help of an Arab scout, Rashid, a leader in the Arab Revolt, to help the Jewish fighters navigate the unfamiliar terrain beyond the northern border. Dayan and his men gained valuable fighting experience during their reconnaissance missions deep behind French lines.
The invasion began on June 8, 1941. The night before, Dayan and four of his men, including his friend Zalman Mart, joined three Australian officers and seven soldiers to secure two adjacent bridges crossing the Litani River, twelve and a half miles north of the border, until the main force arrived the next day. Dayan gave expression to the pride he had felt marching with his men, leading the invasion to Syria. “At long last we go to war against the Axis,” he wrote in a report years later. “Our boys are at the head, without uniforms, poorly equipped. Nevertheless, here are the border stones; we are in Syria not as sneakers, not as smugglers—we are conquerors.” He did not forget to mention that ahead of them an Arab scouted the way.13
The multi-ethnic unit reached the bridges shortly after midnight. With no enemies or booby traps in sight, the men waited for the reinforcements to arrive. Dayan stretched out beneath one of the bridges to nap, a habit he would maintain during breaks in battle. His rest was brief. As night turned to dawn, concern grew over their comrades’ delay. Only later would they learn that the French had blown up a number of smaller water crossings and mined the road closer to the border, impeding the troops’ advance. With no sign of approaching Allied forces, and without the cover of darkness, the unit was left exposed at the bridges. They decided to walk a few miles south to capture the local police station, unaware that the Vichy forces had seized the building and transformed it into their headquarters.
As the Australian and Jewish fighters approached the station, they were greeted by heavy gunfire from surrounding orchards and roadside positions. Bullet bursts from a machine gun on the roof of the police station spurred Dayan to action, and the brawny farmer from Nahalal became a fearless Haganah legend. Dayan hurled a grenade twenty-five yards, silencing the gun, and without waiting for orders from his Australian counterpart, he stormed the rooftop. There he organized the Haganah men.
The roof was not fortified, and the low railing offered little protection. While Dayan peered at the battle below through a pair of binoculars he had found, a bullet struck the left lens and shattered it into his eye. Zalman Mart dressed the wound, and Dayan was transferred on an improvised stretcher to a sheltered spot on the ground floor. “Moshe, what do you say?” Mart asked his wounded friend. “I lost an eye, but if I get to a hospital quickly, I’ll live,” Dayan responded, maintaining his composure throughout. For six hours Dayan lay wounded “like a sack … making no sound,” Mart later testified. “I admired him.”14 Dayan offered his own matter-of-fact description: “I took a bullet in the eye. I did not pass out. I received first aid at once. But from then on, all I could do was hear what was happening around me.”15
When the Australian vanguard finally arrived in the early afternoon, Dayan was evacuated to a hospital in Haifa. Throughout the ordeal, Rashid, the Arab scout, held Dayan’s hand, and he accompanied him to the hospital. “It doesn’t matter,” Dayan told Mart before being taken in for treatment, “I lived with two eyes for twenty-six years. It’s not terrible. You can live with one eye, too.” Davar’s editorial board, already familiar with Dayan’s exploits during his trek throughout much of Palestine years earlier, published a brief article titled “Disaster for Moshe Dayan,” which explained that “Dayan was wounded while performing a heroic feat.” His Australian comrades were equally impressed. One of the officers, upon meeting Ruth at Moshe’s bedside, noted with some exaggeration that “if there’s anything military that your husband doesn’t know, it’s not worth knowing.”16
After rushing Dayan to the hospital in one of their army ambulances, the British recorded his injury on a field medical card: “Moshe Dayan. Palestinian civilian, accidentally wounded, 8.6.1941.”17