IF HE HAD NOT BEEN WOUNDED, Dayan would have returned from Lebanon crowned with laurels, a rising Haganah star. But the bullet had smashed the bones around the eye cavity and the bridge of the nose, requiring close medical attention in place of a hero’s welcome. He remained out of combat for seven years. After the initial injury healed, he moved his small family to his in-laws’ home near a Jerusalem treatment center. He underwent further surgery to allow a glass eye to be fitted, but the operation failed, and Dayan had to wear an eye patch for the rest of his life.
He was despondent about his future as “an invalid with no line of work and no financial base.”1 When Ruth announced that she was pregnant with their second child, he burst out, “Who will hire a one-eyed man? I can’t support my family.”2 As the Haganah military organization took shape without him, Dayan felt “finished” and “washed up.”3 His appearance only aggravated matters. He worried that with his black eye patch he resembled a pirate and frightened children.
But ever since Germany had invaded Russia, on June 22, 1941, it had posed a real danger to the Middle East, and Dayan’s services were still needed. The British and the Haganah feared that German forces in the Caucasus would descend from the north while Rommel’s troops—already at the gates of Alexandria—would rise from the south. Reuven Zaslani, who lived in the apartment underneath the Dayans’ in Jerusalem and took turns with Ruth and her mother driving Moshe to treatment, was in charge of Special Affairs at the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, liaising with British military intelligence. Only three months after Dayan’s injury, Zaslani (later Shiloah), who is credited with founding the Mossad, Israel’s renowned secret service, asked Moshe to set up an espionage ring to penetrate the German camp in the event of Axis forces overtaking Palestine. The few who knew about the group called it “Dayan’s network.” Its mission was to establish and operate clandestine transmission stations to inform the British of developments within German-occupied territory.
But with Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein in northern Egypt in the fall of 1942, the immediate German threat was avoided and the network dismantled. The Palmach absorbed Dayan’s men, leaving him unemployed once again. He decided to return to Nahalal to develop the new farm he had purchased.
Moshe devoted the next five years to the farm. For Ruth, these were golden days: “Those were wonderful years … of family unity and the kind of life I loved,” she remembered. “We were together that entire period, working together for a common goal and living together just like anybody else.”4 There they had two more children, Ehud and Assaf, who came to be better known by their nicknames Udi and Assi.
It is difficult to imagine Dayan at peace on a farm during those particularly turbulent times. As World War II ended, the Jews and the British halted their cooperation, the latter again choosing to impede the Zionists. The British closed Palestine’s ports to arriving Jews, forcing increased undercover Jewish immigration. When the United Kingdom turned against the Zionist cause, incidents against the British regime intensified. In October 1945, Yitzhak Rabin led a Palmach raid on the Atlist prison and liberated 208 Jewish prisoners, and a month later the group sabotaged railway lines at more than 150 locations. On June 17, 1946, the Haganah carried out its largest and most impressive operation: Palmach units blew up 10 bridges connecting Palestine to its neighbor countries.
Although Dayan played no part in any of these operations, the Haganah command still regarded him as a senior officer and occasionally recruited him. In early 1945, he was assigned a thankless mission deemed necessary to stunt the developments brought on the previous year by the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL; National Military Organization). On February 1, 1944, Menachem Begin, head of the IZL, had called for a revolt against the British regime. The IZL, which would respond to Arab attacks with violence, had split from the Haganah in April 1937 after refusing to acknowledge the authority of the Jewish Agency, regarded by most of Palestine’s Jewish population as its pre-state authority. By 1945, the Jewish Agency and the Haganah command had concluded that ongoing cooperation with the British regime was important and the IZL’s actions were therefore dangerous. They decided to dissolve the IZL. A special Haganah unit launched the saison (hunting season)—pitting brother against brother. The Haganah, with Dayan involved, detained numerous IZL members and even turned some over to the British.
The regrettable in-fighting exposed raw nerves and generated a bitterness that lingered. Dayan rarely spoke of his key role in rounding up IZL members. When he met up with the leaders of the dissenting underground group, he chatted at length with Begin. “Dayan offered heartwarming, encouraging words,” Begin wrote; “he admired our actions … they showed Jewish youth that the British could be beaten.”5 Dayan acknowledged his praise for their operations and dedication, but he remained committed to David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency at the time, and opposed any break from national authority.
Dayan’s work for the Jewish Agency and his role in the saison propelled him toward the political ranks of the ruling Mapai Party.6 In 1944, the party split. A minority formed the Labor Unity Party, which advocated activism and opposed the land’s partition, attracting many young people. Most Palmach commanders backed the Labor Unity, which, in return, supported the Palmach. Ben-Gurion, in response, tried to woo young leaders to Mapai. Dayan joined Mapai’s young guard, where he met Shimon Peres, eight years his junior. Peres, who had immigrated to Tel Aviv from Poland in 1934, would eventually serve as Israel’s prime minister and president, and the two men would work together for years.
In the winter of 1946, Dayan and Peres were sent to Switzerland to observe the Twenty-second Zionist Congress, the eminent WZO forum. Ruth accompanied Moshe since a Parisian doctor had agreed to attempt a bone transplant around his eye. The operation failed, however, and he was hospitalized for a month, restless and in the care of nuns.
“For four days … Moshe lay with high temperature, unable to eat,” Ruth later described. “I was at his bedside day and night…. As he recovered, he grew angry and fidgety, insisting on my presence. ‘What am I to do with all these nuns?’ he demanded. ‘I don’t even speak French.’”7
He returned from Paris with no glass eye and the same aggravating eye patch. “I was prepared to endure anything to be rid of it,” Dayan wrote. “It drew attention…. I preferred to stay at home.”8 While the distress would remain, over time his black eye patch would become a greatly admired icon.
In 1947, the United Nations was on the verge of deciding to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. Palestine’s Jewish population, the Yishuv, braced for attacks from neighboring Arab states. Three groups made up the fledgling Jewish army’s officers—seasoned Haganah fighters, Palmach commanders, and World War II veterans of the British Army. Dayan was not included in the urgent process of building a conventional military.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 calling for the partition of the territory of Palestine into two independent states, free of British rule. The Jewish leadership accepted the resolution, while the Arabs rejected it and almost immediately initiated attacks on the Jewish communities in Palestine. Soon after, the Arab League established the Arab Liberation Army, which included a Druze battalion headed by an officer from the Syrian army. In early April, the Druze battalion attacked Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, near Nahalal. It took the Haganah forces four days to repel the Druze. When the fighting concluded and the damage could be assessed, Moshe’s younger brother Zohar was among the casualties.
Dayan and his brother-in-law, Israel Gefen, set out to identify the body. “There was mourning at home,” Dayan later noted tersely. “The raging war and high daily toll of sons dulled outward expressions of individual grief.” His mother’s bereavement gave him pause. “Mother was closer to [Zohar] than to Aviva and myself to some extent because he was the youngest, mostly because of his personality…. He had an incredible vitality, an abundant, radiant cheerfulness. He had burst upon life as if there were no stops.” His mother was devastated. “This wound would not heal,” Moshe wrote. “The light went out of her life.”9
Beginning in mid-April, the Haganah went on the offensive. Many of Dayan’s old colleagues were now battalion and brigade commanders, and he was eager to enter the fray. In early May, his friend and mentor Yitzhak Sadeh suggested that Dayan set up a commando battalion within Sadeh’s new armored brigade. Dayan jumped at the chance. On Friday, May 14, 1948, with the British Mandate set to expire the following day, the Jewish leaders convened and proclaimed an independent Jewish state. They deliberated over its name and decided not to call it Zion, which would have made it the last country to vote in the alphabetized system of the United Nations. With the Sabbath fast approaching, they agreed on Israel. The next day, five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state. The Syrian army attacked the area south of the Sea of Galilee and approached Deganya, Dayan’s birthplace. Multiple Jewish forces were operating in the area and the Haganah General Staff (HGS) sent Dayan to coordinate the efforts. By the time he arrived on May 19, the Syrians had already taken Tsemah and readied to attack Deganya. For Dayan, retreat was not to be considered.
His authority had not been properly defined, and he sidestepped formal channels to operate as he saw fit. He appointed a Nahalal friend as commander of Deganya Bet, the site Shmuel Dayan had torched thirty years earlier. In the nine-hour attack on both Deganya Aleph and Deganya Bet, two Syrian tanks breached the fences but were stopped by a flurry of Molotov cocktails. As the stalemate continued into the afternoon, Dayan decided to introduce a battery of old field cannons into the battle. Though they were missing their sights, accuracy was not the priority; the Syrian soldiers were spread out. The cannons, the first used by the Jewish army, served their purpose and surprised the Syrians, who scattered in every direction.
By nightfall, the front was quiet, and Dayan assumed that the Syrians had retreated from Tsemah. Escorted by a handful of former colleagues, he headed for the battered police station and found it “empty, silent and abandoned.” All around, bodies of Syrian and Jewish soldiers killed in the first retreat were strewn about. He was overcome with shock and grief.
“A hard battle, tragic and depressing,” he recalled. “Much young blood spilt. Not the blood of war-seasoned soldiers. Young blood, meeting death open-eyed. Casualties abandoned to moan at the roadside. Their friends, pursued by fire, unable to attend to them or gather them up. Defenders fighting with pathetic weapons against Syrian tanks, cannon, and armored cars…. It was a valiant … desperate battle of no retreat, this battle for the Deganyas.”10
In June 1948, the United Nations declared a monthlong truce. Dayan was preoccupied with building his army unit, known as the Raiders Battalion No. 89. The unit deployed jeeps, machine guns, and half-tracks purchased on the U.S. junk market.
On June 20, Sadeh called upon Dayan to handle a particularly sensitive situation. A ship carrying arms and nine hundred Jewish immigrants had reached the central coastline. The Altalena, purchased and outfitted in France by the Irgun, had dropped anchor at a deserted beach and had unloaded its cargo. Ben-Gurion viewed the operation as a blatant breach of the Haganah agreement with the Irgun at the end of April, whereby the latter was to dissolve after the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces and to forfeit its firearms. Sadeh ordered Dayan to confiscate the weapons brought by the Altalena.
Hurrying to the site with his company from the Jezreel Valley, Dayan found a small cache of weapons on the beach, surrounded by Irgun members threatening anyone who approached. Dayan issued an ultimatum, which was answered with gunfire that killed two of his men and wounded six others. He ordered his men to shell the beach with mortar fire. The Irgun surrendered, but the ship turned around and sailed for Tel Aviv. A battle ensued and the Altalena was set on fire, exploded, and sank. This was not an episode that Dayan relished, but his allegiance to Ben-Gurion remained unshakable.
Following the Altalena tragedy, Dayan was summoned to General Headquarters, where he was instructed to accompany Col. David Marcus’s body to West Point for burial. Col. Marcus, an American Jewish officer who had volunteered his services in the war against the Arabs, had been accidentally killed by friendly fire. Marcus’s lack of Hebrew cost him his life when he was unable to communicate with a Palmach fighter to stop him firing on his position. Dayan and Yossi Harel, captain of the SS Exodus, escorted the coffin back to the United States. Upon his return to Israel, ignoring an order to report immediately to Ben-Gurion, Dayan rushed to rejoin his battalion for a major offensive against Jordan’s Arab Legion stationed in the Arab towns of Lod and Ramle near Tel Aviv. Four brigades were organized under Allon, whose rank was now comparable to general.11 Dayan, a major, was one of a dozen battalion commanders in the campaign, but his battalion, inspired by his daring and fighting spirit, stood out.
On the day that Dayan returned, his companies moved on two fortified villages on the Samarian slopes. One village opened fire on the company of half-tracks leading the battalion, and the company halted. Dayan ordered the commander to attack head-on while he took charge of the second company and stormed the other village. It was the battalion’s first engagement, and a successful one. The men were heartened, enabling Dayan to act even more daringly.
After his battalion completed its initial mission in the Arab villages north of Lod, Dayan presented himself to Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, now prime minister, offered Dayan the challenging position of commander of Jerusalem, a considerable advancement. But Dayan asked for a postponement.
“I was appointed battalion commander only recently,” he reasoned. “I haven’t seen any fighting yet. This morning we started our first battle. I really don’t want to leave my battalion and my job. In Jerusalem I’ll have to instruct others to fight; here I myself fight.”12
Ben-Gurion was impressed with Dayan’s grit and agreed to allow the young commander to return to his unit. Night fell as Dayan made his way back to the lines, and, worried that he would trigger a mine in the dark, he decided to catch some sleep in a sorghum field and wait for dawn. “Now, too, after joining the ‘cavalry’ and fighting from a jeep, there was nothing closer or more calming to me than the ground,” Dayan later wrote. “Its radiating warmth, the loose sand and earth, the shelter and mystery it enfolded were family. No barriers, no betrayals. It could be counted on in battle, and one could lay one’s head on its shoulders for a night’s rest.”13
Reunited with his battalion, Dayan led his men into an important battle, part of a wider IDF offensive to take Lod and Ramle, pivotal Arab-controlled towns on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Arab Legion and Palestinian irregular forces had taken positions in these towns to fire on Jewish travelers even before the war’s start. These Arab militias succeeded in disrupting transportation along the main road leading up the Jerusalem hills. The Haganah launched the offensive, “Operation Danny”—named in honor of Danny Mass, the late commander of a Haganah unit that lost thirty-five men in an effort to resupply the Gush Etzion communities south of Jerusalem in January 1948—to remove the Arab stranglehold on the travel arteries to Jerusalem.
In the course of capturing a Jordanian armored car fitted with a two-pound cannon, Dayan’s battalion came under fire. Despite its exposure to enemy forces, the battalion managed to take the hills overlooking Lod, northeast of the Arab town, the side considered more vulnerable. While Dayan evaluated his soldiers’ position, a Palmach commander whose men were under heavy fire on the southeast edge of town sent for help. Dayan arrayed his battalion along the road behind the captured Jordanian armored car and took his place in the second half-track of the advance company, totaling some two hundred soldiers.
The stage was set for one of the most celebrated battles of Israel’s War of Independence. Though the Dayan-led attack drew criticism for its undue risk, generations of IDF soldiers would be raised on the drama that unfolded. The key to the troops’ success was firepower and speed. In only forty-seven minutes of fighting, Dayan’s battalion breached Lod’s defense lines, crossed the village to the outskirts of the neighboring Arab town of Ramle, and returned under a downpour of fire from Arab Legion fighters holding two fortified positions on the main road. The battalion lost nine men and seven wounded; every car was hit including Dayan’s half-track, which had to be pushed and pulled the entire way. As Dayan’s men emerged from the fierce battle on the north side of the village, they sighted Palmach fighters sprinting into town.14
The battalion’s raid undoubtedly helped topple the town’s defenses and paved the way for the infantry’s victory. Dayan, like all the other Haganah battalion commanders, had no previous experience or training in leading large corps into battle. Guided by his temperament, he acted on instinct. Tactically his actions lacked sophistication, and he narrowly avoided disaster. But success speaks for itself, and his daring exploits warranted the glory he received when he returned with his battalion to their base on July 19. Ben-Gurion could wait no longer and four days later promoted Dayan to colonel and appointed him the commander of Jerusalem.
The glory earned in the trenches was mostly unattainable to the commander of Jerusalem. While leadership in battle required personal courage and direct contact with subordinates, Dayan’s new position relied on delegating other commanders to lead. Here he learned to develop his strengths in diplomacy.
Aside from minor daily skirmishes, there were only two major clashes during Dayan’s tenure as commander of Jerusalem, both of which ended in failure for the Israelis. In early August, Arab irregulars violated the demilitarized zone surrounding the United Nations headquarters (previously the British Government House) on the Hill of Evil Counsel south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, and seized a few hilltop positions. The Israelis decided to dislodge the Arabs from these positions. The mission fell to a battalion in Dayan’s brigade that was instructed not to harm the U.N. personnel or enter the U.N. compound. This restriction led to a failed campaign, leaving the hilltop in Jordanian hands. Eleven IDF soldiers were killed, five taken captive, and twenty wounded. Battalion and brigade commanders assigned blame to one another.
The IDF initiated the second major incident under Dayan’s command of Jerusalem. With an ongoing IDF offensive in the south, Dayan directed his brigade’s attempt to take the Beit Jala ridge overlooking Bethlehem on the night of October 21. At first the campaign went well as the brigade took control of points north of the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem railway line. But while ascending the steep slope to the next target, the advance units encountered heavy opposition. Dawn soon broke, and the forward battalion was recalled to the northern side of the railway track, rendering this operation a failure as well.
The two unsuccessful operations notwithstanding, Dayan’s leadership and decisiveness were effective in his new command, and they were on particular display following the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish U.N. mediator, on September 17 by the Stern Gang, a small splinter paramilitary group also known as LEHI (Israel Freedom Fighters). The Stern Gang, along with the IZL, had retained a quasi-independent status in Jerusalem. Following the murder of Bernadotte, this above-the-law privilege would end. The IZL surrendered their arms peacefully, but Dayan’s men had to surround their camp before the Stern Gang did so. Afterward, Dayan assumed control of all the Jewish armed forces in the city.
When Dayan was appointed commander, he relocated his family to Jerusalem, leaving the Nahalal farm to hired workers. They moved into a posh apartment that had previously been owned by Abucarius Bey, an Arab attorney who had fled the city during the fighting. Foreign diplomats, U.N. officials, journalists, senior Israeli government officials, and members of the local Jewish elite all found their way to the Dayan salon.
Moshe Dayan had become part of Israel’s political and social aristocracy, causing a drastic change in the family’s lifestyle. His children, accustomed to Nahalal’s open fields, struggled to adjust to the city life and resorted to mischief. Moshe, now a regular in the headlines, often found himself “embroiled in argument” and he gained weight. A changed way of thinking accompanied the new life: Dayan began to understand the art of diplomacy.15
As one of his first diplomatic achievements, Dayan established good relations with Jerusalem’s Jordanian commander, Abdullah al-Tal. The two men trusted each other and would meet at the solitary cross-point of the divided city controlled by the United Nations. Al-Tal told Ruth, who occasionally came along, that it was “a pleasure to meet with an enemy such as your husband.”16
On November 28, 1948, Dayan and al-Tal decided to sign an “Absolute and Sincere Ceasefire.” They had set up a direct “red line” of communication to avert potential clashes in the fragile arrangement. Problems, however, often cropped up about the exact demarcation of forces. Using a chinagraph pencil, the two commanders would draw the lines on maps unfurled on a stone-strewed dirt floor. The bumpy stone would occasionally cause the pencil to stray into the wrong neighborhood or street, inviting argument.
Still, the Absolute and Sincere Ceasefire in Jerusalem encouraged diplomatic efforts to resolve outstanding issues in other areas. Dayan and Reuven Shiloah, the neighbor who had founded the Mossad, were in direct touch with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who entrusted them with representing him in talks on territorial exchange to allow free movement to Arabs between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and to Jews between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well as to the Western Wall. Jurists drafted official authorizations, which were duly exchanged, but the gaps between the sides were too wide to bridge.
Though Dayan believed the IDF was strong enough to expand its control all the way to the Jordan River, he pledged his allegiance and unquestioning trust to Ben-Gurion and his peaceful state-building approach. The talks with al-Tal proved fruitless, and soon Jordan’s King Abdullah invited the Israeli representatives to meet with him at his winter palace in the town of Shuneh, east of the Jordan Valley.
The first meeting took place on January 16, 1949. Dayan and Eliahu Sasson, the senior expert on Arab affairs at Israel’s Foreign Ministry, represented Israel. The issues raised with King Abdullah related to Jerusalem and the West Bank, both occupied by Jordan. Israel demanded a boundary change on the western slopes of the Samaria Hills, including the annexation of several large Arab villages near the central mountain range. The Israelis also wanted control of Wadi Ara—“Nahal Iron” in Hebrew—a strategic road connecting the coastal lowlands and Galilee.
The meetings with the king followed the finest Bedouin tradition: a chess match that would end in victory for the king and a recital of verses he had composed, followed by a banquet late in the evening. King Abdullah enlivened the discussions on territory with erudite Eastern proverbs and epigrams. After several such discussions, it became clear that the cautious king preferred armistice talks over peace talks, and in March 1949 formal negotiations between Jordan and Israel began at the Hotel des Roses in Rhodes. Dayan and Shiloah again represented Israel, and Ralph Bunche, Count Bernadotte’s replacement as U.N. mediator, oversaw the talks.
Dayan took in the scenery, admiring Rhodes’s antiquities and the famed Valley of Butterflies, at its most vivid during that season. But he was aggravated that Jordan’s delegates had no authority to conclude matters. To overcome the deadlock, he flew back to Jerusalem to join the Israeli diplomats negotiating directly with King Abdullah. In another meeting with the king, he presented Israel’s demands amiably and courteously but refused to negotiate. It took an additional meeting for the Jordanians to let down their guard and consider Israel’s proposal. This meeting was also attended by Yigael Yadin, the chief operations officer of the IDF, and Yehoshafat Harkavi, a senior intelligence figure. Dayan addressed the king: “The three military members of our delegation, Yadin, Harkavi, and myself, each lost a younger brother in this war—a war that we did not want and that would not have erupted had the Arab states, including Jordan, not attacked us. The time to have talked about concessions and compromise was before the war, so as to prevent it. Now it is necessary to bear the consequences and end it.”17
At the end of the discussion, the king fetched a bouquet of roses and gave each Israeli a flower. “Tonight we ended the war,” he said; “we brought peace.”18 The next day, Dayan returned to Rhodes. All that remained was to sign the agreement. But the talks dragged on for another two years and ended only in July 1951 when a Palestinian nationalist assassinated Abdullah as he was leaving the al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Dayan’s main accomplishment—taking advantage of the positive climate created in the talks—amounted to minor territorial exchanges that netted Israel an important gain: complete, unfettered control of the railway line to Jerusalem. Deserving of the credit and praise that Ben-Gurion heaped on him, Dayan had earned the renown and respect that positioned him for more senior roles.
Among the IDF’s senior officers, Dayan had become the leading expert on Armistice Agreement issues. On July 19, 1949, he was put in charge of armistice affairs, a responsibility that placed him in close contact with Foreign Ministry officials and, in particular, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, who managed diplomatic efforts with the United Nations. Dayan’s comments reflected a hawkish stance. At a conference of ambassadors and diplomats convened by Sharett in July 1950, he astounded participants by questioning whether Israel’s “present borders suffice … and will remain as they are in the future.” According to the conference minutes, “Dayan believes that the first campaign in the process of Israel’s establishment as an independent state is not yet over since we have not yet specified whether its spatial identity today is the final one…. He believes that the period we are living in is still open to change.”19
Dayan did not accept the borders determined by the result of the War of Independence as final, nor did he abandon his ambition to expand them. Historians are fond of citing Dayan’s words at Sharett’s conference as evidence that the farmer from Nahalal sought to conquer the West Bank and establish Israel’s border along the Jordan River. In the 1950s, occasional proposals to conquer parts of the West Bank emerged, but they always stemmed from the fear that Jordan’s Hashemite regime was about to fall and that hostile elements would replace it. Dayan’s proposals to change the state borders, however, were aimed at the Egyptian front. For the time being, he accepted Ben-Gurion’s policy of supporting Jordan’s control of the West Bank.
When Dayan retired from the IDF years later, Ben-Gurion sent him a warm letter that included a list of his many military accomplishments. Referring to his stint of service in Jerusalem, he wrote: “You have been endowed not only with first-rate military ability but also with extraordinary political acumen and statesmanship.”20