ON OCTOBER 9, 1949, Moshe Dayan was appointed officer commanding (O.C.) of Israel’s southern front and promoted to the rank of major-general. In his new capacity, he oversaw a region that bordered Egyptian territory in the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and Jordanian territory in the Hebron Hills and along the Arava, a desert plain that stretches from the Dead Sea to Eilat. The War of Independence had left the borders of this expanse unresolved, and disputes flared up. One such altercation escalated into a serious exchange of fire and gave Dayan the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership abilities.
After taking Eilat on the Red Sea without a fight in March 1949, the IDF had built a dirt road through the Arava, which Jordan claimed infringed on its sovereign territory. The Jordanian army blocked the road with boulders and fences, and Dayan rushed to the site to demand that the corridor be reopened. Jordan refused, and Dayan ordered a battalion of half-tracks to break through the blockade. When the Jordanians opened fire, Dayan called in mortar fire in return, forcing the Jordanians to abandon their posts. Some days later, U.N. observers determined that Jordan’s grievance was legitimate. Dayan respected the finding and authorized a bypass road. This episode characterized Dayan the leader: firm, sharp, and quick to protect Israeli interests, but also able to admit when he was wrong and remedy the situation.
As O.C. Southern Command, Dayan directed most of his attention to civilian affairs. From 1949 to 1952, large-scale immigration to Israel doubled the country’s Jewish population. The government adopted a countrywide policy of population dispersal, settling many immigrants in new rural communities. Dayan’s jurisdiction contained small kibbutzim built under the British Mandate. Most of the territory was desolate, and he understood that true security was not only a military matter but also a matter of filling the land with thriving communities.
There were some six thousand families distributed among the fifteen transit camps in his jurisdiction, tent cities exposed to debilitating heat in the summer and raging storms in the winter. The army helped the immigrants in every way possible. The Engineering Corps paved roads and drained rainwater; the Women’s Corps provided hundreds of soldiers as teachers; the army brought food and supplies where roads were impassable; and, at some camps, officers assumed full management responsibilities.
Most of the new immigrants were not inclined toward a collective way of life. Dayan suggested that the cooperative moshavim of his youth might be more suitable, and he pressed the settlement institutions to create immigrant moshavim along the border with the Gaza Strip and Jordan. In 1950, mere months after moving to Israel, immigrants from Kurdistan developed the moshav of Mivtachim opposite the Gaza Strip. It suffered from infiltration by Arab guerrillas, the occasional shelling, and mining of the dirt roads, and Dayan placed all the resources he commanded at its disposal. Today, Mivtachim is a prosperous community, exporting flowers and vegetables to Europe.
The Southern Command also offered fine hunting grounds, much to Dayan’s delight. He stalked partridges and pigeons, returning from his patrols with a dozen birds, from which he prepared delicacies. The sport inadvertently introduced him to a new passion: archaeology. On one expedition with his older son, Udi, the two passed Tell es-Safi at the edge of the Hebron Hills. Rain had exposed antiquities in the biblical town’s ruins, and pottery peeped out of the steep wall of the grooved wadi, requiring little digging to extract a few jugs. Consulting with an archaeologist, Moshe learned that these were from the Kingdom of Judea in the ninth or tenth century BCE. The following Saturday, he excitedly returned to the tell with a spade and uncovered more vessels. It was a defining moment, bringing Dayan his “first intimate encounter with ancient Israel … life from three thousand years ago.”1
His brush with the past sparked an uncontrollable obsession. Israel is filled with archaeological mounds, and after his original discovery Dayan spent hours unearthing artifacts and piecing together shards in his garden. “For me, born in the Land of Israel, love of homeland was not abstract,” he explained. “The lily of the Sharon and Mount Carmel were as real as could be; a flower is fragrant, a mountain has paths trodden by my feet. And yet the Israel that I saw with my eyes and touched with my hands was not enough for me; I wanted to make ancient Israel concrete too. Much as my parents who hailed from the Diaspora wished to make the spiritual Israel of books a physical homeland, I wished to lend my physical homeland the depth of spirit and history, to breathe the soul of the past into ruins and tells, to bring alive the Israel of the Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings.”2
His digs were flagrantly illegal and widely condemned, but he either could not resist or did not care to. Archaeological excavation would become a lifelong passion, and he would exploit his public stature, his personal relationship with archaeologists, and ambiguous laws to amass a rich, valuable collection.
In early 1952, the IDF sent Dayan to England to attend a course for senior officers. He formed instant friendships with some of the other foreign officers, although his relations with the British were less warm. Some of them had served in Palestine during the Jewish struggle against the Mandate and had unpleasant memories of their run-ins with Jews. But Dayan’s sense of humor and casual manners quickly thawed the British chill. His English had improved considerably, and his recollections of the discomfort he had experienced in London six years earlier had faded. Undoubtedly his spirits were also improved by having a personal valet assigned to him, as was customary in the British Army. He was brought tea in bed every morning, and every evening his shoes were polished. The instructors’ comments in his notebooks speak of Dayan’s diligence and indicate their respect for his battle experience and command.3
On June 1, back in Israel, Dayan was appointed O.C. Northern Command, moving him up another rung on the IDF ladder. The senior generals, some ten years Dayan’s senior, were wrapping up their military careers, and Dayan, the outstanding officer of his generation, would not have long to wait to take their place. He moved his family north, though not back to Nahalal. The army allotted him a spacious flat in Tivon, a small town located between Nahalal and Haifa. His farming days were over.
Dayan knew the region of the Northern Command very well. His headquarters were in Nazareth, the town of his childhood school. He was now in charge of a much more populated area than the Southern Command, including roughly a hundred villages and three urban centers with some hundred thousand Arabs who had remained in Galilee after the 1948 war. Only a few years had passed since these Arabs had fought the Jews, and their allegiance to the State of Israel was questionable. Their lives were managed by army officers and heavily restricted under a military government that they despised.
Dayan’s worries in the North also included Syria. The armistice agreements had left matters open to contrary interpretations. The two sides disagreed over the right of Syrian civilians to fish in the Sea of Galilee, of Israelis to carry out development work in areas declared demilitarized, and of the utilization of the Jordan River’s waters. These issues caused friction between Israel and Syria for years. Through personal contact with the Syrians, Dayan tried to settle the discrepancies, but his charisma failed him and he could not convince them to yield.
At the end of that year, the top command of the IDF was embroiled in a crisis when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion cut the defense budget to maximize resources for immigrant absorption. The chief of General Staff (CGS), Yigael Yadin, deemed the cuts too drastic and resigned. His second-in-command, Mordechai Makleff, consented to serve as CGS for one year. Dayan was offered the position of his second-in-command but turned it down, saying it was not in his nature to be anyone’s second. He had no problem accepting authority, he added, even if he disagreed with his superiors, but as a deputy he would not be able to express his own opinions or dispute those of the chief if he thought them wrong. He agreed instead to head the General Headquarters (GHQ) branch in charge of operations, training, strategic planning, and intelligence—an appointment that raised eyebrows. Dayan was considered unpredictable, a maverick who was not afraid to change his mind and often surprised those around him with apparent inconsistencies. “Only asses don’t change their minds,” he would say, smiling, hardly relieving the unease of both subordinates and superiors. A lone wolf, he had no army coterie or party support. Ben-Gurion alone believed in him and continued to promote him.
On December 7, Dayan reported to the General Headquarters near Tel Aviv. For all his aloofness, there he formed warm friendships. He was especially close to three co-workers: Shlomo Gazit, his senior assistant and formally his bureau chief; Neora Matalón, a lieutenant who served as his secretary and in fact ran the bureau; and Noam, his dependable driver. He kept no secrets from them, not even in intimate matters. He instructed his secretary to open every letter, including those marked “personal.”
“I will not start keeping private files,” he would tell his aides.
Dayan was very fond of Neora Matalon.4 For her compulsory military service, Matalon was assigned to his bureau at the age of nineteen, having already completed the officers’ course and attained the rank of second lieutenant. A woman of integrity, she was fiercely loyal to Dayan, though she did not spare him criticism when necessary. She later carved out a career in medical services and raised a family of her own, yet she stood by him at important junctures of his life and in his last years. Her fascinating memoir, A Good Spot on the Side, provides some of the most vivid descriptions of Dayan. She opens with her impression when she first stepped into his office: “The office looked like the headquarters of a tent camp. Makeshift tables and folding chairs. The commander acted like a field officer who may have arrived in the morning in a clean, pressed uniform, but by midday looked like he had been through a series of drills: dusty shoes, trousers baggy at the knees, sleeves carelessly rolled up.”5
Shlomo Gazit, Dayan’s first bureau chief, would also be found at Dayan’s side in subsequent chapters of his career, and Dayan would continue to consult him even after retiring. In those early days at GHQ, Dayan deliberately tried to create a casual and playful atmosphere. He ate his meals in the officers’ mess, not in his office, as his predecessor had done. He held staff meetings on the outdoor stairway so they could all bask in the sun. He pilfered oranges from orchards he drove by and shared them with his passengers—once, entering the headquarters carrying two fruits, Dayan tossed them at the guard, whose arm was raised in salute. “Catch!” he yelled.6
The years preceding Dayan’s arrival at GHQ marked a low point in IDF combat performance. The generation that had fought the great war—the War of Independence—was discharged from active duty in 1949 and replaced by immigrants whose military prowess left much to be desired. The IDF suffered a number of defeats in the first three years after the war, including the failure of an entire infantry battalion to overwhelm a small local band of militia in the Arab village of Falama in the winter of 1952.
Dayan knew that the IDF needed to take drastic measures to transform itself from a ceremonial army into a fighting force. He began by changing the atmosphere from the top down. Instead of emphasizing lectures and exhortations, he encouraged personal examples and gestures to signal the change that would cascade down through the ranks. He designed his office to look like the workplace of a field commander rather than that of a bank director. He refused to hire a personal adjutant, chiefly a ceremonial position, and chose a rugged jeep over a fancy limousine at the start of his term. Bored by long, drawn-out discussions in air-conditioned offices, he delegated authority to various GHQ division heads and spent most of his time on field inspections and visits to different units.
Dayan did not believe that a full-scale war was imminent and accordingly concentrated on the IDF’s long-term fighting capability rather than on daily maintenance and alert. He preferred the acquisition of modern weaponry over the improvement of soldiers’ living quarters, a cost-benefit analysis expressed succinctly by a popular IDF song: “A cannon instead of socks, a tank instead of shoes.” He instilled combat tenacity in his officers, driving home the point that failing to perform a mission was not acceptable “unless 50 percent of the [officer’s] men are wounded.” An article he wrote for the official military magazine, Ba’Mahaneh (In the Camp), noted: “The commander is not the unit’s most important member, to be protected. The unit’s most important member is the enemy, to be quashed.” He breathed new life into the exclamation that IDF officers continue to shout today: “After me!”7
In 1953 murders and robberies committed by Arab refugees proliferated. The hundreds of Jewish immigrant settlements that had sprung up along Israel’s borders were vulnerable, and some were abandoned. Defensive measures failed to prevent recurring sabotage, and Dayan believed that the only way to reduce the violence was to persuade the surrounding Middle East regimes to clamp down on Arab infiltrators on their side of the border. Dayan’s “persuasion” took the form of reprisal, on the theory that if the IDF tormented the Arab marauders, it would provoke the desired reaction: more supervision on the other side of the border. “We cannot safeguard every water pipe against explosives or every tree against uprooting,” Dayan wrote. “We cannot prevent the murder of orchard workers or a sleeping family. But we can exact a high price for our blood, a price that an Arab community, Arab army, Arab regimes will not consider worth paying.”8
The IDF command entertained the idea of creating a commando unit to carry out these reprisals, a concept that Dayan opposed at first. He thought all combat units should develop a fighting spirit rather than “subcontract” the missions to a special forces unit. But there was too much at stake for the reprisal operations to risk failure by inexperienced soldiers, and Unit 101, which would become legendary in the IDF, was created. Maj. Ariel Sharon, a young former intelligence officer under Dayan in the Northern Command, established the volunteer unit, which consisted of Palmach veterans and daring young recruits. Among these young men eager for adventure was Meir Har-Tzion, from a Jezreel Valley kibbutz. Dayan met him under unusual circumstances when in September 1953 Unit 101 was sent to drive the Azazma Bedouin tribe back across the border. Dayan recalled their introduction: “Two dead camels lay in a wadi as birds of prey pecked at the entrails. I aimed … at a bird, prepared to press the trigger, when someone deflected my hand in reproach: ‘What are you doing? That’s an eagle!’ I turned around. Before me was the patrol commander, Meir Har-Tzion, a tall, lean young man with a childlike face, his locks falling onto his forehead. The light never left his face, even when he was angry. For a corporal to grab a general’s rifle was hardly an everyday occurrence; Har-Tzion explained that only thirty pairs of eagles remained in the country.”9 Dayan would encounter Har-Tzion again in a much tenser situation and come away regarding him as the best soldier the IDF ever had.
In 1953 violent and sometimes lethal Palestinian provocations from the Jordan-occupied West Bank intensified, as Arab infiltrators planted mines along the border roads, blew up bridges, stole cattle, sniped at Israeli patrols across the border and killed many Israeli soldiers and civilians. The attacks came to a head on October 12, when Palestinians hurled a grenade into a home near the Lod Airport, killing a mother and two children and wounding a third.10 The deadly blast spurred the IDF to respond, and it approved a large-scale operation in Kibiya, a village garrisoned by an Arab Legion platoon. With Sharon in command, Unit 101, totaling only forty soldiers, merged with a paratroop battalion. In conveying the GHQ order, Sharon rephrased it so that rather than being instructed to blow up homes after “putting inhabitants to flight” the orders read that the solders were to inflict “maximal damage to life and property.” (This would not be the last time that Sharon tampered with GHQ intentions and escalated Israeli aggression.) The soldiers swarmed through Kibiya and blew up forty-five houses with the residents inside, killing some seventy civilians, mainly women and children. The brutal operation provoked worldwide anger. Many countries protested, including the United States. Dayan flew to New York to bolster the Foreign Ministry delegation at the United Nations and attempt to defend Israel’s position. But he failed to ward off condemnation by the U.N. Security Council. Although many Israelis outside the military establishment protested the attack, the IDF took no disciplinary action against Sharon.
While Dayan was abroad, his daughter, Yaël, caused a minor scandal. Not yet fifteen, she was bright, talented, and mature for her age, due to graduate from high school two years early. She had befriended Uri Avneri, the editor of a popular weekly newspaper that often criticized the government and the IDF, and around this time Avneri published confidential information on military activity that strengthened his articles excoriating the IDF reprisals. Security personnel suspected that Yaël had provided Avneri with some of the confidential files. They searched her room, combed through her diary and school notebooks, and questioned her. Although it was assumed that Yaël was the source of the leak, no clear-cut evidence definitively implicated her.
Ruth was stunned. She, too, had been questioned. She sent three frantic telegrams to Moshe demanding that he return from New York. Furious, he rushed home and waited for Yaël in her bedroom. “My diary, which he had obviously just read, was open on the desk,” Yaël wrote in her memoirs. “He kissed me warmly as we hadn’t seen each other for a long while, and then he slapped my face, so hard I was almost thrown across the room…. I cried from the pain.” Yaël would have liked to discuss the matter further, but her father was embarrassed by the entire affair and anxious to end the conversation. “As far as I’m concerned, the matter is closed,” he said. He suggested that she come upstairs to see the dresses he had bought her in America. “I love you very much,” he added, “but don’t take advantage of it.”11
At the end of 1953, Lt. Gen. Mordechai Makleff’s term as IDF chief of staff drew to a close around the same time that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided to retire from politics. Ben-Gurion moved to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev to work and settle the land in hopes of reigniting the pioneering spirit that had swept across the region in the first half of the twentieth century. His Mapai Party appointed Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett to replace him and become Israel’s second prime minister, while Pinchas Lavon, a man known for his wit, eloquence, and moderation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, succeeded Ben-Gurion as minister of defense. Hours before leaving office, Ben-Gurion appointed Dayan the IDF chief of staff, much to Sharett’s chagrin. “I said … that Moshe Dayan is a soldier only in wartime, but in times of peace, he is a politician,” Sharett wrote in his diary. “He has no interest in managing the military organization. The appointment spells the GHQ’s politicization. The new chief of staff’s remarkable talent for intrigue will be a hotbed of complications.”12
Sharett was right about Dayan being a politician with no interest in military organization per se; the charge of intrigue, however, stemmed from Dayan’s overblown image at the Foreign Ministry. Senior Israeli diplomats noted Dayan’s disrespect toward them, his belittlement of their concerns, and his open disparagement of Sharett with whom he was at odds both by temperament and by policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their mutual wariness certainly created “a hotbed of complications,” and their relations continued to sour.
Despite his rocky relationship with the prime minister, Dayan, now with complete authority as the chief of staff, devoted himself to improving the Israel Defense Forces. In June and July 1954, Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin (then head of IDF training), and several officers took an extensive tour of the United States Army. Dayan was especially interested in the commando units and the training that the combat commanders endured. On the delegation’s return, he decided that every combat officer would have to pass a paratroopers course.
Dayan, of course, led by example. Along with a group of GHQ officers that included the chief military rabbi, he learned to jump out of an airplane. On his sixth and final jump to complete the course, he sprained his ankle, but he showed up at the ceremony to receive his “jump wings” badge with a bandaged leg. The badge was pinned on his uniform by the commander of the paratroop battalion that had absorbed Unit 101, Ariel Sharon. The event was widely covered and came to symbolize the fighting spirit instilled by the new chief of staff. By the end of 1954, after one year in office, the atmosphere in the IDF had entirely changed.
Dayan was aware that he would now play a key role in the history of the State of Israel. Just as he had kept a childhood diary, he began to record every event in which he was involved. At the beginning of his term as IDF chief of staff, Dayan’s secretary, Neora Matalon, set aside an hour at the end of each day for him to chronicle his thoughts and experiences in his journal. But he quickly lost patience and delegated the diary’s management to Matalon and Shlomo Gazit, his bureau chief. One or the other was usually at his side and able to report directly on meetings and trips. In time Dayan would use the bureau diary as the basis of two memoirs about that period of his life.13
Dayan would begin his workday with two hours allotted to reading intelligence reports from the previous day. He would arrive at his office at eight in the morning—no meetings were ever scheduled before ten—and pore over the raw intelligence material. Though detailed documents bored him, he did not trust summaries or expert assessments. Instead, he insisted on reading decoded enemy telegrams and full reports from his intelligence agents so that he could reach his own conclusions. He also scanned the daily press and Foreign Ministry telegrams to stay current on the diplomatic front.
During the two years of Sharett’s premiership, suspicion and tension characterized the relationship between the prime minister and the IDF chief of staff. Sharett believed that Dayan overstepped his authority, evaded his instructions, and withheld information. Dayan did not hide his opposition to Sharett’s stance on security issues, which the military man regarded as dangerous to vital state interests. While Sharett understood that there was no chance of reaching peace with the Arabs in the foreseeable future, he believed that a moderate Israeli policy might eventually soften their opposition to a Jewish state in the Middle East. Sharett felt that Israel should be careful not to stoke resentment among the Arabs by using disproportionate force against Arab incursions. But Dayan, like Ben-Gurion, was sure that another war loomed in which the Arabs would try to make up for their defeat in 1948 by destroying the despised Zionist state. Bolstering his belief, the neighboring Arab countries, not yet ready for full-scale war, constantly tried to weaken Israel. They interfered with the development of water sources, blocked the Suez Canal, economically boycotted states trading with Israel, and denied access to Israeli and foreign ships bound for the Eilat seaport. Israel countered these attempts at sabotage with force when necessary. If such action was the slippery slope that would lead to an all-out war, Dayan held, Israel nonetheless had to take the necessary measures to protect its citizens.
A number of incidents involving IDF officers, particularly paratroop commanders, exacerbated Sharett’s distrust of Dayan. Though in none of these had the officers acted with the chief of staff’s approval, Sharett blamed Dayan, suspecting him of complicity and casting doubt on his explanations. The worst case concerned Meir Har-Tzion. On December 23, 1954, Bedouins raped and murdered Har-Tzion’s sister Shoshana, at the Dead Sea, not far from the Jordanian border. Har-Tzion, who had been discharged a short time earlier because his father was ill, set out with friends on a personal vendetta. Supposedly with Sharon’s knowledge, they killed several Bedouins opposite the border point where Shoshana was killed.
When the matter became public, Dayan put Har-Tzion and his accomplices on trial, but they hired a shrewd lawyer who threatened to turn the affair into a political issue, something nobody wanted. The defendants were released. Sharett objected to the trial’s cancelation and suspected Dayan of deliberately covering up the episode. In his diary, Sharett attributed the atmosphere that precipitated the crime to Ben-Gurion and Dayan’s reprisal policy.
“We heedlessly jettisoned the emotional, moral brakes on the instinct of vengeance that is stamped on man’s soul to do evil,” he wrote, “and thereby enabled a paratroop battalion to elevate vengeance to the level of moral principle.”14 Sharett’s anger over the incident illustrated the gulf separating him and Dayan, who regarded the paratroop battalion as the army’s finest unit.
Dayan remained close to Ben-Gurion, visiting him often at Sde Boker to report and consult even when Ben-Gurion was no longer in office. He offered to help Ben-Gurion advance his program to help new immigrants who had no farming experience and faced a dangerous life on the frontier. Ben-Gurion sought to inspire a volunteer movement of young native Israelis to assist the immigrants, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Dayan interceded and mobilized childhood acquaintances—young people from the established moshav farming communities. Several hundred went to live on the new moshavim for months and taught agriculture to the newcomers, aided in social integration and medical services, and tutored children in school and adults in Hebrew.
Dayan supported the project enthusiastically, and his office became a quasi-headquarters for moshav volunteers needing advice. He harnessed IDF resources to bolster Ben-Gurion’s project and toured the moshavim to boost their inhabitants’ morale. The successful project helped the immigrants acclimatize to their new surroundings, and later, when Dayan entered politics, the young people of these moshavim were his most loyal public supporters.
While Dayan was away during June and July 1954 on his official study visit to the U.S. Army, a minor, foolhardy episode escalated into a major national scandal that cast a lingering shadow over Israel’s political leaders. Years earlier, IDF intelligence had established a ten-person spy cell in Egypt. Now Col. Benjamin Gibli, the head of IDF intelligence, activated the sleeper cell to conduct an operation, code-named Operation Susannah, to instill fear and instability in the country in order to delay Britain’s withdrawal from the Suez Canal. Young Egyptian Jews detonated small firebombs, damaging several U.S. and British cultural institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. One bomb, however, ignited inadvertently in the pocket of a Jewish spy, Philip Natanson; there were no casualties, but it compromised the operation and led to the arrest and trial of all ten members of the cell. Two senior Jewish Egyptian agents were executed, an Israeli agent committed suicide in jail, and seven received long jail sentences, among them Marcelle Ninio, who was tortured in prison. The incident garnered worldwide attention. Israel denied any connection to the cell, yet information leaked, albeit after passing through tight military censorship. Enigmatically called HaEsek HaBish—“the unfortunate business”—it left most Israelis in the dark about the affair.
Behind the scenes, fingers were being pointed. Who gave the order for the operation? Gibli, the spymaster, blamed Defense Minister Lavon, who, in turn, adamantly denied the charges. Prime Minister Sharett appointed a commission to investigate, but it failed to determine the source of the operation. Despite the lack of clarity, the fallout was severe: Lavon resigned and Gibli was relieved of his command.
On January 21, 1955, following Lavon’s resignation, David Ben-Gurion left Sde Boker and assumed the post of defense minister. His return to politics deflected attention from the amateur episode in Egypt and restored stability—for the time being.