RELATIONS WITH THE BRITISH grew increasingly complicated in October 1956. The rise of pro-Nasser, anti-Western forces in Jordan concerned Amman and London. Britain, which wielded considerable influence in the affairs of the Hashemite kingdoms of both Iraq and Jordan by funding their armies, considered sending the Iraqi army to Jordan. Israel voiced opposition to armed Iraqis on its border and appeared ready to back up the disapproval with force. Israel and Great Britain seemed to be on a collision course.
As the diplomatic discussions continued behind closed doors, in the field Jordanian soldiers continued to harass Jewish settlers across the border. On October 9, Israeli orchard workers were killed in the Sharon Plain, their ears cut off by the perpetrators as proof to show their dispatchers. Still struggling to exercise restraint, Dayan felt that Israel must respond. “We wanted to avoid military action,” he wrote in his diary, “but … things went too far.”1
On October 10, Sharon’s paratroop brigade attacked and destroyed the police station on the edge of Qalqilya, a town near the murder site. Dayan, determined to prevent civilian casualties and unnecessary IDF losses, ordered Sharon’s soldiers to keep out of the town. He rejected Sharon’s suggestion that the brigade also capture a Jordanian military post down the road from the town east of Qalqilya. Sharon’s paratroopers proceeded with the plans to lay an ambush farther east, deep inside Jordanian territory, and were attacked by Jordanian forces. Sustaining casualties that hampered their retreat, Sharon’s soldiers had to break through the military post that Dayan had ordered them to spare, and many more men were hit in the heavy gunfire.
As usual, Dayan spent the night at Sharon’s command post, worried. He readied the air force to deploy if infantrymen could not rescue the paratroopers before daybreak. Jordan’s King Hussein was also concerned and requested aid from the British, who had an air force base in Cyprus. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden later noted that “we were asked to extend help and our airplanes were about to take off,” but at dawn Sharon managed to extract his troops from the entanglement, and the Israeli soldiers returned across the border, so intervention by the Royal Air Force was no longer necessary.2 Israel lost eighteen paratroopers, leaving the GHQ and paratroop unit dispirited and feeling that the IDF tactics of recent years had caused too many casualties. Ominously, it was clear that a different war was brewing.
After assessing Israel’s military capabilities, General Challe returned to France and suggested that Paris should persuade Ben-Gurion to launch an attack on the Egyptian army in Sinai—ostensibly unconnected to the Franco-British operation—to provide a pretext for France and Britain to intervene. While seemingly protecting the Suez Canal from the expected violence that would ensue, England and France would be in position to capture the canal, invalidate its Egyptian nationalization, and defeat Nasser. Prime Minister Eden welcomed the proposal. An Israeli attack would show cause for intervention in Suez, offering the bona fide justification Britain had been grasping for amid international conferences and growing domestic opposition. But Eden had one condition: the IDF action must not appear prearranged. Ben-Gurion was vexed. According to Peres, he “saw the proposal as British hypocrisy at its worst, smacking more of a desire to do Israel ill than of a resolve to topple Egypt’s dictatorship.”3 Ben-Gurion suspected that the British wished to embroil Israel in war in Sinai in order to carry out their scheme to deploy the Iraqi army in Jordan. He spurned the proposed division of roles that would make Israel appear to be the aggressor and permit England and France to seem disinterested.4 Even Dayan, an advocate for war with Egypt, did not try to assuage Ben-Gurion’s anger; he too considered the British condition unacceptable.
Realizing that only a summit might change the Israeli prime minister’s mind, Prime Minister Mollet invited Ben-Gurion to Paris on October 16. “If we refuse, we will miss a historic one-time opportunity,” Dayan warned Ben-Gurion before they left. “We will have to keep fighting Nasser alone, without the French and British armies and without the French military equipment that they are only providing as part of the joint campaign.”5 Ben-Gurion was unconvinced. Dayan knew that a double task awaited him in Paris: to persuade the French and British to improve the terms of the “partnership,” and to persuade Ben-Gurion that a joint operation was feasible without unduly endangering Israel.
The summit, for which I acted as secretary, was held in a modest villa in the garden suburb of Sèvres. The residence belonged to the family of Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a member of the French Resistance who at age twenty had assassinated Adm. François Darlan of the Vichy regime at the end of World War II and been executed by the Vichy police. A bronze bust of his likeness stood on the mantelpiece of the villa. Because of the need for secrecy, Ben-Gurion did not set foot outside the villa for the entire three days lest his distinctive white mane divulge his presence. Dayan and Peres stayed at a hotel in the city and, as a precautionary measure, Dayan exchanged his eye patch for black sunglasses.
The French brought their top ministers to the first meeting: Prime Minister Mollet, Foreign Minister Pineau, Defense Minister Bourges-Maunoury, and a handful of senior officials headed by General Challe. Ben-Gurion began the meeting with a demand for an open agreement that his country would not be left as the scapegoat for a multi-national confrontation. Israel was uncomfortable with the circumscribed role proposed by France and England and wished to be partner to the overall plans for the region’s future. The French pointed out that Ben-Gurion’s demand was untenable; the British would accept only General Challe’s initial proposal of an apparently unrelated Israeli attack in Sinai.6
Dayan stepped in to save the summit from failing before it had barely begun. With Ben-Gurion’s permission, though without committing the prime minister, Dayan offered a personal suggestion that might satisfy the British. Israel would launch a limited operation near Suez at a time agreed upon in advance, and Britain and France would then demand that Israel and Egypt withdraw their troops from the canal area. Israel would agree to do so and Nasser, presumably, would refuse, paving the way for the British and French to launch their own attack, code-named Operation Musketeer, including air strikes on Egyptian airfields.
Dayan elaborated on the plan to the Israeli caucus in the afternoon. The campaign would start with a paratroop battalion dropped near the Mitla Pass, a path that snakes between mountain ranges thirty miles east of Suez, and the rest of the brigade would break through from the Israeli border to join them. In the initial hours, the other IDF troops would be stationed at the border awaiting further instructions. The Kadesh campaign would begin only after the British and French started bombing Egypt. If for any reason the British failed to go to war, the paratroopers would withdraw, and Israel would be able to present the operation as a stepped-up reprisal for the constant Egyptian attacks on southern Israel. Ben-Gurion listened to the proposal without reacting.
In the evening, British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd arrived. Though Ben-Gurion had not yet decided whether to accept it himself, he presented Dayan’s proposal to the guest. But there was no chemistry between the two leaders. Lloyd failed to grasp the dramatic reversal in Ben-Gurion’s position—that, for the first time, he was agreeing to have Israel launch the operation on its own. “Selwyn Lloyd may generally be warm, pleasant and sociable. If so, he did a good job of hiding it,” Dayan later wrote. “A more antagonistic exhibition than his is hardly possible. His entire manner conveyed disgust—disgust of the place, of the company, and of the substance of the matter he was compelled to deal with.”7
Lloyd returned to London late that night and the next morning reported to the cabinet that Israel was not prepared to accept the proposed British plan. The French foreign minister, Christian Pineau, however, did understand the importance of Israel’s concession, and he believed that the two positions were bridgeable. He rushed off to London to rectify the situation. At this stage, it was clear to Dayan that his problem was not convincing the British, but rather convincing Ben-Gurion.
The decisive discussion of the Israeli delegation took place on the second afternoon. Addressing Ben-Gurion’s doubts, Dayan underscored the chance of success. He believed that if Israel limited its operation on the first day, the combat would be contained, allowing the option of rescuing the paratroopers and bringing them home. Dayan’s words were also a commitment: now, if Ben-Gurion accepted the plan, he had to make sure to stay within these limits. The Old Man was still undecided. He retired to his room for the day.
When he came downstairs the next morning, it was clear to Dayan and Peres that he had reached a decision. He still had myriad technical, organizational, and diplomatic questions, but these were more “guidelines for further handling, no longer spokes in the wheel.” Typically, he did not directly state that he had made a decision, he merely announced, “We will have to keep written minutes of the negotiations to be signed by everyone, obligating the parties.”8 With those words, he authorized Dayan’s plan.
In London, Pineau obtained Eden’s consent to the revised plan, and Sir Patrick Dean, deputy director of the Foreign Office and head of the Intelligence Service Committee, flew to Paris to seal the accord. Sir Patrick, a seasoned diplomat, agreed to Ben-Gurion’s suggestion that they follow routine procedure and take minutes of the meeting. Ben-Gurion, Pineau, and Dean, representing Her Majesty’s government, each signed the minutes and received a copy. Ben-Gurion folded his copy and put it in his breast pocket. It was compensation for all the insults he had suffered from the British and the best guarantee that Britain would not renege. Still, for years, Eden would try to disclaim knowledge of the events at Sèvres.
On the morning of the decision, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “The action seems to be necessary. It is the only opportunity for two fairly big powers to try to destroy Nasser, for it to be unnecessary that [Israel] confront him alone in the future as he grows stronger and controls the Arab states.”9 There is no overestimating Dayan’s role in the decision to go to war in Sinai. It was entirely Ben-Gurion’s decision, but Dayan knew just how to calculate his moves and phrase his proposals to encourage Ben-Gurion to decide affirmatively.
After the British left, the French and Israelis toasted the campaign’s success. Dayan’s mind was already elsewhere. Zero Hour had been set for the evening of October 29—only five days away. He wired Meir Amit to call up the armored units immediately. On the flight home in the French DC4 he was calm, knowing there was nothing of substance he could do before landing. He passed the time doodling. He sketched a small cartoon with a map of Sinai in the background, depicting the British Lord Bull and the French Marianne reaching out to “Little Israel” and declaring, “After you, sir!” The next day he would be swept up in a whirlwind of war preparations.
Landing in Israel on October 25, Dayan went straight to his office and convened the GHQ Operations staff under Amit. He faced a dilemma: to bring about the conditions agreed to at Sèvres, he had to rework the Kadesh plan with modifications that defied military logic and contradicted the principles he had instilled in the army since becoming chief of staff. In the original Kadesh plan, the paratroop brigade had two major missions: capturing the Egyptian military headquarters at El Arish and then taking Sharm el-Sheikh. Now it was tasked with a less brazen mission of marginal value but vital to ensuring British and French military involvement. Contrary to IDF doctrine and the original Kadesh plan, instead of speeding toward enemy deployments at the start of the action, the Armored Corps would now have to wait thirty-six hours until Britain and France began bombing Egyptian bases.
Dayan could not explain the real reason for the tactical changes nor could he tell the handful who did know of the British-French connection about his promise to Ben-Gurion to limit the scope of the IDF’s involvement. He prepared his staff with a disclaimer in general terms.
“Everyone will know only those details necessary to performing their mission even if they do not understand the general scheme,” he explained. “Due to political information, orders may be given that seem surprising and defy everything planned to date, sometimes defying even military logic. Nevertheless, the GHQ and combat officers are ordered to comply with the decisions without reservation. Whether in performance or in speech, absolute discipline is necessary.”10 Within a few hours, the GHQ issued orders for Kadesh 2, in line with the new political conditions.
Dayan spent the last few hours before the campaign composing the announcement for the IDF spokesman, which would be publicized two hours after the paratroop drop. Composing the proper statement required close knowledge of the Sèvres agreements and their constraints, and fine maneuvering between contradictory aims: Israel had promised the British that it would create the impression of “a real act of war endangering the canal,” but the IDF also had to make the Egyptians believe that the Israeli attack was a limited operation. Only Dayan was capable of finding the necessary balance. When he finished the statement, he brought it for approval to Ben-Gurion, who was bedridden with fever in Tel Aviv. Toward evening, Dayan set out for the war command post near Ramle, not far from the point he had reached at the climax of his battalion’s raid in the War of Independence.
Dayan spent most of the campaign on the battlefields. He had no patience with the minutiae of its management and wanted to feel the battles from up close and, if possible, personally observe developments. Dayan usually left for the front early in the morning in a light aircraft, spending hours in the field before returning to GHQ toward evening to receive updates and issue further instructions. He would then visit Ben-Gurion, who was confined to his bed for most of that period. Five times during the weeklong offensive, Dayan found himself under fire. On the whole, the Sinai campaign proceeded according to plan. Meir Amit directed the war from GHQ, and the countless small decisions that had to be made hardly required Dayan’s direct input. He maintained wireless contact during most of the hours that he was away from GHQ, but there were also spells when he could not be reached, a lack of communication for which he drew criticism during the conflict.
“The ongoing management of the campaign is in the trusty hands of staff officers with first-rate knowledge and judgment,” he later wrote. “Staff officers claim that my absence from the command disrupts proper working procedures. They may be right, but I am unable or unwilling to act otherwise.”11
The first operational mishap developed on the second day of the campaign. Late in the morning of October 30, Dayan arrived at the forward command post of O.C. Southern Command Assaf Simhoni. To the chief of staff’s astonishment, he learned that against orders the Seventh Armored Brigade was already in action twenty-five miles inside enemy territory. Livid, Dayan berated Simhoni in the presence of the officers and soldiers situated there. This was exactly the sort of development he had sought to avoid. The entry of the armored brigade deep into Sinai could not be regarded by Cairo as a limited operation. The Egyptians were liable to wake up, activate their air force, and hit Israel full blast before the allies intervened. Moreover, Simhoni’s action undermined Dayan’s promise to Ben-Gurion at Sèvres that the Israeli action would be limited until the British and French took a part, a condition that had been the reason for the prime minister’s consent to the entire operation. But though Simhoni knew of the British-French connection, he did not understand its full import, which had led him to act precipitately.
The next morning, Dayan went to see Ben-Gurion before leaving for the front. Telegrams from France advised that the British, contrary to their promises, had decided to postpone their bombing by twelve hours, putting off sorties by the Royal Air Force until the evening of the third day. Enraged, Ben-Gurion suspected that the British were reneging on their undertaking. Fearing for the safety of the paratroopers, he demanded that they retreat, but Dayan, with the greatest difficulty, managed to persuade him to wait another few hours. He did not dare tell Ben-Gurion about the Seventh Armored Brigade’s disobedient advance the previous morning. Working patiently he was able to get everything back on track by evening.
On October 31, the allies began a massive bombardment of Egypt’s air bases and military installations. There was no longer any reason to curb the operation, and Dayan issued general instructions to deploy all forces according to plan. He spent the next twenty-four hours in the northern zone, embedded with Col. Chaim Bar-Lev’s armored brigade, which, following a nighttime raid and with the assistance of the First Infantry Brigade, had captured all the Egyptian posts around Rafah. Dayan requisitioned two command cars, one fitted with communication equipment, the other for his squad, which included myself as bureau chief, a signaler, and a bureau clerk for technical assistance and to guard the convoy.
At dawn on November 1, the squad crossed the southern tip of the Gaza Strip straight into a thicket of Egyptian posts near the Rafah Junction. The sector had not been cleared and Egyptian soldiers fought on sporadically. At one spot, we came under machine-gun fire and an anti-tank cannon shell exploded just yards from our command car, and we all jumped from the car and took cover in a roadside ditch. The last Egyptian soldiers soon left, and the squad proceeded to the junction, where a group of officers had briefly stopped to celebrate their gains. There was hugging all around, and even Dayan permitted himself a display of emotion. “We fell into each other’s arms like in a Russian war film,” he gushed.12
From Rafah Junction, the armored brigade headed west along the coastal road and arrived at a chain of dunes about three and a half miles east of El Arish, the Egyptian army’s headquarters and logistical nerve center in Sinai. With nightfall approaching and the military vehicles needing to refuel, the attack on El Arish was postponed until morning. Dayan and the squad settled down on the slope of a dune, finishing our combat rations supper and preparing for a short sleep. Suddenly the Egyptians started shelling. The shells landed next to our group, but shattered inside the soft sand, which absorbed some of the shrapnel. Covered with sand and leaves from the eucalyptus tree above our heads, we swiftly rolled down the dune, out of range of the exploding mortars.
At dawn on November 2, the command cars drove into El Arish behind the armored brigade’s advance company. As we entered a lavish building alongside the road, our squad was greeted by a burst of automatic gunfire. The bullets killed the bureau clerk and came within inches of Dayan’s head, hitting the wall and covering him with dust and plaster fragments. At 11 A.M. we flew off in a light aircraft that had been dispatched to the newly captured airfield of El Arish and asked the pilot to circle above the town. In the distance, Bar-Lev’s tanks could be seen gliding westward toward the Egyptian town of Kantara, near the Suez Canal.
Returning to GHQ, Dayan learned of an additional blunder. When Ariel Sharon’s paratroop brigade dropped east of the Mitla Pass, Sharon realized that his troops were arrayed along a line of low, exposed hills and sought permission to move them into the pass, protected by steep hills. GHQ firmly opposed Sharon’s request, knowing that this advance was not needed for the combat. Defying explicit orders, Sharon placed an entire battalion on the main road, unaware that the night before the Egyptians had advanced two battalions from bases at the Suez Canal and captured fortified positions on the cliffs on both sides of the pass. The paratroopers were trapped and forced to attack the Egyptian positions in broad daylight and under tough conditions. They managed to dislodge the Egyptians from the high ground, but only after a fierce battle that claimed thirty-eight Israeli soldiers. The Mitla Pass battle was the hardest battle of the war—and totally unnecessary.
At the United Nations, pressure mounted for a cease-fire, and Dayan feared that the IDF would be denied the most precious fruit of the entire campaign: the conquest of Sharm el-Sheikh. Expediting matters, he ordered the paratroopers, bruised and battered from Mitla, to descend to the Suez Gulf by dirt roads. One battalion parachuted down over the town of E-Tor on the shore of the Gulf, about ninety-five miles northwest of Sharm el-Sheikh.
On November 5, the seventh and last day of fighting, Dayan returned to the southern front. He flew to E-Tor early in the morning, commandeered an expropriated civilian van from the paratroopers, and, escorted by a squad of soldiers, set out along the coastal road for Sharm el-Sheikh.
The road was filled with armed Egyptian soldiers fleeing Sharm el-Sheikh on foot, and there were occasional random shots. “There was nothing to stop … Egyptian soldiers taking cover behind … shrubs or in a dip in the ground and making sieves of us with their machine guns,” Dayan later recalled.13 But no one opened fire nor, probably, did anyone recognize the traveler. Dayan reached the paratroopers just as they were preparing to storm the Sharm el-Sheikh compound only to find that it had been captured earlier in the morning by the Ninth Brigade. The paratroopers met up with the soldiers at the pristine gulf. The war was over. The IDF controlled the entire Sinai Peninsula.
Dayan returned to Sharm el-Sheikh the next day, this time in a transport plane filled with senior GHQ officers, for the Ninth Brigade parade celebrating the completion of its mission. As soldiers stood in formation on the local airfield, the CGS, the O.C. Southern Command, and the brigade commander stood side by side on the podium, and Dayan read out a cable from the prime minister. Simhoni looked tense and downcast. Apart from a handshake and a few words of courtesy, he and Dayan did not speak to each other. Simhoni was in a hurry to return to the north for family reasons. The weather was blustery, and the skies darkened by a sandstorm. He took off in a light aircraft, but it lost its way in the haze and crashed into a cliff side across the Jordan. “This death of the O.C. Southern Command after the end of the war rather than in battle has the hallmark of a tragic fate,” Dayan later wrote in his memoirs.14
Both Simhoni and Sharon’s actions clearly breached orders and exhibited a lack of discipline. Simhoni’s death painfully spared Dayan the need to judge his conduct. As for Sharon, Meir Amit and other GHQ officers demanded that he be court-martialed, but Dayan took no steps. In response to criticism, he replied, “For all the grievance I felt over the breach of discipline, it is better to fight with galloping horses that need to be reined in than to prod and urge oxen that refuse to budge.”15
One more small battle awaited Dayan. That evening he and I went to meet the prime minister, now recovered and in his Jerusalem office. Ben-Gurion was in a foul mood, having received a crude, humiliating cable from Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin demanding Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had not spared Ben-Gurion harsh words either.
Late that night, as Dayan and I were leaving Jerusalem for Tel Aviv, our car was stopped by military police, who told us that the fedayeen dispatched by Nasser at the start of the war were operating on the road. Dayan refused to wait for a convoy to be organized. As we set out, a hastily deployed security van took its place in front of us. The two vehicles came under attack from a hand grenade and machine gun just before leaving the Jerusalem hills. The driver, Noam, hit the gas to speed past the danger, but as we started to climb again, renewed fire opened on the van a few hundred yards ahead of our car. This time, Noam braked and we all jumped into a ditch.
“All was still, though we knew that the fedayeen were at the top of the hill,” I recorded in my notes shortly after the incident. “The van had disappeared westward. It was cold and wet and I was filled with concern for the CGS. I had long since noticed that one of Dayan’s ways to vanquish fear, which, like everyone else, he felt at such moments, was to attack. His gun drawn, he suddenly said to me, ‘Come, let’s charge at them.’ I do not know how I had the presence of mind to tell him at that moment, ‘Now I am the commander. If the convoy does not arrive soon, we will make a run for it to the nearby kibbutz.’ But there was no need since the convoy showed up within minutes and the terrorists fled.”16
Dayan often seemed to deliberately challenge death. Years after these events, he intimated as much in an introduction he wrote for a book of poems by the renowned Israeli Nathan Alterman: “Man goes into mortal battle not in order to save others, not in order to sacrifice himself for the future. Man goes into battle because he, personally, does not want to surrender, to be defeated—he wants to fight not for the existence of his life but for the meaning of his life. Death is merely the supreme expression of the courage of his struggle. It is not the death of war, of a historic event, it is a personal death, dynamic, imprinted in the struggle, the fight, not the war.”17