ON JANUARY 30, 1958, Moshe Dayan took a leave of absence from the army to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a pursuit that temporarily spared him from making decisions about his future course. His official military retirement date was set for November 1. He did not speak to David Ben-Gurion about entering politics, nor did the prime minister make any offers. “If they want me, they know where to find me,” Moshe told Yaël.1 He knew that if he had a future in politics it would be within the Mapai Party, Israel’s largest, which had been governing since the birth of the state. Mapai was also Ben-Gurion’s party, and therefore Dayan’s political future depended on the Old Man. He would soon discover that matters were not so simple.
In the interim, the IDF issued him a modest apartment on a small army base in southern Jerusalem, and most days of the week he drove to the Hebrew University campus in a civilian jeep wearing civilian clothes. Ruth, who remained at their home in Tel Aviv, had decided to fight for their marriage, and she was highly concerned about his extreme moods. Yaël described this period as a “very dark” time. “Instead of easing his restlessness and edginess, the study period in Jerusalem had the reverse effect, just as Mother had feared,” she wrote. “Lack of responsibility made him more irresponsible and his impatience turned into arrogance.”2
He found one outlet for his recklessness: women. Though he and Rachel were still close, she lived in Tel Aviv while he was on his own in Jerusalem most of the week. There he formed liaisons that were the talk of Jerusalem society. One evening Yaël was astonished to find a strange woman in his apartment who behaved as though she owned the place. Dayan walked Yaël to the bus stop and explained that the affair was not serious. She was not disturbed by her father’s betrayals, but questioned his poor taste in bedmates.
Rachel, too, knew of Dayan’s affairs but was confident that she remained his one true love. “He did not love the women,” she explained in an interview; “he liked the exercise. I was able to understand it and had no doubt that he really loved only me.” She also wondered about her future husband’s extramarital tastes. “They were cheap or loose women, and Moshe could not resist the temptation.”3
One tryst that became notorious involved a young woman at the army base who was married to a childhood friend of Dayan’s from Nahalal, also a senior IDF officer. She fell in love with Dayan and was deeply hurt when he ended the relationship, an affair that would return to haunt him. The episode enraged the woman’s husband, who wrote to Ben-Gurion demanding that he publicly withdraw his support of Dayan. Ben-Gurion replied by citing King David, remembered as a great king despite impregnating Bathsheba while she was married to Uriah the Hittite. The intimation was clear: personal and public affairs were separate matters, and he would continue to endorse Dayan.
Dayan did not wait long before being called to politics. Less than four months after removing his uniform, he began to receive invitations for Mapai Party events and political appearances, though he soon vexed the old-timers who ran Mapai. Following the Sinai campaign, Mapai’s young guard, organized into a quasi-Fabian society, demanded changes to the party structure that would enable them to win leadership positions. But they faced opposition from the intermediate generation, fifty- and sixty-year-olds who deemed them overly hasty.
Dayan gravitated toward the young guard but, typically, also kept them at a distance. He did not like wheeler-dealers, old or young. Nevertheless, his personal fame led both the public and the party to regard him as a prominent representative of the young guard’s revolt. His political positions contrasted starkly with the conservatism of party leaders, whom he seemed to be challenging. Finance Minister Levi Eshkol, who would succeed Ben-Gurion as prime minister, compared Dayan to a Cossack hetman charging with sword and whip.4
Along the same line as Eshkol’s analogy, when Dayan addressed the Tel Aviv student union on May 25, the press likened his talk to an “artillery bombardment” and “a grenade assault prior to charging.” Lashing out indiscriminately, Dayan criticized the kibbutzim for looking out only for their own narrow interests and the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union, for ignoring national interests. He also assailed the party apparatus and party hacks, focusing on the veterans. “The previous generation has passed the age of revolution,” he was quoted the following day in the newspaper Ma’ariv. “All energy burns itself out.”5
To the public, the kibbutz settlers, and the Histadrut, Dayan was a revolutionary indeed, defying the values they had always championed. He believed that from the moment a sovereign state was established, most tasks should be the government’s province. Pioneering now meant having a volunteer spirit, giving one’s all beyond the line of duty. To party veterans, this was blasphemy. It sounded as if the pioneering frameworks they had created before statehood were being abandoned.
Efficiency was another Dayan concept that differed from the party outlook. The social-democratic Mapai Party was committed to worker interests, whereas Dayan believed the focus should shift to economic efficiency. Histadrut had just recently called a strike at the country’s leading textile firm, Ata, and worker demands threatened the company’s competitiveness. Dayan’s response brimmed with socialistic heresy. “During the Ata strike, I was very sorry that we, the workers, defeated Moller [the owner],” he said. “If the good of the company requires downsizing, cloth can be manufactured using fewer workers.”6
Ben-Gurion did not endorse Dayan’s opinions, but he defended his right to express them. Party veterans took this as a sign that the Old Man was cultivating Dayan for the top position, and they mobilized to thwart the alleged succession. They demanded that because he had not been discharged from the military yet, he should be silent on political matters until he returned to civilian life. They succeeded in barring him from public appearances before his formal discharge on November 1; then the tempest resumed. Elections for the Fourth Knesset were a year away, and internal squabbles posed a threat to the party. Two fruitless meetings were held, attempting to calm the storm. One veteran likened the older party members to frail Eskimo elders being ushered out to die in the snow. Another noted that “not every Moshe [Moses] descending from Mount Sinai brings the Ten Commandments.”7
Dayan also fueled the fire. In a public speech in Jerusalem, he challenged the audience: “Do young Israelis who over the past fifteen years have crawled through thorns and rocks with rifle in hand … understand the needs of nation-building less than those who for twenty years have sat on the fifth floor of the [Histadrut] executive building?”8
Some heard a jarring militarism in his words. The cartoonist for the workers’ newspaper Davar depicted Dayan as a small child flinging stones at that fifth floor, with the caption “The Naughty Boy.”9 Yet the public, especially the young, embraced his anti-establishment spirit. At party rallies, they shouted, “Long live Dayan! Boo to the party!” Ben-Gurion convened senior party figures to put an end to the acrimonious exchanges, and Dayan promised to curb his public remarks. The animosity, however, became a permanent fixture in Israeli politics.
Despite their objections to his political views, Mapai Party leaders could not ignore the electoral value of Dayan’s fame and public status. Though he refused to join the party secretariat for fear of being confined in a gilded cage, Dayan agreed to coordinate activity among young voters and recruited Neora Matalon, his secretary from his days as chief of staff, to assist. “I felt like a reserve officer receiving a call-up,” she later noted in her memoirs. Matalon would remain at Dayan’s side for six years.”10 Among the young guard, he met Yizhar Smilansky, known by his nom de plume S. Yizhar, the greatest Hebrew writer of his generation, who was initially apprehensive about working with Dayan. “He was always considered tough, inconsiderate, volcanic, decisive, brutal, and cruel,” Yizhar said in an interview.11 But he soon witnessed Dayan’s sense of humor and abundance of warmth, the characteristics that enabled the two eminent men to become close colleagues.
As part of his campaign, Dayan barnstormed from one party branch to another, satisfying his urge to roam the country. Matalon accompanied him on most trips. “We never arrived at our destination by the main road,” she wrote. “Roads that were semi-impassable to cars took us through fruit orchards, ruins of ancient villages, burial caves. Here he was as happy as a child, splitting open a watermelon he found in the fields, picking figs or jujubes from a prickly tree, scooping up a stone arrowhead or fern-embedded limestone. His cries of joy when he called us to see what he had found echoed through the ravine and made us laugh.”12
With the ordinary people Dayan’s encounters were not always easy or pleasant. “There was a crush of people in the auditorium, tired, sweating, with a bellyful of complaints and tumultuous,” Dayan described to Yizhar in an interview. “Now and then, they interrupted me with catcalls; they shouted at me, and I shouted at them. They did not reach me—I heard only a general echo—and I don’t know if I reached them.”13
While there is no way of gauging Dayan’s personal contribution to the party’s success in the election, his celebrity status no doubt brought in supportive votes. With 370,585 votes—nearly three times as many as the next party—Mapai won 47 of the 120 parliament seats, 7 more than in the previous Knesset.
The Fourth Knesset had many new faces that would become mainstays in Israeli politics for decades to come. Among the new generation filling the Mapai Party benches were Dayan; Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion’s right-hand man at the Ministry of Defense; and Abba Eban, the former ambassador to the United States. Ben-Gurion, fearing the wrath of party veterans, offered Dayan the position of minister of agriculture, which was not considered a senior post. Peres was appointed deputy minister of defense, and Eban joined the cabinet as minister without a portfolio though he was soon appointed minister of education. The senior posts remained with the veterans: Levi Eshkol was still the minister of finance and Golda Meir the foreign minister.
Party relations ostensibly calmed down, and Dayan’s political standing seemed assured, though scars remained. Ben-Gurion’s chief rival now was Pinchas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut. In 1960 it emerged that during the Cairo Affair of 1954, in which Operation Susannah, the Egyptian sleeper cell of Israeli spies, was uncovered, the head of the Intelligence Branch had forged documents and suborned an officer to commit perjury before the committee of inquiry. Lavon, who had been accused by the head of Intelligence as having ordered the activation of the cell in Cairo, now demanded that Ben-Gurion declare him innocent of the Cairo mishap, but the prime minister refused, arguing that it was a matter for the courts and he was not a judge. Lavon, furious, went public with dramatic recriminations—the opening volley of a struggle that became known as the Lavon Affair. The Mapai Party leadership had split over the issue and some of Ben-Gurion’s loyal lieutenants turned against him. Repercussions from the affair rocked Israel’s political establishment for years, severely damaging the party’s public status and ultimately leading to Ben-Gurion’s resignation. One result was that Dayan gradually distanced himself from Ben-Gurion and devoted himself to the Agriculture Ministry, where he served from December 1959 to November 1964. “Wheat fields, fruit orchards, vegetable seedlings, and cattle barns were stamped on my blood more than tanks and cannon,” he later wrote.14 Dayan, after all, had been a farmer, and he was familiar with the problems of agriculture and found them absorbing.
Though he was now on the party steering committee, the meetings bored him and he stopped attending. Instead, he scrambled about archaeological sites and lurked around development and construction areas to uncover the earth’s belly, always carrying a spade and change of clothes in the car. One urban neighborhood turned out to be sitting on a Canaanite town. A resident, Leah Morris, who was a young girl at the time, later described her childhood memory of Moshe Dayan, the dilettante archaeologist: “One day, Dayan arrived at our yard in khaki shorts with a spade and began digging at the edge of the tell, without asking anyone’s permission. I was curious and for days left off all play and stayed near him. I sat on the mango tree, watching him for hours as he pulled old objects and broken vessels from the kurkar (coastal sand-dune rock), one after another. I would pick him a juicy mango and feed him from my hand because his own hands were dirty from digging. Ultimately, my father politely banished him from the yard.”15
Israeli agriculture found itself in crisis at the end of the 1950s, owing, paradoxically, to its dizzying success: surplus production had caused prices to plummet. Dayan’s first task was to introduce supervision of farm produce and re-regulate production, and he particularly wished to bolster immigrant moshavim, which barely eked out a living. As minister, he controlled three chief appropriations: land allocation and water and production quotas. He decided to remove urban dairy farms from the center of the country, a proceeding that drew the ire of dairy farmers. Dayan also discovered that the new settlements of the 1950s were being shortchanged in water and production quotas, so he altered these, angering the members of the older kibbutzim and moshavim. The change primarily benefited some four hundred immigrant moshavim at the expense of older farming communities.
Dayan learned a valuable lesson in the realities of his position from the unlikeliest source: tomatoes. No matter how sensible and strategic his reasoning, Dayan could not target all civilian agricultural projects. The popular large juicy Israeli strain of tomato had a short shelf life, a fact that made it unsuitable for export. Learning that the British preferred a strain known as Moneymaker, with a considerably longer shelf life, Dayan banned the Israeli tomato in early 1960 and encouraged the cultivation of the Moneymaker. But the affair blew up in his face. Housewives were outraged, and Moneymaker prices plunged through lack of demand, while those of the juicy Israeli tomatoes skyrocketed. Dubbed “General Moneymaker,” Dayan carried a belligerent message to the Knesset: “I am prepared to defend the Moneymaker to the last drop of Opposition blood.”16 Nevertheless, he had to compensate the farmers for their losses and lift the ban on the Israeli tomatoes.
Water was a different story. Zionists had long dreamed of channeling water to the country’s dry south from the Jordan River’s rainy season overflow. In the late 1950s, a project was begun to convey water from the Sea of Galilee to agricultural areas countrywide, but when Dayan took office, it was at a standstill. He strongly supported the project’s revival, and in May 1964 the National Water Carrier, an integrated system of pipes, tunnels, reservoirs, canals, and pumps, was inaugurated. Jordan waters began to flow to the Negev, dramatically changing Israeli agriculture. Dayan could chalk up an accomplishment on par with his military feats.
Dayan’s work at the Agriculture Ministry did not prevent him from participating in internal party and general politics. While Dayan was instrumental in helping Israel’s deserts bloom, the Lavon Affair sidetracked the Mapai Party, much to the satisfaction of the parliamentary opposition, led by Menachem Begin’s Herut Party. On January 31, 1961, following a motion of no-confidence brought by Herut and General Zionists, David Ben-Gurion was unable to form a new coalition and resigned as prime minister, causing the coalition government to collapse after the shortest Knesset term in Israel’s history and prompting new elections for the Fifth Knesset. In general, Dayan supported Ben-Gurion’s policies, but he believed Pinchas Lavon had been blameless for activating the Cairo spy ring and told Ben-Gurion so. He also disagreed with Ben-Gurion’s insistence on resolving the matter through legal channels, considering it preferable to conclude the affair out of the public eye and contain the political damage.
Party infighting and strong public criticism tarnished Ben-Gurion’s position. Kariel “Dosh” Gardosh, a noted cartoonist for Ma’ariv, drew a cartoon of Ben-Gurion smashing a statue of himself with a hammer. The message was clear: Ben-Gurion was being spurned by the party he had built. The old-time Mapai leadership drew closer to Ahdut Ha’Avodah (Labor Unity Party) on the left, the small party representing a good proportion of the kibbutz movement and headed by people who at one stage or another had clashed with Dayan. After the Mapai Party received more than one-third of the votes, however, Ben-Gurion formed a new coalition. When the new government assembled at the end of 1961, Yigal Allon, now a leader of Ahdut Ha’Avodah, was offered the Agriculture Ministry. Dayan was offered the Ministry of Housing, a more junior position, but he refused, insisting that he be given agriculture or nothing. Dayan retained his ministry.
During the final stretch of Ben-Gurion’s premiership, his relationship with Dayan cooled. On May 25, 1963, just before Ben-Gurion retired from politics, he goaded Dayan during a cabinet meeting discussion about Israel’s Defense College. Dayan reported to Neora Matalon that Ben-Gurion told the cabinet, “Generally, I would like to say to Moshe Dayan that seven years have already passed since he was in the army and many things have changed since then.” Dayan told Matalon, “If it hadn’t been Ben-Gurion, I would have said that what I’ve forgotten in those seven years, he never knew. But because it was Ben-Gurion—I said nothing.”17
In 1963, contention in the Mapai Party spilled over into the entire political arena. The Lavon Affair had now become the Ben-Gurion Affair. Confronted in May 1963 by strengthened internal party opponents, David Ben-Gurion resigned, leaving Eshkol to form the new government. Like Ben-Gurion, Eshkol assumed the additional post of defense minister, blocking Dayan from this senior position. Mapai Party veterans and Ahdut Ha’Avodah members combined forces to ensure that their opposition to Dayan would outweigh his soaring public popularity. A public opinion poll published on July 14, shortly after Eshkol took over, had shown that Dayan was the most popular leader after Ben-Gurion and far ahead of Eshkol and Golda Meir.18 Initially, Dayan tried to fight his party opponents, but when it became clear that Ben-Gurion’s resignation was final, Eshkol’s position as prime minister was bolstered. There was an implicit alliance in his government against Dayan, both personally and politically, and the former IDF chief of staff no longer had a say in matters beyond the Agriculture Ministry. A political clique congregated around Eshkol that decided all matters of importance and excluded Dayan even from discussions on defense and military issues. Eshkol and his minister of finance, Pinchas Sapir, began to undermine Dayan’s position within his own ministry. The Finance Ministry started setting the prices of agricultural produce and the party’s daily newspaper, Davar, repeatedly attacked Dayan. Having little left to lose, Dayan became outspokenly critical of Eshkol’s leadership, and he lasted only sixteen months in Eshkol’s government. On November 3, 1964, he tendered his resignation. “My problem was not Ben-Gurion’s absence from the premiership, but the oppressive atmosphere and hostility in which I found myself in Eshkol’s government,” Dayan later wrote. “I felt like the hero of another story…. Better to resign while I was still on my feet.”19
Dayan remained a member of the Knesset, even though legislative work did not interest him. He began writing a book on the Sinai campaign, enlisting Neora Matalon’s help. He also asked for additional governmental duties, however minor, and Eshkol put him in charge of a government fishing company active in Eilat and the Red Sea. The political scene, however, continued to be acrimonious. Ben-Gurion decided to form a new party, and on June 16, 1965, without consulting his parliamentary loyalists, announced that he would run as a candidate for the new party in the upcoming elections.
Though Dayan had opposed Ben-Gurion’s resignation from the outset, he had reservations about turning a struggle over policy and principle into a personal vendetta against Eshkol. He also believed that Ben-Gurion could not muster a large enough party to affect the government’s composition. While Ben-Gurion established Rafi, the Israel Workers List Party, Dayan delayed his decision on whether to join. Ben-Gurion’s supporters knew that his leadership alone would not be enough for a new party, and they pressed Dayan to join. Dayan wavered, believing that a split from Mapai would be the wrong strategy to defeat it. “I don’t share the mantra that they can’t manage without us,” Dayan told party activists at a conference. “I think they can manage … without me, without you, without us.” He may have been hinting, “without Ben-Gurion” as well.20
The day after Ben-Gurion proclaimed the formation of his new party, Dayan announced that he was staying with Mapai. Some of his friends spoke of betrayal, and many thought that the war hero had shown himself to be no hero in politics. Avraham Schweitzer, a senior journalist known as a Dayan supporter, expressed his disappointment. “The public judges harshly someone who refuses to go to war and deserts his unit before battle,” he wrote. “All the more so, a senior commander is judged harshly for announcing, on the day before confronting the enemy, that he is not prepared to risk the results and is therefore going home.”21
Dayan admittedly sat on the fence for three months, countering criticism by saying, “I myself take a harsher view of those responsible for erecting the fence than of those who find themselves sitting on it.” Ultimately, he joined Rafi. “I hesitated simply because I hesitated,” he commented. “I was in no hurry to decide because I was unable to decide.”22 Dayan was also unwilling to submit to Ben-Gurion’s capriciousness and did not want others to perceive him as the Old Man’s gullible follower. But he had little choice: his path in Mapai was blocked. He aligned himself with those closer to his own political ideas.
The results of the Sixth Knesset elections were disappointing. Ben-Gurion’s candidates garnered only ten seats, and the small party was excluded from Eshkol’s new coalition government. Peres was appointed Rafi secretary while Dayan cut his political activity to a bare minimum. He felt as though he was stranded.
With his political post now settled, Dayan continued his extramarital affairs. “I knew of them all: the thin and the fat, the Frenchwoman and the student, the officer and the journalist,” Yaël, who was to some extent his confidante, wrote disdainfully. She did not condemn him, she was merely shocked by the vulgarity of it all.23 His liaisons occasionally found their way into the tabloids, and the affair of his university days caught up with him. The wife of his Nahalal friend did not get over his rejection and wrote a thinly veiled novel about the affair in which he was easily identified. The book was published in 1963 under the title Hot Sands, but made no waves. His weakness as a womanizer was so well known that the public was not overly bothered by the exposure of yet another affair.
Ruth, though, took the matter hard. “My world had fallen apart,” she wrote. “Every day was a form of death, and the nights far worse. I seemed to be heading for disaster, and there was nothing I could do but endlessly bide my time. I felt as though I were being punished for my love.”24 The press repeatedly commented on Dayan’s recklessness, writing that his behavior could not be glossed over. Apparently, however, it could. Yaël captured the public attitude toward Dayan’s womanizing cynically but precisely: “The public eagerly swallowed up the gossip, which added to Father’s colorful image as a folk hero. Men envied him, women were curious, and admirers forgave him and found justification.”25
Rachel, too, suffered from the public exposure of Dayan’s escapades. At one stage, she decided to sever their relationship but was unable to stand firm for more than a few days. When the next scandal broke, she stood at his side. Dayan had a passing liaison with a young woman who claimed that he had proposed to her, and her mother threatened to sue unless he paid them a large sum. This time he yielded, though the affair had already made headlines. His lawyers advised him that a long trial would keep the affair alive, revealing additional embarrassing details. “I loved Moshe very much, and I felt sorry for him,” Rachel acknowledged. “I learned to forgive and forget, never doubting his love for me.”26
Dayan’s excesses also spilled over into lawlessness. Caught driving at more than a hundred miles an hour, he told the police that with one eye, he could see only half the speed. The stories made headlines but hardly a dent in his popularity. Rather, they added a perverse dimension to his devil-may-care image.
In April 1966, Dayan accepted an offer from the New York Times to cover the Vietnam War as a correspondent. The Knesset and his own faction condemned his new role, fearing that his trip would be interpreted as Israeli support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. Dayan dismissed the criticism, claiming that he was interested in learning about the management of modern warfare. “My chief expertise is in the defense field,” he said. “Just as an expert of diseased plants travels to see diseased plants and how they are treated, I would like to see and learn about this war.” As for appearing to support it, he assured his colleagues that his rejection of that notion “will become clear upon my return.”27
He spent two months in Vietnam meeting with both Vietnamese and U.S. military leaders, including General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. operations during the Tet Offensive. Once a soldier, always a soldier; he spent most of his time on the battlefield, embedded with Marine units on missions inside villages. Press photographs showed him trudging through waist-high mud, his eye patch visible through the jungle trees.
On one of the few occasions he visited Saigon, he was surprised to find his wife, Ruth. She had come to Bangkok for a world conference on traditional crafts and decided to visit Saigon as well. There, under the unusual circumstances, their old love blossomed, if only for a day. “That night, most surprisingly, we had a wonderful time,” Ruth later wrote. “We ate at a Chinese restaurant and danced, something we hadn’t done in a long time. That night, for the first time in years, Moshe opened his heart to me.”28
When he returned from Vietnam, Dayan published a series of articles criticizing U.S. policy in the war and the Americans’ faltering military performance. He had reached the conclusion that the United States could not win and would eventually give up. The articles were reprinted in various languages, earning him international fame, and on a subsequent trip to the United States, England, and France, he was invited to meet state leaders, senior military commanders, and journalists. Opponents of the war used his articles as ammunition. In Israel too, Dayan was once more seen as a world-renowned expert on military and defense affairs.