ON MAY 15, 1967, the nineteenth anniversary of Israel’s independence, ominous news interrupted preparations for a festive parade in Jerusalem. In violation of the agreements ending the Sinai campaign ten years earlier, Egypt had flagrantly deployed troops in the Sinai Peninsula. The Israel Defense Forces began to call up reserves, and anxiety gripped the public. Should Egypt launch war, Israelis feared, Israel could suffer catastrophic consequences. Dayan was restless. He could not bear the thought of Israel fighting a war without him.
On May 20, he asked Prime Minister Eshkol for authorization to inspect the IDF units assembling in the South. Eshkol granted him permission, and on May 23 he was warmly welcomed at the command post in Beersheba. Eshkol knew that President Nasser had just ordered the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping, an action that Israel had repeatedly warned would be considered an act of war. Three IDF divisions were on alert in the Negev: the elite Armored Corps under the command of Gen. Israel Tal; another armored division led by Gen. Avraham Yoffe, who in the Sinai campaign had led his brigade to Sharm el-Sheikh; and the paratroopers and their celebrated but controversial commander Gen. Ariel Sharon.
Over the next seven days, Dayan toured all the Southern Command units. He met with commanders, spoke with soldiers, and for the first time kept his own diary, having neither a secretary nor a bureau chief. He knew most of the senior officers well, and they all knew and admired him. On the instructions of the IDF chief of General Staff, Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, the officers showed him their strategic plans, naturally expecting him to share his thoughts. Dayan was reluctant. “I came to see and to hear, not to express opinions,” he said, but soon enough he was unable to withhold his reservations.
He slept in Beersheba, returning to Tel-Aviv intermittently to keep abreast of the political situation. One evening he was spotted on his way to a café and immediately surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd. “Moshe Dayan! Moshe Dayan!” The crowd’s embrace was a local expression of the mounting public anxiety at the end of May, an anxiety that also permeated political ranks. Prime Minister Eshkol was viewed as hesitant and indecisive, and there was talk among the public, the press, and the leadership of replacing him as minister of defense. Dayan’s name surfaced. As a member of Ben-Gurion’s small opposition Rafi Party, he did not believe that he would receive the appointment and asked his brother-in-law Ezer Weizman, then head of GHQ Operations, to re-enlist him into the army.
Eshkol, under heavy pressure to include more people in the decision-making process, called Dayan in for a personal meeting and suggested he join the special ministerial committee on foreign and defense affairs. Dayan refused. He was prepared to make himself available for consultation whenever Eshkol or Rabin desired, but he saw no point in sitting on a committee of seven or nine ministers who did not set policy. He repeated his request to rejoin the IDF, asking to be appointed commander of the Egyptian front.
Eshkol grasped at the suggestion and instructed Rabin accordingly. Now, however, pressure to appoint Dayan minister of defense came from within Eshkol’s own party. Key party women demonstrated in support of Dayan outside Mapai headquarters, but Eshkol dismissed them as the “merry wives of Windsor.” But soon afterward, a member of the Knesset, Chaim Zadok, a prominent party leader loyal to Eshkol, threw his support behind Dayan during a stormy meeting. “Dayan is the minister of defense that the people most want,” he declared. “The public living here in Israel today, the mobilized public … know Dayan as a commander, a statesman, the victor of Sinai. That is the important image at this moment.”1
Eshkol surrendered to the calls, agreeing to a national-unity government with Dayan as minister of defense. The expanded cabinet first convened on the evening of June 1. With a major military showdown with Egypt and other Arab countries both assured and imminent, the Israeli government had no time for formalities: Dayan assumed the position with the Knesset endorsement to follow later. He was already familiar with the operational defense plans and most of the information available to the Intelligence Branch. That same day, King Hussein, who had recently allowed Iraqi troops to deploy in Jordan, flew to Egypt and signed a pact with President Nasser. He was escorted back to Amman by two Egyptian commando battalions and an Egyptian general who would soon take command of the eastern front. With Arab military interests against the State of Israel coalescing, it appeared as if Israel could no longer postpone making an attack.
The decisive deliberations took place on the morning of June 2. The ministerial committee and the IDF top brass, including division commanders, convened at “The Pit,” the popular designation for the wartime bunker of the General Headquarters. Eshkol still favored delaying the operation for at least another week to permit the Americans time to exhaust all diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis. In a cable from Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson entreated Israel not to launch an attack, and in Paris, President Charles de Gaulle wrote firmly that the party to shoot first would be denounced.
The Pit air was fraught with tension. Eshkol argued that Israel stood to lose all international support and needed time to explain its position to the United States before taking irreversible steps. Yitzhak Rabin, however, pointed out that time was not on Israel’s side. “I feel—more than feel—a military and political noose closing in on us,” he said. “I don’t think that an outside party will loosen it. I therefore think that the IDF should be permitted to act at once.”2 Rabin was not only voicing his assessment, he was also articulating the crux of the strained relations between the military officers and the prime minister, and their increasing lack of confidence in him. Dayan shrank from the acrid remarks, though he clearly supported their gist. According to Rabin, “We found support and reinforcement for our stance in the words of the new minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, who backed up our position at his first appearance in his new role.”3
Later that day, Eshkol convened several ministers for further consultation. Not one believed that an IDF attack was avoidable. The Israeli Air Force (IAF), it was decided, would mobilize to destroy the Egyptian air force in one fell swoop. Now that Eshkol could be certain that a military conflict would ensue, he stood behind the war effort and called on the government to make a formal decision. “We have fully exhausted our diplomatic actions,” he said. “It is no longer possible to wait. We must decide finally.”4
Dayan did not wait for the government’s approval. That same evening and into the next day, he closely reviewed the operational plans and offered his own suggestions on three points. First, the IDF would not conquer the Gaza Strip in the first stage, to avoid spilling unnecessary blood or having to divert troops to handle Palestinian refugees, whose numbers had doubled since 1948; second, the IDF would not go as far as the Suez Canal in order to avoid the international complications that would surely arise if Israel encroached there; and third, a major objective would be to open the Straits of Tiran by taking the coastal village of Sharm el-Sheikh, even if this could be done only at a later stage.
Dayan wished to concentrate all efforts on the Egyptian front. When the O.C. Northern Command David Elazar (Dado) suggested using the war as an opportunity to improve Israel’s border on the Golan Heights, Dayan was opposed. The northern forces were not to act, he ordered, even if Syria shelled and bombed Israeli towns. Unless there was an outright troop attack, the IDF was to take no initiative. Escalating hostilities on the Syrian front could rouse the Soviet Union, which had close ties with Syria. This disagreement over the war in the North would soon have a dramatic sequel. Meanwhile, Dayan instructed the O.C. on the eastern front similarly: as long as Jordan’s armored troops remained on the eastern side of the Jordan River, he was not to act.
The final decision to go to war was made at an extraordinary session of the special ministerial forum. All the ministers except two, who represented Mapam, a small party that always favored a conciliatory approach, voted for Dayan’s proposal. They approved, in principle, launching the war and authorized the prime minister and defense minister to instruct the IDF to choose the time, place, and means as they saw fit. Dayan left the meeting, phoned Rabin, and advised him of the decision. War would begin the next morning.
As Zero Hour approached, maintaining the element of surprise against the Egyptian air force became more pressing. News reports of the contacts between Israel and the United States, coupled with the government’s decision on May 26 to continue to pursue diplomatic channels, lent credibility to Dayan’s careful leaks about waiting. He exploited one chance given in an interview with journalist Winston Churchill, grandson and namesake of the celebrated British leader, who asked him whether war was imminent and whether he should remain in Israel to cover it, by assuring him that he could return to England without any qualms. Churchill did so. Dayan eased his conscience over the crude deception by noting that “if he is a true friend of Israel, as he says, it is proper that he help dupe the enemy.”5 At his first press conference as minister of defense, on June 3, he left a general impression of “no urgency.” Egypt apparently fell for the ruse and the state of emergency declared in the country days earlier was canceled.
On the morning of June 5, Dayan ate breakfast at home with Ruth and then headed for the command post about an hour before the campaign’s start. He asked Rachel to accompany him to a nearby café, but revealed nothing of what was about to happen. Afterward she was not overly upset that he had not told her that war was about to break out, though on her way back to her apartment at 7:45 A.M. she was surprised when the sirens sounded all over the country. By then, Dayan was already in the air force control room following events on the situation table, where miniature planes were being moved about with long rods. Some two hundred Israeli planes approached their targets, flying low over the Mediterranean in a communications blackout. “The air could be cut with a knife,” Dayan recalled. After the bombing began, communication was restored. The surprise had been complete. The IAF destroyed 204 Egyptian planes within the first thirty minutes of the attack.6 At the same time, the amassed ground forces near the border received the order to penetrate Sinai and attack. The hundreds of Israeli tank crews heard the command on their wireless sets: “Move! Move!”
During the six days that the war lasted, Dayan toured the fronts but was unable to spend long hours with the troops on the lines as he had done in the Sinai campaign. He was now bound by the intricacies of rank and duty and had to stay in constant touch with the prime minister and participate in cabinet meetings. He could influence the campaign only during brief visits to Pit headquarters before having to rush back to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Among the officers, his prestige from his days as CGS elevated his stature. He had, however, come to this campaign very late, after the command had already formed conceptions, plans, expectations, and hopes about the war’s management. Command Headquarters was made up of a tight group of officers who had traveled a long road together. Despite his authority and personal status, Dayan struggled to direct them and implement the changes he thought necessary in the battle plans. He was also resented in his civic capacity. “My membership in the government was precarious,” he later wrote. “The veteran members of government, especially of the ruling party, Mapai, saw me as an outsider foisted on them as a military and defense expert.”7
His position was further complicated by the intervention of Yigal Allon, who was involved in the war planning, and by Rabin’s free access to the prime minister, still smarting over his ousting as defense minister. Against this internal political backdrop, the military command operated with a certain freedom of action and license to ignore Dayan’s instructions. He felt more isolated than ever, as if he were shouldering all the responsibility alone.
Dayan spent most of the first morning of the war in the air force control room, sitting on a raised bench behind Commander Moti Hod, who managed the campaign. “Though the war has only just begun, the opening is promising,” Dayan noted later that afternoon. “The Egyptians have no air force. Not only is there no danger of bombing Israel’s civilian population, but our ground forces are assured a decisive advantage; they have aerial assistance at their disposal, the Egyptians do not.”8 After the first morning of fighting, 286 of Egypt’s 420 combat aircraft had been demolished.9
Israel had assured King Hussein that Jordan was not a target and asked him to stay out of the confrontation. But Jordan activated its artillery and small air force against Israel and dispatched a unit to capture the demilitarized zone around the U.N. headquarters in Jerusalem. Dayan still wanted all military attention concentrated on Sinai, but the Jordanian actions sparked their own reaction. Dormant dreams awakened in the hearts of IDF officers who had served in the 1948 war and regretted the missed opportunities in Jerusalem; the Old City had remained in Jordanian hands and off-limits to Israel since 1948, and many Israelis, Dayan included, had hoped that it would revert to Israel one day. The O.C. Central Command, General Uzi Narkiss, and some of the brigade commanders had fought on the Jerusalem front in 1948 and were avid for action there when Jordan entered the fray in 1967. Dayan and the GHQ were under constant pressure from the lower ranks to expand operations to Jerusalem and the entire west bank of the Jordan River, and Dayan tried to prevent commanders from devising their own battle plans. In response to Jordan’s attack, he limited Israel’s initial reaction to urgent locations: conquering Jenin in northern Samaria to stop Jordanian artillery fire at Israel’s northern air bases and taking northern Jerusalem to connect with the besieged unit in the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus. Dayan feared that bringing the fight to Jerusalem would incur unnecessary damage to holy sites in the city, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the mosques on the Temple Mount.
From the first day of fighting it was clear that some of Dayan’s instructions were being ignored. On the Sinai front, IDF engagement proceeded according to plan, although in the morning hours Egyptian cannon and mortar began shelling Israeli settlements on the Gaza border. With Rabin’s approval, the O.C. Southern Command decided to attack the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip according to the original plan, but contrary to Dayan’s instructions. By the time Dayan learned of the insubordination, the force was already on its way, and he could merely sanction the action. Though the IDF conquered Gaza, the steep—and tragic—price validated Dayan’s instructions not to attack. The infantry encountered stiff resistance, and GHQ was forced to send paratroopers into the battle. The IDF captured the Strip on the third day, when the armored troops were already near the Suez Canal. Israel lost seventy soldiers.
As the various battles raged, Dayan was summoned to Jerusalem for his swearing-in ceremony in the Knesset. The main road was exposed to Jordanian fire and blocked by the armored brigade called in to relieve the Israeli-controlled sections of the city. He arrived via a roundabout route only to find the entire Knesset personnel in shelters because of the Jordanian shelling. He lost patience and left. The Knesset endorsed the new cabinet minister in his absence. Ruth, too, had found herself under bombardment in Jerusalem. She managed to reach the Knesset and accompanied Moshe back to the coast. “Mother was again a proud, loving witness to unfolding events,” Yaël later wrote. “Father issued instructions and received reports while driving. On the road winding up to Jerusalem, the inky shadows of heavy tanks advanced in the dark.”10
The GHQ under Rabin was frantically prosecuting the war. Dayan was present for all the cardinal decisions; he had an office in the Pit and occasionally dropped into the war room for updates. The campaign management demanded detailed, concerted coordination, operative decisions, and organizational handling, which he observed but left up to the GHQ. The fine line between purely military concerns and ministerial intercession was blurred.
On the second day of the war, developments accelerated. Dayan repeatedly urged that his troops take Sharm el-Sheikh as soon as possible. The U.N. Security Council had already begun discussing demanding a halt to the fighting. “[Dayan] phoned me and said rather impatiently: ‘News is mounting of stepped-up Soviet diplomacy to end the war. What about Sharm el-Sheikh?’” Rabin later recalled. “‘We will find the war ending and be deprived of our reason for launching it.’”11
Dayan also repeatedly blocked the opening of a third front, against Syria. The IDF there was merely to “brake and swallow”: stand its ground and tolerate Syrian provocations.12 In the morning, news came that paratroopers had broken through to Mount Scopus, and Dayan decided to go to Jerusalem. A small command group including Uzi Narkiss, Ezer Weizman, and Dayan went up to Mount Scopus and met the brigade commander near the deserted buildings of Hebrew University. The O.C. pressed Dayan to permit his troops to enter the Old City, but Dayan insisted on their first taking the Mount of Olives without, as he put it, “that whole Vatican.”13 At the afternoon meeting, many ministers, among them Begin and Allon, pushed to send IDF troops to the Old City at once. Dayan, backed by Eshkol, stood his ground. The entry into the Old City and capture of the holy sites was deferred to the next day.
On the third and largely decisive day of battle, word came that Egypt had ordered its troops to retreat from Sinai, but they were bogged down in combat with Israel’s Armored Corps and could not withdraw. One Israeli armored team on the northern route from El Arish heading west rumbled close to the canal but stopped on Dayan’s explicit instructions. The O.C. Southern Command questioned the order again and was firmly turned down. Shortly before noon, naval forces and paratroopers dropped from helicopters gained control of Sharm el-Sheikh without resistance. The IDF troops had won the race against the Security Council resolution, and Israel’s control of the Straits of Tiran was now a reality that would have to be reckoned with. It would be fifteen years before the IDF withdrew, in the wake of Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt.
That morning, Dayan gave instructions for troops to enter Jerusalem’s walled Old City. From atop the Mount of Olives, Col. Motta Gur, the paratroop commander, issued a formal order, predictably not lacking in historic pathos. Gur broke through the Lions’ Gate, one of eight gates into the Old City, crossed the compound of mosques on the Temple Mount, and from there descended to the Western Wall. Many of the paratroopers wept. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the Military Rabbinate, blew the shofar. In the afternoon, Dayan strode through the Old City with General Rabin and General Narkiss. The group was photographed entering the Lions’ Gate, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, Dayan inserted a note in a crack of the Western Wall, with three Hebrew words: Lu yehi shalom—“May there be peace.” He also briefly addressed the soldiers and gathered journalists who printed his words in every Israeli newspaper the next day: “We have returned to our holiest site so as never to part with it again. To our Arab neighbors, Israel stretches out its hand in peace, and the members of other religions may rest assured that all their religious rights and freedoms will be fully protected. We did not come to conquer the holy sites of others or to restrict their religious rights, but to ensure the integrity of the city and to live there with others in brotherhood.”14 Publications worldwide reprinted the snapshot of Dayan, Rabin, and Narkiss walking together, wearing steel helmets and fatigues. It became one of the war’s iconic images, enhancing the acclaim Dayan would soon reap.
Levi Eshkol, of course, also wished to get to the Wall. Told that there was still shooting and it was unsafe, he arrived in the evening and made a formal declaration. The next morning’s papers carried the photo of Dayan at the Lions’ Gate and his address at the Wall on the front page while Prime Minister Eshkol’s words appeared on the inside pages. Eshkol’s military secretary, Israel Lior, was furious. “Dayan stole the glory,” Lior said, presumably venting Eshkol’s frustration as well. “This could not be erased from the pages of history written in Jerusalem that day. There was no choice, Eshkol filled the role of a mere minor player here.”15
On Thursday, June 8, the fourth day, heavy fighting continued with Egypt’s retreating army in Sinai. In the afternoon, the troops along the Mediterranean captured eastern Kantara, a small town on the shores of the Suez Canal. The cover photo of the June 23 issue of Life magazine featured a young Israeli officer who had jumped into the water holding his gun pointed skyward with his left hand. Dayan still believed that the IDF troops should stop short of the canal and a defense line should be demarcated in the hilly passes some twelve and a half miles to the east. But battles have their own dynamics. While pursuing the last of the retreating Egyptians, IDF troops on all fronts reached the banks of the canal. Dayan did not order them to withdraw.
On the Jordanian front, the fighting had stopped on the third day. By that evening, IDF soldiers reached Jericho, and Israeli tanks crossed the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River and captured positions on its eastern bank. Dayan instructed them to return, and making sure there was no misunderstanding of his objective of severing the western and eastern banks of the Jordan, he ordered the soldiers to blow up the bridge.
South of Jerusalem, IDF troops captured Bethlehem and Hebron, and Dayan set out for the historic cities on the same day. In Hebron, he went to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are buried along with their wives, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. The site is holy to both Jews and Muslims, because Abraham was the father to both Isaac, who perpetuated the Jewish religion, and Ishmael, the forefather of Muhammad. Since the erection of a mosque thirteen hundred years earlier, Jews had not been permitted to go past the seventh step leading to the tomb. Dayan wanted to have “Jews and Arabs praying and prostrating themselves together on the tombs of their common forefathers,” and gave instructions to remove the Israeli flag that had been raised on the building. To Dayan’s displeasure, after he left, Rabbi Goren brought a Torah scroll into one room and sanctified it as a synagogue. Dayan believed that it was sufficient to allow Jews to pray there and that making the site into a synagogue was unnecessary. But he did not revoke the rabbi’s measure. It would not be the last time that he failed to impose his own views about the occupied territories, especially in Hebron.
At this stage the focus turned to Syria. It was now or never. The O.C. Northern Command, Dado Elazar, feared that the war would end before he could act on his main front—the Golan Heights, which many in the military establishment believed was a vital strategic high ground needed to defend northern Israel. He again urged Rabin to approve the long-planned attack, and northern farmers, called on to pressure the government, arrived in Jerusalem in the afternoon of June 8, met with the prime minister, and demanded immediate action.
Eshkol submitted to the pressure and voiced his full support. He summoned Rabin, Elazar, and Allon, excluding Dayan from the talks. In the evening, Eshkol convened the ministerial committee, a maneuver calculated to sway Dayan, who opposed taking the Golan. Defying even the semblance of standard procedure, the prime minister invited the settler delegates to the meeting. Dayan was furious. He reiterated his reasons for not attacking Syria.
“Yes, the Golan Heights are a high point, but airplanes fly higher,” he argued.
He saw no justification for opening a third front. As it was, Israel would have a tough struggle to retain its gains after the war. There was no chance that Syria would accept Israel’s conquest of the Golan, and Israel had no interest in adding its defense to the postwar pressures. The thought of further provoking Russia, Syria’s main backer, would not bode well for Israel’s foreign policy. “In the international jungle, Israel should not walk the path of elephants,” Dayan remarked. “There are always other paths.”16
Perhaps fueled by his anger, Dayan was adamant, and his statements were borderline heresy for a man who grew up in Nahalal. “It is true that the Syrians embitter the lives of our settlements on the northern border,” he said. “But if the settlers are unable to stand it and the situation needs changing, it is better to move the farm buildings away from the border than to embroil Israel in a state of war with another Arab state.”17
His listeners were stunned. Eshkol closed the meeting without a decision, and the matter was left to his and Dayan’s discretion. At 3:20 A.M. on June 9, Syria announced that it was accepting the U.N. ceasefire order. When Dayan arrived at the command post at 6:00 and read the announcement, he knew it was Israel’s last moment to act. He phoned Elazar and asked him whether he was ready to attack. Elazar said he was. “Attack! Attack!” Dayan instructed. He immediately advised the prime minister that he had changed his mind, but Rabin was upset that Dayan had gone straight to Elazar rather than through proper channels—namely himself, the IDF chief of General Staff.18 “The unpredictable Moshe Dayan … surprised [us] once more,” Rabin noted cynically.19 Dayan’s decision also irked Eshkol’s office; the prime minister had been authorized to be part of the decision. But there was no point in opposing the order. Eshkol supporters believed that Dayan had acted as he did so that he could take all the credit. Israel Lior, still upset by Eshkol’s missed photo opportunity in the Old City, observed that when the news was received, Eshkol spat out a single word: “Sneak!” “He immediately realized that Dayan was stealing the limelight on this front too,” Lior said. “Again, it looked as if Eshkol were trying to hold back the army while Dayan, the hero of Israel, once more undertook to do the right thing, the patriotic thing.”20
Dayan must have felt that he had not acted properly. Years later in his autobiography, he struck an apologetic note while justifying his actions. “I searched for the CGS, but he spent that night at home and was not at GHQ,” he wrote. It should not, however, have been difficult to locate Rabin had Dayan considered doing so important enough. At the least, his actions attest to a typical impatience with bureaucracy. As for Eshkol, Dayan wrote: “I asked my secretary to contact the prime minister’s military secretary to advise Eshkol of the instruction I had given, of my reasons, and to hear his reaction. I had no doubt that Eshkol wanted the operation with all his heart.”21 His rationale sounded more like an excuse. After all, the operation could have been delayed for a minute or two while he phoned Eshkol before issuing instructions. But Dayan was never alert to the finer points of dealing with people.
The fighting on the Golan Heights started at 11:30 A.M. Though there were several difficult battles, by the end of the day most of the Syrian units had disappeared. The next day, the IDF captured Kuneitra, the Golan’s main town, and the troops ascended Mount Hermon, from which they could see the suburbs of Damascus. As Dayan feared, the Soviets severed diplomatic relations with Israel, but they took no steps beyond indignant declarations and anti-Israel activity in United Nations corridors.
On the first day of fighting on the Golan, Dayan toured the command post. What he learned there annoyed him, for he came to believe that Elazar had been disingenuous in reporting the situation. If he had not lied outright, he had at least withheld important information. Dayan had considered bringing the campaign to an end and had asked Elazar whether an additional division that had readied to attack the southern part of the Golan Heights might be halted. Elazar had told him that the troops were already on their way to the Golan and could not be stopped. Dayan found out that the troops were still holding and awaiting further orders to mobilize toward the Golan.22 “Not everything is smooth with the O.C.,” Dayan noted. “The information I receive is inaccurate…. I did not say anything to him, though inwardly I was boiling, and even more—saddened.”23 Dayan did not forget such feelings, and they tainted his relationship with Elazar when the latter was CGS during the Yom Kippur War.
On Saturday, June 10, as evening approached, Israel ceased fire. The Six Day War had come to an end.
Although the IDF enjoyed a sweeping victory, disagreements among the military and political leaders left their marks. Dayan, for his part, received tremendous publicity but was widely accused of having stolen the acclaim from Rabin, who had in fact prepared the army for victory and was responsible for the military planning. Dayan had certainly played no part in these efforts. Nevertheless, his appointment was a great boost to public and military morale. Ezer Weizman summed up Dayan’s contribution in one sentence: “Dayan provided a powerful drive for the readiness to fight.”24