DEFENSE MINISTER MOSHE DAYAN’S order to blow up the Allenby, King Abdullah, and Damia bridges leading to Jordan after the IDF reached the Jordan River was a dramatic, concrete move to demarcate what he thought should be Israel’s eastern line of defense. But within hours of cutting off the crossings, he pondered a question with which he would grapple for the rest of his life: How should Israel control the territory captured west of the Jordan without imposing an alien rule on the people living there? His first step toward answering this question was to fix the bridges. When he visited the sites, he learned that numerous Palestinians were fording the seasonally shallow river on foot or by car, and trucks with farm produce were crossing to markets in Jordan’s large East Bank cities. On the spot, he issued instructions to permit regulated Palestinian passage, and placed a temporary bridge opposite Jericho and another near Damia, below Nablus. Allowing Palestinians to have contact with their Arab neighbors became a basic principle of Dayan’s policy in the occupied territories. Many West Bank inhabitants had relatives who had moved to the East Bank or other Arab states. Additionally, many young people, lacking universities in the West Bank, pursued studies elsewhere in the Arab world. Now, in June, summer vacation was near, and thousands of students were streaming homeward. The eastward flow demanded little supervision, but westbound traffic was a potential opening for infiltration by guerrillas, necessitating checks and control. Dayan toiled to streamline and ease the crossings.
Israel faced another new problem, this one in regard to passage across the old Jewish-Arab Jerusalem border. After the city was captured, a curfew had been imposed on the Arab quarter in the east. But Israelis were impatient to visit the newly conquered area, especially the holy sites, whether for religious or historical reasons or out of just plain curiosity. The rest of the areas conquered remained “occupied territories,” their fate to be decided in the future. East Jerusalem, however, was annexed to the municipal jurisdiction of Israeli Jerusalem by Knesset legislation. The handling of the city’s problems and its Arab residents fell to Jerusalem’s legendary mayor, Teddy Kollek, who dismantled the walls and fences without delay and called a meeting on June 8 to discuss the question of passage between areas of the city. Most of the representatives present feared Arab violence in protest of the annexation. Dayan, who had considered the matter important enough to attend the meeting, demanded that Arabs and Israelis both be accorded free two-way passage without permits. The bodies in charge of public order were vehemently opposed, but he insisted and won them over. The next morning, thousands of Israelis poured eastward to view the historic sites to which they had been denied access for nineteen years, while thousands of Arab residents flowed westward to feast their eyes on modern Jerusalem. “There is a festive air in the city,” Kollek wrote Dayan the following day, “Kudos! You were right; all the Arabs are at Zion Square and all the Jews at the [Arab] bazaars.”1
On June 18–19, a week after the war, the government discussed policy regarding the conquered territories. Dayan held that Judea and Samaria, along with the Gaza Strip, were “part of our land, to be settled, not abandoned.” The border between Israel and Jordan had to be the Jordan River. But he did not think there was any urgency to the decision because the Arabs would not be prepared to sign peace treaties with Israel in the near future. The real question facing Israel, according to Dayan, would be “to find practical ways to improve our relations with the Arabs [within the occupied territories], even in the absence of peace.”2
Dayan served as minister of defense for seven years and was the prime architect of policy in the occupied territories. Though a variety of issues there fell under the authority of other ministers, too, most did not personally deal with these issues. Initially, Prime Minister Eshkol attempted to assume management of the territories. He held consultations, created interministerial forums, commissioned surveys, and even intervened in such specifics as road routes, licenses for waterworks, and approval of Jewish settlements. However, as his biographer wrote, “Reality was stronger: the fact that the military government ruled the occupied territories exclusively, combined with Dayan’s profound interest and personal dedication in dealing with the inhabitants’ day-to-day life, forged the realities on the ground. Ultimately, the defense minister managed the Palestinians living in the occupied territories.”3
In time, Dayan came to symbolize understanding and empathy toward the Arabs. Nonetheless, he maintained an extremely hawkish view on Israel’s continued control of the territories, repeating, like a mantra: “Israel must not return to the border that is less than ten miles from coastal Netanya…. In 1949 we had impossible borders, and we must not return to them for they are worse than war, they spell permanent war.”4 He embraced the new situation created by the Six Day War, his rational arguments overlaying powerful emotions about withdrawing from areas that since his meandering trek as a youth he had seen as an integral part of the Jewish homeland. In these places the Bible came alive before his eyes. In a eulogy for the 1948 casualties of Jerusalem’s Old City delivered on the occasion of their reburial on the Mount of Olives, he said, “We have returned to the Mount, the cradle of our people, the patrimony of our forefathers. The land of the Judges and the stronghold of the Kingdom of David.”5 Of his newfound homeland he wrote, “There was something special about Judea and Samaria. I could never still the quiver in my heart at the local [biblical] names, even when a site retained only ruins.”6
He struggled to find or create a political solution that would be in line with his emotional response and never abandoned the search for that elusive formula. During Dayan’s last years, the violence of Palestinian terror organizations was already rocking the country, and the whole world recognized that the Palestinians were fighting for their own national liberation. But Dayan kept trying to reconcile his conception of a Jewish homeland with his understanding of the Palestinians’ needs and motives. He was able to lead Israel to peace with Egypt, but he could not find the road to peace with the Palestinians. On the contrary, his policies established political realities that would impede future efforts to compromise with the Palestinians.
It is little wonder, then, that most of his declarations in this period were obscure and contradictory. At a conference of the IDF senior command in September 1967, he listed four policy elements: to make the ceasefire lines permanent borders; to reach peace settlements with the Arabs through direct negotiation; to prevent the rise of a bi-national state; to thwart the possibility of a future Arab majority in the occupied territories.7
Today it is hard to conceive of more unrealistic aims. But even then it was clear that turning the ceasefire lines into permanent borders would preclude all possibility of peace with the Arabs, and that retaining the territories would inevitably create a bi-national state, sustainable only by force. The desire to forestall an Arab majority in the territories at a time when not a single Jew lived there was a delusion.
As soon as the fighting died down, Dayan turned his attention to the problems he had inherited after the war. A week after the cannons went silent, he met with Arab mayors of the major cities of the West Bank and Gaza, whose cooperation he considered essential to building a new government apparatus. Most belonged to old, well-connected families that enjoyed the support of the Palestinian elite, and they became the mainstay of Dayan’s policies.
One of his early steps was to invite to his home the Palestinian poet Fadwa Touqan. From a prestigious Nablus family, she was known for her strong voice expressing hatred and anger at Israel and the occupation. She arrived at his home on October 12, 1968, accompanied by her uncle, the mayor of Nablus, Qadri Touqan. Dayan’s invitation to an established foe of Israel aroused the ire of Israel’s right-wing establishment. He responded to their gripes on Israel Radio: “I read her poems and was impressed by her personal sincerity and nationalist spirit,” he explained. “Fadwa Touqan is now the nationalist poet of the Palestinian Arab public, and I believe we should try to know what that public thinks, what they feel, what they will accept, and what they will fight; not only what their political leaders say.”8
In mid-August 1967, he appointed Shlomo Gazit, the bureau chief from his early days as chief of the IDF General Staff, the Coordinator of Activities in the Occupied Territories. Gazit later noted three tenets of Dayan’s policy: “an invisible government of occupation; normalization; a wise penal policy.”9
On the idea of an invisible government of occupation, Dayan held that “we must make sure to minimize the points of friction between the two peoples. To do so, we must permit … local Arabs to run their own lives without having to see or talk to any Israeli officials so long as they do not break the law.”10 Dayan gave instructions to relocate IDF command posts from the cities to rural areas; to remove Israeli flags from Arab areas; and, where possible, to avoid army patrols in Palestinian population centers, relying on local officials and municipal government to run day-to-day life.
While Dayan was at the helm, he was able to maintain calm and prevent the sort of uprisings that erupted in the late 1980s. Yet it is clear today that a people cannot be occupied invisibly. His goals, including the “wise penal policy,” were unrealistic. In the war on terrorists, he tried to avoid harming innocent civilians, which, in the long run, proved impossible. Most measures aimed to deter, a policy that could be directed only at the families of terrorists or the civilian population collectively.
Dayan not only opened the border to permit Arabs from the territories to visit Israel, he fostered Palestinian economic activity to raise their standard of living. Israel’s labor market was open to Palestinian workers, West Bank farm produce was sold in Israeli markets and vice versa. He attempted to integrate economically two communities that were asymmetric in every way and inexorably made the conquered dependent on the conqueror. The economic activity and relative well-being in the territories did not dampen the nationalist sentiments of the Palestinians. Dayan seemed to have insight into short-term processes but not the foresight required for long-term historical goals.
Following the Six Day War, various workers parties united around Mapai to form a new organization known as the Labor Party. The party included Ahdut Ha’Avodah, headed by Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, and Rafi, led by Dayan and Peres. For the first time since the early 1940s, Allon and Dayan, Yitzhak Sadeh’s protégés from their days patrolling Hanita, found themselves in the same party. Both were widely regarded as the chief candidates for party leadership after the changing of the guard—the generation of Eshkol, who passed away in February 1969, and of Golda Meir, his replacement. Both Allon and Dayan aspired to chart Israeli policy on key issues. Allon could count on the unreserved support of his party leaders, and Galili, his mentor and friend, was Meir’s faithful adviser. Dayan, the lone wolf, drew power from the public, who regarded him as an inspiring leader. During the years between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Allon and Dayan clashed sharply on most issues of state.
Soon after the Six Day War ended, in July 1967, Allon submitted a document to Prime Minister Eshkol titled “The Future of the Territories and Management of the Refugees.” Known as the Allon Plan, it proposed defining permanent borders as the basis for negotiating peace with Arab states. Israel, according to the Allon Plan, would retain sovereignty over a narrow strip along the Jordan River, over East Jerusalem and its environs, and over the area around Rafah Junction in the southern Gaza Strip. Dayan proposed a “functional partition,” a division not of territory but of authority and administration.
A more concrete disagreement between Dayan and Allon crystallized over the issue of Jewish settlement of the occupied territories. Dayan had never valued the use of civilian settlements to solve strategic problems. He envisioned controlling the territory by relocating army bases to the hilltop ridge. He was not, however, opposed to the settlement process, which he viewed as a guarantee of continued Israeli rule there. In principle, he agreed, it was inconceivable to keep Jews from living anywhere in the Land of Israel. He also did not think that Israel should withdraw from the Jordan River, Rafah, or Sharm el-Sheikh, though he was opposed to Jewish settlement in densely populated Arab areas.
The ultimate test case of the settlement policy came in Hebron, from which Jews had fled after the 1929 massacre. On April 2, 1968, less than a year after the war ended, some of the champions of a Greater Israel held a Passover seder at a rented hotel in an Arab neighborhood of Hebron, having agreed to leave the next day. Instead, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, one of the leaders of the new, religious-Zionist settlement camp, called for Jews to return to the “City of the Patriarchs” and settle. Allon provided them with equipment and paid them a highly publicized visit the day after they arrived. Although Dayan had sent greetings to the seder participants, he opposed their continued presence in Hebron, which he considered an unnecessary provocation to the Arabs. But he was in the hospital at the time,11 and unable to intervene. By the time he returned to work, the settlers could no longer be dislodged.
The public regarded such episodes as a prelude to a contest between Dayan and Allon for the premiership down the road. Allon claimed that for every proposal he made, Dayan proposed the opposite.12 Dayan responded by sending a message with General Joseph Geva, the director-general of Allon’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, affirming that he did not aspire to be prime minister and therefore Allon should not feel threatened. Allon was not convinced. “Don’t believe that sly fox,” he told Geva.13
Dayan’s liberal policy toward the Palestinians did not prevent him from applying tough, even cruel, measures against those who resorted to violence or abetted terrorists. By August 1967, the Palestinians had adopted a policy of terror: shooting Israelis and laying mines on roads, detonating bombs in Jewish cities. To punish and deter the terrorists, the IDF blew up homes, detained suspects or their relatives, shut down shops whose workers went on strike, and imposed curfews on Palestinian cities. “One of the painful, effective retaliation measures was the exile of political leaders and agitators responsible for organizing strikes, demonstrations, and other means of resistance,” Shlomo Gazit wrote.14
Yasir Arafat, leader of Fatah, the main Palestinian guerrilla movement, founded in 1959, began setting up bases in Jordan and striking at Israeli targets across the border and around the world. The Jordan Valley became a hotbed of unrest. Militants from Jordan tried to ford the river at night to reach the hilltop ridge west of the river by dawn and blend in with the dense Palestinian population. Israel responded by installing a surveillance system along the river that included outposts, fences with electronic sensors, and roads that were covered with fresh earth every morning to monitor and detect footprints.
Defending Jewish communities in the Jordan Valley against mortar shells and missiles fired from across the river was a more challenging task. Dayan assigned cannons, tanks, and airplanes to the area and hoped to restrict IDF retaliation to military targets only. That hope clashed with reality, and the entire population on the Jordan’s eastern banks suffered; the fertile region turned barren. Moreover, as Dayan defeated the terrorists on the battlefield, Arafat and his people gained in power and status.
Even military failures empowered the Palestinian Liberation Organization. On March 12, 1968, the IDF carried out a broad offensive against the village of Karameh, the main Palestinian base on the eastern slopes of the valley. It was the largest IDF operation since the Six Day War. Within hours, paratroopers conquered the village, killing some 150 militants and taking 130 captive. Yet the incident became a symbol of Palestinian resistance. In the eyes and lore of the Palestinians, the Battle of Karameh remained a victory. Abu Ayad, a senior Palestinian leader, described its effect on morale to Eric Rouleau, a French journalist: “The Palestinian masses were gripped by fervor. After decades of humiliation and persecution, they could hold their heads up thanks to the Karameh victory, which they saw as the start of their liberation. Thousands, tens of thousands of young and old wanted to join the Fatah movement. High-school pupils and students left school to join its ranks.”15
Dayan learned of the Karameh fiasco in the hospital, where he lay injured after a brush with death. A day before the IDF operation, he had gone digging in Azor, a town near Tel Aviv, after a local boy named Arieh told him that bulldozers had uncovered a burial cave. Dayan hurried to the site, entered the chamber, and while poking around was completely buried under a cave-in. “This time, I really thought I was done for,” he later recalled. “I saw the upper part of the sand hill that had given way falling and rolling down on me. I had time to think: this is the end. I could not move or flee or stop the enormous block that landed on my head.”16
Dayan lost consciousness, and Arieh summoned neighbors, who dug him out and called for an ambulance. Dayan was badly hurt and bleeding all over his body, with two broken ribs and a torn vocal cord. He was hospitalized for more than three weeks, the upper part of his body in a cast, unable to speak. Physiotherapy treatments were agonizing, and he required a speech therapist before he could talk again. His family—Ruth, Yaël, Udi, and Assi—sat at his bedside every day. Rachel, his love, would arrive after lights-out. His appearance shocked her, and he had to reassure her daily that he would fully recover.17
For a long time after his discharge from the hospital, Dayan experienced tremendous pain, and his voice remained hoarse and weak. Yaël believed that he never fully recovered, that “this blow was the start of a process of declining health; from then until his death he was never completely healthy.”18
He returned to work to find the Jordanian border heating up. The Palestinians were now operating from refugee camps in the hills, and though King Hussein endeavored to curb them, they enjoyed the backing of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. Following a Palestinian assassination attempt on Hussein’s life and the bombing of three airplanes hijacked from Europe en route to a Jordanian airport, tensions erupted. In September 1970, Hussein ordered his army to attack Palestinian strongholds; after several battles, the army won control of the camps. Known as “Black September,” the attacks by the Jordanian army killed thousands of Palestinians and sent the rest into exile. Along with other guerrilla organizations, Arafat moved Fatah’s headquarters to Lebanon, and the Jordanian front cooled. Life on both sides of the Jordan Valley returned to normal. Dayan regarded the episode as a political victory. However, it soon became clear that a military defeat, even as decisive as Black September, does not stop a liberation struggle. The various PLO factions regrouped at new bases in Lebanon.
Dayan faced his toughest test as minister of defense on the Egyptian front. Nasser never came to terms with Egypt’s defeat in 1967, and the Soviets replenished the Egyptian and Syrian armies, vastly augmenting their weapon supplies. Soviet officers and technicians arrived in the Middle East en masse to train and prepare the Arab militaries for the next round of fighting. In the first year after the war, Israel’s southern front remained largely quiet, for Nasser calculated that Egypt was not yet prepared for a renewed showdown. But on September 8, 1968, the front flared up when Egypt pummeled IDF posts along the Suez Canal with artillery shells. The IDF forces were inadequately protected and suffered heavy losses that day: ten dead and eighteen wounded. Daily incidents at the canal opened an active front that lasted for two years. The War of Attrition, as it came to be known, claimed heavy casualties on each side, but both the Israelis and Egyptians strengthened their resolve and refused to submit.
Dayan, assessing the situation in Suez, described a scene he came upon at an IDF post. “The place looked like a typhoon had hit it,” he noted. “A shell with a delay device had penetrated the concrete layer of the main bunker’s roof and exploded inside. There were twenty soldiers inside at the time; all were hurt.”19
He concluded that the bunkers and posts along the Suez had to be reinforced immediately, though he did not believe that defensive measures alone would prevent the Egyptians from crossing the canal. He reverted to the aggressive policy he had employed during the 1950s. “The decisive question is: Can we implement a policy to show the Arabs that it is better for them to reach a peace settlement or at least a ceasefire because wars with us will cost them dearly and they will not achieve their goal?” he asked himself. “We must now strike back hard, not rely on fences and mines.”20
The IDF installed heavy fortifications in a series of strongholds along the canal to better protect the soldiers on the water-line. These posts were known as the Bar-Lev Line, after Chaim Bar-Lev, who had replaced Rabin as the IDF chief of staff on December 31, 1967.
The Israeli public believed, incorrectly, that the line was meant to stymie attempts by the Egyptian army to cross the canal, much as France’s Maginot Line along the German and French borders had been intended to do after World War I. In fact, the Bar-Lev Line’s sole purpose was to protect the soldiers from artillery fire so that the IDF could maintain a presence on the banks of Suez. The fall of the Bar-Lev Line in the 1973 Yom Kippur War thus appeared to Israelis as the collapse of their first line of defense, though Dayan had never seen it as such. Yet once again, despite his experience and acumen, which may have led him to consider a more mobile defense system along the canal, as minister of defense in 1968 he did not interfere in GHQ military considerations, leaving the decision to the CGS.
Dayan acknowledged the need to reinforce the Bar-Lev Line, but the War of Attrition became a campaign of constant escalation. The IDF carried out complex commando raids that incorporated aircraft and tanks. In one such raid, on November 1, 1968, the IAF bombed the Qina Bridge, and paratroopers, dropped by helicopter, blew up the Naj Hammadi Bridge, both on the Nile. Aerial dogfights soon followed.
In the spring of 1969, the Egyptian army amplified its attacks. In March, it conducted 150 offenses, and in April 600. Despite suffering heavy losses, Egypt showed no inclination to stop. Nor did Dayan. He recommended expanding the fight by permitting the air force to strike deep inside Egypt. On January 6, 1970, the IAF attacked army and missile bases and radar installations not far from Cairo. Egyptian military morale appeared to plummet, and Nasser appealed to Moscow for help. The Soviets answered Nasser’s call and outfitted Egypt with longer-range missiles and three additional cutting-edge flight squadrons. Soviet soldiers manned both the missile batteries and the aircraft, and on July 30, Soviet and Israeli pilots engaged directly. Israelis downed five Soviet aircraft. But the new actor in the war elicited concern. “The question is not which pilots are better, the Israeli or Russian, but how to do everything to avoid clashing with the USSR,” Dayan told the proud Israeli pilots.21
By the spring of 1970 both the Israelis and the Egyptians seemed thoroughly exhausted. On April 10, Nasser publicly appealed to U.S. President Richard Nixon to intervene. On June 19, Secretary of State William Rogers launched an initiative directed at Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, demanding that they cease their fire and hold direct talks through Norwegian U.N. mediator Gunnar Jarring. In early August, the warring nations agreed. Firing stopped on both sides of the canal, but on the night after the ceasefire went into effect, Egypt, contrary to its commitment, moved missiles nearer the canal. Israel protested sharply, yet Golda Meir and Dayan refused to violate the ceasefire. The missile repositioning would seriously impede the Israeli Air Force in the next war, two years later.
On the ceasefire, Dayan wrote: “Both sides breathed in relief. The soldiers raised their heads above the dugouts. On both sides of the canal, they sat on sand ramps and exchanged words—not necessarily greetings and pleasantries, but that too was preferable to bullets and shells.”22
In his memoirs, Dayan treated the War of Attrition as an Israeli victory. The IDF did manage to thwart Nasser’s intention of wearing Israel down and forcing the IDF out of Sinai; and after long refusing to halt his fire, Nasser ultimately asked for American intercession. Still, today, Israel’s part in the War of Attrition seems like a pyrrhic victory. Nasser apparently impressed on the international community that Israel’s hold on Sinai was temporary and, if retained, in the long run would be intolerable. Without a political settlement, the ceasefire was bound to be fleeting: the countdown to the next war had already begun. Nasser’s boldness in challenging Israel along the canal and the intermittent crossings raised military morale in Egypt. Indeed, despite the IDF superiority, Egyptian soldiers dared strike across the canal.
On September 28, a few weeks after the ceasefire took effect, Nasser died of a heart attack. He was replaced by his vice president, Anwar Sadat, who would utilize the experience of the War of Attrition to cross the canal—not merely with commando units, but with his entire army.