THE CEASEFIRE ON THE JORDANIAN and Egyptian fronts was largely maintained for the next three years, but the political stalemate worried Dayan. He believed that Israel should not retreat from the Jordan River, its natural eastern border, or from Sharm el-Sheikh, the Rafah Salient, and the Gaza Strip. Yet he knew that the Arab regimes, Egypt’s in particular, would not accept the impasse, and sooner or later war would resume.
This expectation led him to seemingly contradictory conclusions. To preserve a de facto state of nonbelligerence, conditions for the Arabs must be tolerable: Palestinians needed to be allowed maximum autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the IDF had to retreat from the Suez Canal, enabling Egypt to open it to international navigation and repair the towns that had been virtually destroyed in the War of Attrition. At the same time, he sought to consolidate Israel’s control over the territories attained in the Six Day War by developing integrated utilities and large Jewish settlements so that the territories vital for Israel’s security would remain Israeli after the Arabs eventually concluded that never-ending war with the Jewish state was not in their best interest. Between these two poles, he introduced initiatives in the early 1970s that were both conciliatory and politically hawkish.
On March 22, 1971, Dayan brought up his astonishing policy calculations at a discussion in “Golda’s kitchen,” a regular, informal gathering of ministers and advisers that was often held in the prime minister’s own kitchen, where she would serve tea and biscuits. “To breach the solid wall, we should aim for an interim agreement,” Dayan told the group. “Contrary to our position that so long as there is no peace treaty we will hold the current ceasefire lines, we should retreat from the Suez Canal as part of an imperfect agreement.”1
Dayan had never wanted the IDF to sit on the banks of the Suez, and the War of Attrition further convinced him that Israel should not be the party blocking international passage through the canal. Now he sought to trade IDF withdrawal for a nonbelligerence agreement or at least a situation that would tie Egypt’s hands.
The initiative failed, however, because the prime minister and most of the ministers were unwilling to draw back more than six miles, which Egypt found insufficient and would not even discuss. Meir had been influenced by General Bar-Lev and the GHQ, who claimed that Dayan’s plan endangered the IDF. Further, she did not trust Egypt to honor an agreement. Dayan, believing that Israel’s withdrawal and Egypt’s renewal of shipping would greatly reduce the threat of war, proposed redeploying some eighteen miles farther east. He also suggested dismantling the Bar-Lev Line and treating the arrangements as lasting. He was under no illusion that Egypt would accept the new line as permanent, but he assumed that Sadat would agree to settle the final border through political negotiation rather than war.
Dayan’s proposal was rejected, and he did not insist on it; the Egyptians, too, hardly welcomed the idea. It would take another war to vindicate Dayan, and while it is not the historian’s task to muse about what might have been, one thing is certain: Meir’s proposal to retreat only six miles and leave the area demilitarized was unacceptable to Sadat. Egypt readied for battle, and two years later, in the Yom Kippur War, dealt Israel a severe blow, compelling a withdrawal not to the lines Dayan had suggested but all the way back to the pre-1948 border.
In addition to staving off threats from Egypt, Dayan also struggled with Palestinian militant organizations. Israel’s eastern border remained calm after King Hussein expelled the Palestinian militias from Jordan in 1970, but a new front opened in the north. Arafat’s Fatah movement joined the PLO in 1968 and quickly took control. After being expelled from Jordan, the PLO continued to carry out attacks against Israel from combat bases in Palestinian refugee camps along the Mediterranean and in Beirut’s suburbs in southern Lebanon. The group launched a campaign of global terrorism, including hijackings. In an attempt to force the Lebanese regime to rein in the terrorists, the IDF raided the Beirut airport on December 29, 1968, destroying fourteen planes belonging to Arab airlines.
Deterring Palestinian terrorists was a particularly vexing task in Lebanon, a country with no definable regime. Torn by ethnic factions for centuries, Lebanon had no central power capable of checking the Palestinian forces. Here Dayan’s retaliation tactics were ineffective: the Palestinian militants in Lebanon incessantly barraged Israeli border towns and northern communities with katyusha rockets. Terrorists infiltrated Israel and ambushed a civilian bus, killing eight children and four adults, and wounding twenty-nine more people. Many of the PLO attackers reached Israel from the sea. IDF retaliation did not relieve the daily distress. Israeli attacks may have sowed destruction in Lebanese refugee camps and villages, but at the end of the day, the IDF soldiers returned to their bases and the Palestinians returned to terrorism. Dayan conceded that his reprisal strategy to deter the terrorists had failed.
“The tough policy of initiated reprisal didn’t stop the terrorism from Lebanon,” Dayan later admitted. “The Lebanese government, its army, leaders, and population—whether willingly or from weakness—grew resigned to the situation. They accepted a military force within the state independently operating and conducting policy. The IDF’s hardest, boldest strikes … shocked the Lebanese, but did not induce them to expel the terrorists.”2
In contrast to his flexibility over Israel’s relations with Egypt and the Palestinians in the occupied territories, Dayan was firm in the early 1970s about the conditions Israel should establish for final-status negotiations with the Arabs. His views placed him at the extreme right on Israel’s political spectrum. Though the national religious fervor of the Greater Israel movement, which advocated full annexation of the entire land west of the Jordan River, was alien to him, his love of the land continued to guide him. Believing that peace with the Arabs was impossible, he thought that Israel would always have to exist within “defensible borders”—with or without Arab consent. When Israel’s War of Independence ended, the 1949 armistice line left Israel only ten miles wide at its most populous area and with the Egyptian-controlled Gaza and Syrian-controlled Golan Heights abutting its communities. The Jordanian-controlled West Bank land Israel gained in 1967 widened the country’s narrow waist and according to many created defensible borders.
As the 1969 summer elections approached, Dayan outlined his view of the ideal permanent borders for the State of Israel, and the Labor Party incorporated his draft into its platform. “Israel regards the Jordan River as its eastern defense border, non-crossable westward by foreign army forces,” the chairman of the platform committee broadcast on the radio on August 3, 1969. “We will continue to control the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip and our independent forces, controlling the straits in an area … territorially contiguous with Israel, will ensure freedom of shipping from Eilat southward.” This position appeared in all of the Israeli newspapers the following morning.
Despite the Labor Party’s reunification following the Six Day War, the various factions within the party occasionally convened in informal caucuses. Dayan’s coterie increasingly emerged as the internal opposition, its political strength deriving primarily from his popularity. Veteran party leaders felt that he was constantly threatening to break away and perhaps join up with elements on the right. Given Golda Meir’s struggle against Ben-Gurion and his followers in the early 1960s, and her vigorous opposition to Dayan’s appointment as minister of defense during the Six Day War, Dayan was apprehensive about their relationship when she was elected prime minister. His fears were overblown. “Neither of us forgot the past,” he stated, “but we both dealt with the present and thought of the future.” Dayan respected Meir’s integrity and the transparency of her work. “She had ‘intimates’; I was not one of them. But on topics concerning my work, we were not divided.”3 Together they would endure the storm of the Yom Kippur War, and together they would be toppled by it, but Meir never tried to shift the blame to Dayan. The same cannot be said of Mapai’s other old-timers or of Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, who stood among Meir’s close advisers and spared no effort to undermine him.
Dayan’s position hardened before the elections scheduled for the fall of 1973, and he demanded that the Labor Party adopt a clear policy on the occupied territories. He assembled several hundred supporters at a Tel Aviv convention, which the public understood as an undisguised threat to break away from the Labor Party. Even though he was a lone dissenting voice and most Labor leaders were hostile toward him, he was still able to influence policy. Galili, seeking to keep the Labor Party from collapsing, joined Dayan in formulating what became known as the Galili Document, though it was in fact Dayan’s brainchild.
The document proposed a far-reaching program of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, with a new town on the Golan and a rural center in the Jordan Valley. Dayan also added the dramatic proposal of constructing a deep-water port between Rafah and El Arish, to be called Yamit, in the Sinai Desert. The party secretariat approved the Galili Document on September 3, a month before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, which postponed the elections. By the time the party returned to draft a platform for the elections held three months later, circumstances had radically changed, and the Galili Document did not remain politically feasible. On the eve of the Yom Kippur War, Dayan’s public image was of an extreme, intransigent right-winger. His assertion that having Sharm el-Sheikh without peace was better than having peace without Sharm el-Sheikh still resonated when war erupted.
During this period, there were two major developments in Dayan’s personal life. After fifteen years of living with a husband who was in love with another woman, Ruth decided to divorce him. Moshe later wrote: “We were married for thirty-five years…. We had walked a long way together, but our married life was not successful. Especially the latter half. Neither incidents nor crises ran our marriage aground, but the reverse: the absence of a vital, emotional intimacy as well as growing inner alienation erected a barrier between us…. I suggested to Ruth that I leave and she remain in our home. But she refused; she said that she wished to make a fresh start and build herself another home.”4
According to Yaël, her mother “never stopped loving Moshe but claimed that she loved the ‘Moshe’ who had been, not the man he had become. She was fed up with his avarice, indiscriminate womanizing, loss of idealism and megalomania.” More than forty years after the divorce, Ruth refused to utter a single syllable of disapproval. She guarded his memory as sacred. Her memoirs begin with the sentence, “One can divorce a husband, but not a legend.” As she described her feelings, “When I banged the iron gate shut and heard the clang of metal on metal for the last time, I thought: I’m free. Looking back through the grate and seeing the garden, I felt as if I were stepping out of a fairy tale that I had never wanted. I left behind my emotional loneliness that over the years had become unbearably oppressive—for both Moshe and myself.”5 Rachel moved into Moshe’s home in Tzahala, near Tel Aviv, and they married on June 26, 1973, eighteen years after they had first met on the flight from Rome to Tel Aviv.
Ruth’s departure put an end to the fragile family life. Yaël was close to her father and maintained cordial relations with Rachel, continuing to visit the house. But the sons, Udi and Assi, no longer considered it home. They had never had a warm relationship with their father. When they were small, he played with them occasionally, and took them on excursions around the country and on hunting trips. He apparently enjoyed their mischief and vivacity, and Ruth noted that he “was a good father, a bit conservative.”6 But as they grew older, he was away from home more, and they became increasingly estranged.
He seldom mentioned his sons in his memoirs, though he must have been proud of their military service. Udi joined a naval commando unit and Assi volunteered for the para-troopers, serving in Sinai during the Six Day War. Both chose their own paths in life. In the 1950s, Udi took over the family farm at Nahalal and developed his talent as an iron sculptor. Assi became a film star and made a brilliant career for himself as an actor, scriptwriter, and director. Moshe was hardly involved and only rarely revealed a soft spot for them.
When he was injured in the cave-in, both sons joined Ruth at his bedside, and Udi brought him home from hospital, as Moshe described:
After managing to get out of the car, I had him help me walk briefly around the garden. These were my first steps, and I hung onto him with one hand and held a cane with the other. I felt a total weakness, no strength in my limbs, and aches and pains inside my plaster prison. Udi watched me—and saw a broken man, blind in one eye, scarcely able to shuffle, virtually paralyzed, and literally speechless. Was this his father? He told me much later, after I had fully recovered, that in the garden that day he had thought I would remain like that for the rest of my life, permanently crippled, mute, an invalid, and he had struggled to choke back tears.7
During the Yom Kippur War, Dayan met Assi in Sharm el-Sheikh, where he was serving in the reserves. Moshe did not describe his emotions on this occasion but merely noted that Assi had updated him on the action in the area.
When Ruth shut the iron gates behind her for the last time, even these frayed threads tore. Dayan had a new family.
The other personal development concerned Dayan the archaeological miscreant. His most prized archaeological treasure—and the epitome of his misconduct—was a collection of unique anthropoid sarcophagi found in the early 1970s in the Gaza Strip near the town of Deir el-Balah. In the fall of 1967, Professor Trude Dothan, a specialist in Canaanite and Philistine civilizations, noticed that necklaces, ornaments, pottery, and beads from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C.E. had begun to appear in antiquity shops in Jerusalem’s Old City. Her curiosity was heightened when an unknown collector brought her a piece of broken pottery in the form of a human face, apparently part of a sarcophagus. She was convinced that the source of the mask was on the coast, somewhere in Gaza. Deciding to trace it, she turned to the minister of defense. “Dayan had an extraordinary nose for ancient finds,” she recounted. “He had already learned a lot and knew a lot. We archaeologists used to joke among ourselves that he saw better with one eye than we did with two. Dayan swore to me that he knew nothing about the find, but promised to find out through his contacts and inform me when he knew something.”8
Dayan had long been in contact with a Bedouin by the name of Hammad from the area of Deir el-Balah, and he soon learned that Hammad himself was the source of the rare anthropoid. Three months later, Dothan was allowed to visit the area under the protection of a military guard Dayan arranged, but found nothing. While waiting for the chance to make the visit she surveyed the finds that had appeared on the market and with private dealers, and her search led her back to Dayan. He, in the interim, had collected some twenty anthropoids from Deir el-Balah and built a special structure for them in his courtyard. She could hardly believe her eyes. By now, he had also become a dealer, buying the anthropoids with money, not the coffee and sugar he had bartered for finds twenty-five years earlier, and his collection was worth millions. Legally, anyone could buy antiquities on the free market. Indeed, he had not dug up the finds at Deir el-Balah himself—Hammad had done it for him—but clearly he had used his office to obtain the treasures.
His commissioned digs also failed to follow standard scientific procedure and unwittingly destroyed evidence vital for research. He was quite a deft pottery restorer and spent hours gluing shards together in his courtyard, but he made mistakes. On one of her visits, Dothan found him stirring a pot on a small stove, concocting a new type of glue. He told her proudly that no one would be able to separate the pieces he stuck together. And indeed, when his collection made its way to the Israel Museum after his death, the restorers had a hard time trying to repair some of his mistakes.