AT THE END OF APRIL 1979, Moshe and Rachel Dayan set out on a jaunt through Southeast Asia. He had not been well for the better part of a year. He felt weakened and found physical work, even his cherished archaeology, a strain. His body seemed to be shrinking. During their trip, Dayan set aside time to puff and pant in the oppressive heat between strides up steep paths leading to Buddhist shrines. On his return to Israel, his physician administered a complete checkup and found colon cancer. The doctor scheduled surgery for May 24. Dayan became absorbed by the prospect of death. “I’ve been psychologically ready to part with life for years, to shut my eyes and be gathered unto my forefathers,” he told his physician. “Death is the perfect end beyond which there is nothing and I’m prepared for it at any time.”1 He was worried that he would need treatment and be incapacitated after the operation, but fortunately the operation went well. The day after surgery, he rose, shaved, and wandered about the ward. Although they scolded him, the physicians were pleased with his quick recovery. A week later, he returned to his office and routine affairs.
According to Rachel, however, he never fully regained his strength.2 His heart muscles were apparently worn out. He suffered from various ailments and looked old for his age: gray, tired, dragging his feet. Moreover, he was losing the sight in his one eye and had difficulty reading. He was also aware that he had reached the end of his tenure in Begin’s government. A few weeks after Israel and Egypt signed the peace treaty, the two sides began discussing Palestinian autonomy, as stipulated. Dayan believed it possible to reach arrangements of coexistence that would be acceptable to the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but to head the negotiations Begin appointed Minister of the Interior Joseph Burg, a member of the National Religious Party, which advocated hawkish positions and extensive settlement throughout the Land of Israel. Dayan refused to join the team if he could not steer it and waited months to see how the negotiations proceeded. After four months he realized that there was no real chance of progress on the Begin-Burg path, and he resigned from the government.
Dayan submitted his letter of resignation to the prime minister on October 2, 1979, succinctly stating his reasons for leaving in their final conversation. “The things that interest me, I’m not involved in, and those I’m involved in don’t interest me,” he told Begin. “I didn’t join the government to meet ambassadors and attend cocktail parties.”3 Begin did not try to stop him, and he may have even been relieved. On October 23, Dayan left the cabinet table and took his seat as a one-man faction in the Knesset’s back row, next to Likud extremists who had quit the party in protest over the peace treaty with Egypt. Though the company did not appeal to him, he was happy to sit near the exit: it was the end of his political career. After his “betrayal” of Labor three years earlier, he could not justify returning to his old seat and given his differences of opinion with Likud, there was no room for him among them either. Under the assumption that these were his last days in the Knesset, he typically decided to use what energy he had left to write a book on the peace talks and his role in them over the previous two years.4
Rachel remembered the period fondly. “For all the suffering, I remember the last two years with longing,” she reflected, years later. “Moshe became a real family man, often playing with my grandchildren from my first marriage. He composed limericks and rolled around with them in the garden and on the carpet. He truly was a different person then, but he was already weary and ill.”5
Yaël remembered that time differently. She described her father’s last twenty-four months as “pathetic years of dying.” Granting her dying father little compassion, she elaborated: “The man who all his life had been a constant fighter, who had been destined for tests and challenges, had scaled heights and shown his best when cruelly faced by the hardest demands … had the fight go out of him in the two years of his dying,” she wrote. “He was coddled in kindness and swaddled in comfort. He was loved and obeyed, pampered, cared for and diapered until he withered like a desert flower from overwatering and the removal of a beating sun.”6
Yaël, clearly, did not like her father’s new lifestyle. She describes conversations with him in his garden when instead of discussing public affairs or moral issues, as they had done in the past, he spoke of electricity bills, the rise in taxes, and inflation. “His stinginess had always been a subject of family jokes,” she recalled. “Now, money became almost an obsession. At a time when he needed it less than ever.” Royalties from his books, along with his salary, allowed him a higher level of comfort than he had enjoyed earlier, and Rachel noted that he spent hefty sums on antiquities.
Occasionally, when Rachel was not present, he would attempt to justify his bourgeois lifestyle. “He tried to excuse his shallow, expensive personal grooming as an esthetic value,” Yaël wrote. She could not reconcile this “new lifestyle packed with shallow perks” to her mother’s simple ways. “Mother was poor and a spendthrift, generous, sometimes excessively so, whereas Father in his latter years was rich and a penny-pincher—a combination I found hard to accept.”7
Dayan did not want to quit the public arena completely. He continued the fight outside of the government for accommodation with the Palestinians. He belonged to the Public Forum for Political and Social Questions initiated by a relatively new Likud member, Zalman Shoval, in the summer of 1977, when the controversy over Begin’s appointment of Dayan as foreign minister had been at its peak. The forum, open to the public, convened every few months with various guest speakers, but Dayan commanded the most interest. After his resignation from the government, it became his chief podium, and he continued to make headlines.
Initially nonpartisan, the forum was regarded in political circles as a constant threat lest it develop into a party under Dayan. But this was not Dayan’s aim, and he had long stated that Israel did not need another political party. And although he had various opportunities at the rostrum, he elaborated his position on the Palestinians mainly at the forum.8 The year demarcated for discussing Palestinian autonomy was drawing to a close, and Dayan was worried about repercussions that would affect the peace treaty with Egypt. He suggested imposing unilateral autonomy on the Palestinians, and on December 24, 1980, his one-man Knesset faction put forth a proposal to discuss “self-management” in the territories: annulling the military government and transferring the management of civilian affairs to Palestinian mayors. He thought coexistence was possible even without official Palestinian consent.
Drawing fire from both the right and left, his plan contained three caveats that rendered it meaningless: there would be no Palestinian state; the IDF would remain in the territories; and Israel would negotiate with Jordan, not the PLO. He saw the PLO as a mere nuisance forcing Israel to use bullying tactics.9 He also reiterated his support for Jewish settlement in the territories. “Nowhere in the Land of Israel is extraterritorial to us,” he declared, and he held that autonomy related to people, not territory: Israel would remain the governmental authority.10 The proposal was voted down by a solid majority of the attending members of the Knesset.
Looking back thirty years later, we can recognize that his proposal was naïve and detached from reality: in 1980, the Palestinian national movement was already a consolidated, active entity with considerable international standing. As long as he was still able to read, Dayan often scanned the Bible or literature on Land of Israel antiquities or the works of Jewish national poets. But his knowledge and understanding of historical processes and the international realities that took shape after World War II left much to be desired. For all his acuity and intuition, his political thinking remained basically provincial. He claimed that his plan amounted to a recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people but not of their right to self-determination. This position was already outdated under U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s initiatives at the end of World War I.
High inflation, internal friction, a handful of criminal scandals in governmental circles, and the resignation of several ministers moved Prime Minister Begin to advance the elections for the tenth Knesset. According to the cycle, the elections were supposed to occur in November, but Begin called for early elections to be held on June 30, 1981. Dayan, despite repeated denials of any intention of converting the Public Forum for Political and Social Questions into a political party and run for office, yielded to his colleagues’ entreaties and established a new party, the National Renewal Movement, better known as Telem, its Hebrew acronym. “It was very sad,” Rachel said, describing her husband’s efforts. “He was ill and weary. I tried to shield him from it, but they pressed and he couldn’t resist.”11
The initial polls showed a Dayan-led party garnering quite a few seats. He let himself believe that as the head of even a small party, he might impose his ideas on unilateral Palestinian autonomy on the next coalition. Ill and weak, he nonetheless campaigned throughout the country with Rachel at his side. But he was no longer the star he once was. “It was pitiful,” Rachel recalled; “I was with him everywhere, but the public didn’t show up.”12
On election night, Moshe, Rachel, and a handful of loyal supporters at the party office watched the television polls. Telem won two seats. Any hope of tipping the scales in the next coalition disappeared. The supporters gradually dispersed, full of disappointment and despair. A Dayan biographer, Ehud Ben-Ezer, described the scene televised that night. “Telem Party headquarters began emptying out, and the final frame imprinted on the viewers’ minds … was of Moshe sitting virtually alone at the center of the table beside Rachel,” Ben-Ezer wrote. “Then, he too rose to leave, looking terrible—thin, skeletal, drab, wan as if sentenced to death.”13
Dayan’s health deteriorated swiftly after the elections. On October 6, Muslim extremists assassinated President Sadat, and Dayan was asked to address the tragedy on live television. It was his last public appearance. “Only skin and bones remained of the mythic sabra,” a young journalist noted.14 Gad Yaakobi, Dayan’s close friend from his days at the Agriculture Ministry, hurried to see him and was stunned to find his home completely dark. Dayan appeared, feeling his way along the wall to reach the door. When Yaakobi asked why he did not turn on the light, Dayan replied, “I hardly notice the difference between light and dark. I’ve virtually lost my sight. I can barely make out your image, a sort of hazy dot. I’m blind, I know this scourge won’t continue much longer.”15
On Thursday, October 15, Dayan felt strong chest pains and was taken into intensive care. At 8 P.M. he lost consciousness, and all attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. “It is the end,” his personal physician told Yaël and Rachel, who were waiting outside his room. They entered and stayed beside him, holding the lifeless hands of the father and husband. He was sixty-six years old.
At Dayan’s state funeral, six former IDF chiefs of staff served as pallbearers. Throngs of people, ordinary citizens and powerful politicians, loyalists and opponents, turned out. Moshe Dayan was buried in the cemetery on Givat Shimron, next to his parents, brother, and sister. As he had requested, there was no eulogy. Heaps of flowers covered his grave, dug into the fertile soil of Nahalal.