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Moshe Dayan (May 20, 1915 – October 16,
1981), was an Israeli military leader and
politician. He was the fourth Chief of Staff of
the Israel Defense Forces (1953-1958). 

In Hebrew language|Hebrew, his name translates as
"Moses the Judge". He became a fighting symbol to
the world of the new State of Israel with his
famous eyepatch.

==Early life==

Moshe Dayan was born in a kibbutz ("collective
farm"), Degania Alef ("Degania A"), Palestine
(region)|Palestine, near the Kinneret Sea of
Galilee. His parents were Shmuel and Devorah, and
he was the first child born in the newly
established community. Aged 14 he joined the
Haganah at a very early stage. He was greatly
influenced by the military teachings of the
English pro-Zionist officer Orde Wingate when
Dayan was a sergeant prior to World War II. 



==World War II==

He was arrested by the British ten years later
(when the Haganah was outlawed), but released
after two years as part of the Haganah's renewed
cooperation with the British during World War II.
While attached to the Australian 7th Infantry
Division, which was fighting Vichy French forces
in Syria, Dayan lost his left eye and began
wearing the eyepatch that became his trademark. On
the recommendation of an Australian officer, Dayan
received the Distinguished Service Order, one of
the British Empire's highest military honours.

==Military commander==

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Dayan occupied
various positions of importance, first as the
commander over the defensive effort in the Jordan
valley; he was then given command over a number of
military units on the central front. He was
extremely well-liked by Israel's founding Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurion and became his protege,
together with Shimon Peres (the future Prime 
Minister). 

After the 1948 war, Dayan began to rise rapidly
through the ranks. From 1955 to 1958 he was the
Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces. In
this capacity, he commanded the Israeli forces
during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

==Politician==

In 1959, a year after he retired from the IDF,
Dayan joined Labour (Israel)|Mapai, the leftist
block in Israeli politics, then led by David
Ben-Gurion. Until 1964 he served as the minister
of agriculture. Dayan joined with the group of
Ben-Gurion loyalists who defected from Mapai in
1965 to form Rafi. Levi Eshkol, the following
Prime Minister of Israel|Prime Minister disliked
Dayan; however when tensions began to rise in
early 1967, Eshkol decided to hand over the
position of Minister of Defense (previously also
occupied by him, in spite of Eshkol's never
serving in the army) to the charismatic Dayan.

==Six Day War (1967)==


Although Dayan did not take part in most of the
planning before the Six-Day War of June 1967, his
appointment contributed to the Israeli success.
Following the war, Dayan, whose traits did not
include particular modesty, invested PR efforts to
take credit for much of the fighting to himself.
During the years following the war Dayan enjoyed
enormous popularity in Israel and was widely
viewed as a potential future Prime Minister. At
this time Dayan was the leader of the hawkish camp
within the Labor government, opposing return to
anything like Israel's pre-1967 borders. He once
said that he preferred Sharm-al-Sheikh (an
Egyptian town on the Southern edge of the Sinai
Peninsula overlooking Israel's shipping lane to
the Red Sea via the Gulf of Aqaba) without peace
to peace without Sharm-al-Sheikh. He modified
these views later in his career and played an
important role in the eventual peace agreement
between Israel and Egypt.

==Yom Kippur War (1973)==

After Golda Meir became Prime Minister in 1969
following the death of Levi Eshkol, Dayan remained
Minister of Defense. He was still in that post
when the Yom Kippur War began catastrophically on
October 6, 1973. As the most high-ranking official
responsible for military planning, and in
particular for examining the intelligence
apparatus, it is of little doubt that Dayan, who
became the symbol of victorious complacency
following the Six-Day War, bears a part of
responsibility for the Israeli leadership having
missed the signs for the upcoming war. In the
hours preceding the war, Dayan opted for not
carrying out a full mobilization or carrying out a
preemptive strike against the Egyptians and the
Syrians; he assumed that Israel would be able to
win easily even if the Arabs had attacked and did
not want Israel to appear as the aggressor. 

Following the heavy defeats of the first two days,
Dayan's views experienced a radical turn; he was
close to announcing "the downfall of the "Third
Temple in Jerusalem|Temple" at a news conference,
but was luckily forbidden to speak by Meir. He
also began to speak openly of using Israel and
weapons of mass destruction|weapons of mass
destruction against the Arabs.



To Dayan's credit, he had managed to recover his
self-control and direct Israel's fighting during
the rest of the war. Although the Agranat
Committee Report published after the war did not
lay substantial responsibility on the political
layer to which Moshe Dayan belonged, a wave of
public protests led to the resignation of both him
and Golda Meir.

==Serves as Foreign Minister in the Likud
Government==

According to those who knew him, the war deeply
depressed Dayan. He went into political eclipse
for a time. In 1977, despite having been
re-elected to the Knesset on the Labor Party list,
he became Foreign Minister in the new Likud
government led by Menachem Begin. While Dayan
never formally joined the Likud, this move was
still seen as a betrayal by many of his Labor
colleagues. As Prime Minister Menachem Begin's
foreign minister, he was instrumental in drawing
up the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement with
Egypt. Dayan withdrew in 1980 (joined by Ezer
Weizman who then defected to Labor), because of
his disagreement with Begin over whether the
Palestinian territories were an Israeli internal
matter (the Camp David treaty included provisions
for future negotiations with the Palestinians;
Begin, who didn't like the idea,  did not put
Dayan in charge of the negotiation team.)

==Death==

In 1981, Dayan formed a new party, Telem, which
advocated unilateral separation from the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. The party received two seats in
the Tenth Knesset (elections took place on June
30, 1981) but Dayan died shortly thereafter, in
Tel Aviv, from colon cancer. He is buried in
Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where
he was raised.

==His legacy==

Dayan was undoubtedly a very complicated and
controversial individual; his opinions were never
strictly black and white. He had few close
friends; his mental brilliance and charismatic
manner were often combined with cynicism and lack
of restraint. Ariel Sharon noted about Dayan:

:He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them
ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad;
the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

Dayan combined a kibbutznik's secular identity and
pragmaticism (reportedly, having seen rabbis
flocking on the Temple Mount shortly after
Jerusalem was captured in 1967, he asked "what is
this Vatican?" then handed the keys to the Waqf,
(the Muslim trust)) with a deep sense of love and
appreciation to Jewish legacy and the land of
Israel, apparent in his writing.

Dayan was also an Writer|author and an amateur
Archeology|archaeologist, leading to some
controversy, as his amassing of historical
artifacts, often with the help of his soldiers,
broke a number of laws. Upon his death his
extensive archeological collection was sold to the
state.

His daughter, Yael Dayan is a novelist and
followed him into politics as a member of several
Israeli leftist parties over the years. She has
served in the Knesset and on the Tel Aviv City
Council.

==See also==
*History of the Israel Defense Forces#List of
Chiefs of the General Staff|List of Israel's
Chiefs of the General Staff