Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan (20 May 1915 to 16 October 1981) was an Israeli soldier and statesman who served as IDF Chief of Staff during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, as Defense Minister during the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and as Foreign Minister who helped negotiate the 1978 Camp David Accords. He is one of the most recognizable figures in Israeli history, instantly identified by the black eyepatch he wore after losing his left eye in combat in 1941, and his career traces the arc of the state itself: from a farm boy defending a Galilee kibbutz, to the architect of lightning military victories, to the man forced to answer for Israel’s worst intelligence failure, to a reluctant peacemaker in his final years.

Who he was and where he came from

Dayan was born on 20 May 1915 at Kibbutz Degania Alef, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, the first child born on the first kibbutz in the land of Israel. His parents were among the early wave of Zionist pioneers from Ukraine. He grew up in the Jezreel Valley moshav of Nahalal and joined the Haganah, the Jewish self-defense militia, as a teenager, guarding settlements against Arab raids under the British Mandate. In 1939 the British jailed him for illegal Haganah training; in 1941, fighting alongside British forces against Vichy French troops in Lebanon, a bullet shattered the binoculars he was holding to his face and destroyed his left eye. He wore the black patch for the rest of his life, and it became, almost by accident, the visual shorthand for Israeli military confidence in the years that followed.

What he did in Israel’s wars

Dayan fought in the 1948 War of Independence, commanding the defense of Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley and later leading forces in the battles for Lydda. He rose through the ranks of the new IDF and in 1953 became Chief of Staff under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. In that role he planned and led the Sinai Campaign of October 1956, Israel’s coordinated strike with Britain and France against Egypt after Cairo nationalized the Suez Canal and armed Palestinian fedayeen raiding parties from Gaza; Israeli forces swept across the Sinai Peninsula in days.

His most consequential role came on 1 June 1967, three days before the Six-Day War, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol brought him into government as Defense Minister to steady a nation bracing for what looked like an existential attack by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Dayan presided over the six days that followed: the destruction of the Egyptian air force on the ground, the capture of the Sinai and Gaza, the taking of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria. He entered the Old City of Jerusalem with paratroopers on 7 June and, out of respect for the site’s standing in Islam, made the decision to leave day-to-day management of the Temple Mount in the hands of the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, a status-quo arrangement that has held, with recurring friction, ever since.

The catastrophe of 1973 and the reckoning that followed

Dayan’s reputation as Israel’s indispensable general collapsed almost overnight on 6 October 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Yom Kippur, catching Israeli intelligence and the standing army badly unprepared. As Defense Minister, Dayan was the public face of the early, disastrous days of the Yom Kippur War, when Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and Syrian armor pushed deep into the Golan before Israel, at severe cost, reversed the tide. Dayan’s own composure broke in the war’s first days; he warned colleagues privately of the “destruction of the Third Temple,” a comment that leaked and badly damaged public confidence.

The government-appointed Agranat Commission, convened to investigate the failure, placed most of the direct blame on military intelligence and the Chief of Staff, recommending the latter’s resignation, and formally reserved judgment on Dayan’s own political responsibility. That distinction did not satisfy the Israeli public. Mass protests, led in part by bereaved parents of fallen soldiers, demanded Dayan’s resignation, and Prime Minister Golda Meir, whose own government fell under the same pressure, resigned along with him in 1974. It is one of the honest complications of Dayan’s record: the same commander whose 1967 planning is remembered as a masterstroke presided, six years later, over the near-catastrophic underestimation of Arab intentions and capability that cost roughly 2,600 Israeli lives.

The turn to peacemaking

Dayan’s political career did not end with the Agranat affair. In 1977 Prime Minister Menachem Begin, from the rival Likud bloc, brought Dayan into his government as Foreign Minister, a striking cross-party appointment. Dayan became a lead Israeli negotiator in the peace process that opened when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Jerusalem that November, and he was in the room at Camp David when Begin and Sadat, with US President Jimmy Carter mediating, signed the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978, the framework that produced the Israel-Egypt peace treaty the following year, the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Dayan resigned as Foreign Minister in 1979 over disagreements with Begin on the pace of Palestinian autonomy talks, and in 1981 formed a small new party, Telem, before dying of colon cancer in Tel Aviv on 16 October 1981.

Myths, controversy and legacy

Dayan attracts criticism from more than one direction, and the full record holds all of it without flinching. Palestinian and revisionist writers have cast him as an architect of occupation because of his post-1967 role administering the newly captured territories; the counter-record is that Dayan favored a lighter administrative hand than many in his government wanted and was the one who preserved Muslim control of the Temple Mount rather than asserting Israeli religious authority over it. He was also a controversial and undisciplined collector of antiquities, amassing a large personal archaeological collection through digs and purchases that Israeli law later tightened specifically in response to his conduct, a genuine ethical blot on his record that Israeli historians do not paper over. His personal life, including a long-public extramarital affair, was itself unusually open for an Israeli public figure of his generation. None of that erases the military record, and it does not need to: Dayan is remembered, correctly, as one of the architects of the IDF’s early decades of victories, and the 1973 failure that cost him his office was investigated, named and answered by his own country’s commission and his own country’s voters, in the open, the kind of public accounting his critics rarely extend to their own leaders.