Moshe Dayan Israeli General is the state of Israel’s best-known and most influ¬ential ‘soldier. Forceful, charismatic, and readily recognizable, with his black eye patch, Dayan represents the struggles of the Israeli nation and the military to which the state owes its continued exis¬tence. From service first as a guerrilla warrior and then as a field commander in the 1948 War of Independence, Dayan became chief of the general staff in the 1956 War and defense minister in the Six-Day War of 1967.
Dayan’s life and the establishment of Israel were intertwined from his birth, on May 20, 1915. The future leader was the first child born in the cooperative farm of Deganya, Palestine, near the Sea of Galilee, an area which was at that time a province of the Ot¬toman Empire. During his childhood, Dayan faced the hardships of farm life, compounded by harassment first from the Turks and later from the Arabs. At the age of fourteen, Dayan joined the Jew¬ish militia Haganah to defend his village. In the Haganah, Dayan received guerrilla training and experienced his first combat. Ex¬cept for a brief six-month visit to London in 1935, he remained in the midst of the periodic fighting.
In 1936, Dayan, now a sergeant, served with several regiments when the British in charge of policing Palestine authorized an at-tachment of Haganah personnel to act as guides and scouts. Al¬though basically unimpressed with the discipline and operational procedures of these units, Dayan did further his military education.
Dayan applied the lessons he learned from the British when he gained command of one of the Mobile Guards of Jewish Set¬tlement Police in 1937. The military techniques he employed as a sergeant were the same ones that would pay dividends as he con¬tinued to progress up through the ranks. Dayan detested routine and anything not directly related to combat readiness. He empha¬sized weapons marksmanship, advantageous use of terrain, and overall aggressiveness. During this time, Dayan also advanced his military knowledge while working for the British unconventional warfare leader Charles O. Wingate.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the British ceased their support of the Haganah and ultimately outlawed the organi-zation. They arrested and imprisoned several of its leaders, in¬cluding Dayan, who received a five-year sentence. The British released Dayan in 1941, however, so that he could support their fight against German and Vichy opponents.
Dayan distinguished himself in several battles before being se¬riously wounded in June 1941, when a bullet struck the binoculars he was using to observe the enemy, driving glass and metal into his skull and destroying his left eye and surrounding socket Although some detractors later accused Dayan of self-dramatization because of the black eye patch, in reality he suffered so much bone and tis¬sue damage that nothing remained to support a glass eye.
At the end of the war, the Haganah grew to a force of thirty thousand and renewed its activities in an attempt to gain inde-pendence. When the British withdrew from the region, warfare in-creased between the Haganah and surrounding Arab states, who
Moshe Dayan swore to drive the Jewish combatants and their families into the sea. After the outbreak of the Jewish War of Independence, Dayan, now a major, took command of the Jordan Valley sector on May 18, 1948, and successfully defended his Deganya birthplace from a vastly numerically superior Syrian force. Appointed to. com¬mand the Eighty-ninth Battalion after his victory, Dayan followed no rules but his own as he began to recruit men and appropriate vehicles from other units. Within weeks Dayan gained the reputa¬tion as a gallant, imaginative leader by conducting raids against far superior Arab positions.
In August, Dayan, promoted to lieutenant colonel, began to display his skills as a statesman as well as a soldier when he partic-ipated in negotiations to end the war. By the conclusion of the conflict in 1949, Dayan wore the rank of major general in charge of the Southern Command at Beersheba.
During the postwar years, Dayan labored to organize a pro-fessional Israeli Defense Force (IDF) because Israel remained sur-rounded by enemies dedicated to destroying the country and its people. In 1953 Dayan became chief of staff of the IDF, and the entire Israeli military began to take on his personality.
Dayan rewarded performance and replaced many senior commanders with younger, more aggressive officers. He decreased the number of support units while increasing the strength of the infantry and armored forces. Dayan created an elite airborne unit and at the same time demanded that all other units maintain an eliteness of their own. From his subordinate commanders he re¬quired the continuation of any assigned mission until they had sustained at least 50 percent casualties. To his men, with whom he was immensely popular, he promised that the Israelis would leave be¬hind no wounded to enemy abuse.
In 1956, after deterioration of relations all across the Middle East, Dayan found the opportunity to put his army to the test. Without waiting for a formal declaration of war, Dayan committed his paratroopers to secure critical mountain passes and pressed his mechanized infantry and armor into a lightning attack toward Egypt. Bypassing strong points and refusing to engage in a decisive battle, Dayan defeated the Egyptians in eight short days. In Israel and around the world, the black-eye-patch general became the symbol of Jewish military proficiency.
Dayan left the military in 1958 to enter politics, but in 1967, shortly before the Six Daiy War, the Israeli government recalled him to active service as the minister of defense. Although his sub¬ordinates had already drawn up much of the battle plan, Dayan executed the offensive that included a preemptive air strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground on June 5. Not only did Dayan’s command defeat the Egyptian land forces in less than a week; they also captured the strategically critical Golan Heights from the Syrians.
Dayan’s reputation soared after the Six-Day War, only to some¬what erode with the initial defeats inflicted by the surprise Egyp-tian attacks in October 1973 that produced unprecedented Israeli casualties. Although he eventually rallied the Israeli forces to vic¬tory, Dayan was criticized for his army’s unpreparedness and re¬signed his post as defense minister following the war. Returning to politics, he served in various appointed and elected positions until his death on October 16, 1981, in Tel Aviv, at age sixty-six.
The achievements of Dayan are extensive yet simple: the state of Israel, despite wholesale enemies, continues to exist Dayan is re-markable not only for his feats but also for his innate abilities to train and lead men. His military education came not from acade¬mies or service school but from the kibbutz and the battlefield. Dayan’s professional skills in training his army and his aggressive¬ness and flexibility on the battlefield made the IDF one of the world’s most efficient, effective fighting forces of all time.