Moshe Dayan: Israel's heroic icon

Contemporary Review, August, 2004 by Charles Foster

Moshe Dayan. Martin Van Creveld. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. [pounds sterling]14.99. 223 pages. ISBN 0-297-84669-8.

Moshe Dayan is the ultimate icon of Israel's heroic age. His Zionist credentials were impeccable. He grew up as a kibbutznik in the Galil, the son of swamp-draining idealists from the Ukraine. As he looked up from the lemon groves, he saw the Golan Heights. From there, in the hot nights, Syrian marauders came. The young Moshe Dayan felt the threat: a dark, formless threat, which could be met only by individual nerve and improvisation. Plans and walls were well enough, but no ultimate security. This land, he thought, was his. Although he had no time for bombastic Zionist messianism, and was openly contemptuous of orthodox religion, he felt, in his wars and his peace, that he was living the Bible. In later life he would sit for hours, transfixed by the sight of an ancient scratch on an archaeological artefact, joined in his imagination to the community of Israel's prehistoric dead. He felt more fellowship with them than with his peers in the modern state. He was a man alone, an aloneness demonstrated by his arrogance, his philandering, his intuitive tactical genius, and his spectacular tactical mistakes.

His military mentor was the controversial, but uncontroversially effective British officer, Orde Wingate, who was noted for his extraordinary efficiency in killing Arabs at night in northern Palestine, and for sitting stark naked in the dining room after military operations, eating a raw onion and reading the Bible. From Wingate, Dayan learned the importance of surprise, cunning, compassion and the instillation of fear. He learned that uniformity would always be trumped by initiative, and that a man who does not think for himself does not live long to think at all. He learned, too, that leadership has to be from the front--not just because troops need inspiration, but also because commanders need information. Dayan never trusted bulletins. He understood that maps and statistics never tell the real story. A nose-full of cordite in Sinai was worth many hours of briefing in a room in Tel Aviv. The Israeli Defence Force, in its early days, was fashioned in the image of Moshe Dayan. It is unlearning the lessons he learned, however, and is operationally and morally poorer for it.

For Moshe Dayan, the Arab-Israeli conflict was never personal. He grew up speaking and reading Arabic. Even as a Cabinet Minister he would sit cross-legged with Palestinians and listen to them. This was no pose, no public relations stunt. His empathy with the land implied, for him, empathy with his people. For him, Zionism was not racism. He got cocky, like the rest of Israel, after the great success of the 1967 War but, unlike some of Israel, did not conclude that Arab defeat meant Arab sub-humanity.

Moshe Dayan's career is well known. He was a central player in all of Israel's wars until his death in 1981. He was the architect of the most brilliant apparent success, and ultimately the greatest tragedy of Israel's history: the 1967 war. He had hard things to say. Israel must be like a rabid dog, he said, so that the rest of the region will be terrified to come near. But that was an unfortunate necessity. It was not the way the Jewish state should ideally be.

The great soldier was never a great politician. He could never be a party animal, and had no patience for the sycophancy and detail which came with portfolios. The graphs of annual tomato production held no interest for this one-eyed swashbuckler with the concentration span of a gnat and the heart of a desert lion. Eventually he could not even go through the motions of caring. But he did care about peace. There is no real irony in the observation that war is the greatest impetus for peace, and war-mongering the greatest training for peace-making. A bit of knowledge of men, and a bit of knowledge of history, teaches this. Dayan knew the Arabs, and liked them. He knew, eventually, that the gains of 1967 were potentially losses. Despite his sentimental attachment to biblical Judaea, Samaria, and Gaza, and the location of his childhood enemies in the Golan, he counselled against de facto or de jure annexation.

Mr Van Creveld attributes to Dayan's liberalism the postponement until the 1980s of violent domestic discontent, and he is right. Dayan knew that Sharon's Lebanese adventure was brewing, and did his best, in the last few months of his life, to see it off. It is not difficult to imagine his attitude towards current Israeli policy--a policy of ham-handed bludgeoning in a world where coffee works best, or, if it comes to it, the stiletto. It would not have been polite.

Professor Van Creveld, one of Israel's most penetrating military historians, has painted, with elegance and remarkable economy of line, a striking portrait of a striking man. Drawing on previously untapped sources, including accounts from some of Dayan's mistresses, he dissects the influence of the events on the man, and the man on events, in a way which has not been done before, and will not be done as well again. The result is a compellingly readable conversation with Moshe Dayan, and there is no higher praise for a biography than that.