Moshe Dayan

Overview

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) was an Israeli military commander and political leader whose public career extended from the Haganah through four major Arab–Israeli wars and the negotiations that produced peace between Israel and Egypt. He led the Israel Defense Forces as chief of staff from 1953, commanded the 1956 Sinai campaign, and served as defense minister during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He later became foreign minister and helped negotiate the Egypt–Israel peace treaty.

Dayan’s black eyepatch, worn after he lost his left eye in combat in 1941, became one of the most recognizable images of Israeli public life. His reputation rested on battlefield command, willingness to press for military action against attacks on Israel, and later participation in diplomacy with Arab states. His record also includes a serious failure of judgment before the 1973 war: he promoted the mistaken expectation that Egypt would not attack until it could match Israeli airpower. The opening assault exposed the danger of that assumption, and public anger over wartime failures contributed to his resignation as defense minister in 1974.

His decisions after Israel gained control of eastern Jerusalem in 1967 had lasting consequences. Dayan affirmed the Jewish people’s return to the Temple Mount while promising to protect other communities’ sacred sites and religious rights. He then arranged for Muslim religious authorities to retain a role at the site. Elsewhere, he proposed a system for governing Judea and Samaria and its Arab residents, although the Israeli government rejected his proposal.

Early life

Dayan was born on May 20, 1915, at Deganya Alef, near Lake Kinneret, to Shemuel and Devorah Dayan. Deganya Alef was an early collective settlement, and his upbringing took place amid the growth of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel. At age 14, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish defense organization in which he remained active until the establishment of Israel in 1948. That early service placed him in the generation of commanders who moved from community defense into the armed forces of the new state.

British Captain Charles Orde Wingate taught Dayan guerrilla warfare while organizing night patrols against Arab rebel bands. During the 1936–1939 riots, Dayan served with a special police force in the Jezreel Valley and Galilee. The experience exposed him to patrol work and mobile operations before he held senior command. After British authorities outlawed the Haganah in 1939, they arrested Dayan. He spent approximately two years in prison and was released in 1941.

Following his release, Dayan joined British forces fighting Vichy France during World War II. He served in the campaign that liberated Lebanon and Syria. A battle wound in Lebanon cost him his left eye; afterward, he began wearing the black eyepatch associated with him for the rest of his life. His wartime service linked his earlier Haganah training to combat alongside British troops, and he continued his Haganah activity until 1948.

Career

During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Dayan first commanded the defense of Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley. He later commanded the battalion that attacked Lydda and helped halt Egyptian forces on Israel’s southern front. In August 1948, he was appointed commander of the Jerusalem front. These assignments took him across several of the war’s principal fronts, from the Jordan Valley to the south and Jerusalem.

Dayan moved from combat command to negotiation as the war ended. In 1949, he participated in armistice talks with officials from Jordan at Rhodes. His later diplomatic work was thus preceded by direct involvement in the first agreements between Israel and an Arab neighbor. He continued to rise within the military, becoming chief of operations at General Headquarters in 1952 and chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces in 1953.

As chief of staff, Dayan pressed for strong military retaliation against attacks on Israel. Israeli forces conducted raids in Gaza and other retaliatory operations under his command. On October 29, 1956, he led Israel’s campaign into the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez Crisis. The campaign followed a pact in which Egypt, Syria and Jordan set the destruction of Israel as their goal. Dayan’s direction of the Sinai advance strengthened his standing as a commander capable of organizing rapid operations beyond Israel’s borders.

Dayan left the military in 1958 and entered party politics. He joined Mapai, Israel’s Labor Party, and was elected to the Knesset in 1959. In David Ben-Gurion’s government, he served as agriculture minister from 1959 until 1964. He resigned after a dispute with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, then joined Ben-Gurion in forming Rafi, the Alliance of Israel’s Workers. Dayan returned to the Knesset as a Rafi representative; the faction later rejoined the Labor Party.

In 1967, Dayan became defense minister shortly before the Six-Day War. He and chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin supported going to war despite the absence of clear American assurances. Dayan personally oversaw Israel’s capture of eastern Jerusalem. The war brought Jerusalem’s Old City and the Temple Mount under Israeli control, and it placed Dayan at the center of decisions about the city’s religious sites and the governance of areas gained during the fighting.

At the beginning of July 1967, Dayan and Eshkol established professional committees to plan development and governance in the areas gained during the war, including arrangements for local Arab residents. Dayan submitted one of four proposals concerning Judea and Samaria and its Arab population; Israel’s government rejected his proposal. His involvement showed that the military victory immediately raised questions of civil administration and political policy alongside questions of defense.

Dayan remained defense minister through the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war, public anger over failures surrounding its outbreak and early stages led both Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign in 1974. Shimon Peres succeeded him as defense minister. Dayan returned to a senior cabinet post in 1977 when Prime Minister Menachem Begin appointed him foreign minister. In that position, he took part in negotiations leading to peace between Israel and Egypt.

Ideology and statements

Dayan’s public positions combined a forceful approach to Israel’s security with a willingness to negotiate political agreements. As chief of staff, he favored strong retaliation against cross-border attacks. As foreign minister, he supported convening a Geneva peace conference with Arab states and identified Egypt as central to progress. He sought talks grounded in UN Resolutions 242 and 338 and agreements already accepted by the parties, while rejecting a new U.S.–Soviet statement as their basis. In 1977 discussions, he reaffirmed Israel’s rejection of full withdrawal.

Dayan’s words in Jerusalem in June 1967 expressed both the significance of Jewish return and a commitment to religious rights. After Israel gained control of the Old City, he affirmed that the Jewish people had returned to their holiest places and would not be parted from them again. He paired that declaration with a pledge that Israel had not come to restrict the sacred sites or religious rights of others. The two commitments formed part of the same statement: Jewish access to the Temple Mount and protection of Christian and Muslim worship in Jerusalem.

On June 17, 1967, Dayan met Muslim Waqf and Supreme Muslim Council leaders inside Al-Aqsa Mosque to establish an arrangement for the Temple Mount. He chose to preserve a role for Muslim religious authorities at the site, seeking to avoid a wider religious conflict after Israel’s victory. Israeli police and the Muslim religious authority came to share responsibility for the site. Dayan made the arrangement on his own initiative, without a cabinet decision, giving one minister’s judgment a lasting place in Jerusalem’s religious administration.

Dayan’s statements before the next war reveal a different side of his judgment. On July 17, 1973, he addressed senior security officials at Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, less than three months before Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. His assessment treated Arab states as weak relative to Israel and reinforced the expectation that war was unlikely. In particular, he promoted the mistaken assumption that Egypt would wait until it had matched Israeli airpower before attacking. His stature as a commander did not make that assessment sound; Egypt attacked without meeting the condition on which it rested.

Role in attacks or conflicts

Dayan’s service connected him directly to Israel’s major wars from independence through 1973. In 1948, his commands included the defense of Jordan Valley settlements, the attack on Lydda, operations on the southern front against Egyptian forces, and the Jerusalem front. As chief of staff, he directed the armed forces during a period of recurring attacks on Israel and led the 1956 Sinai campaign. As defense minister in 1967, he was part of the leadership that took Israel into the Six-Day War and personally oversaw the capture of eastern Jerusalem.

In March 1968, Dayan backed an Israeli operation at Karameh, a village near the Jordan River, after cross-border raids originating in the Jordan Valley. Israeli forces struck Yasser Arafat’s force there. Jordanian forces entered the battle, and the Israeli force withdrew. The operation illustrated the continuing security pressures facing Israel after the Six-Day War and Dayan’s preference for military action against forces carrying out attacks across the border.

The Yom Kippur War tested Dayan’s leadership under far more dangerous conditions. Egypt and Syria attacked in October 1973 after Israeli leaders had underestimated the likelihood of war. Dayan served as defense minister through the initial crisis and the fighting that followed. During the opening stage, he invoked the fate of the “Third Temple” to convey that Israel’s existence was at stake. He later acknowledged that Israeli expectations of what the air force could achieve in that stage had proved unrealistic.

Israel fought through the surprise assault, and the war ended on October 23, 1973. Dayan’s wartime leadership remains inseparable from his prewar assessment: the mistaken belief about Egyptian airpower helped create the dangerous expectation that an attack was unlikely, while the opening battles required him to help direct Israel’s defense under the conditions that belief had obscured. The public response continued after the ceasefire. Anger at the failures surrounding the war contributed to the collapse of Meir’s government and to Dayan’s departure from the Defense Ministry in 1974.

Death or current status

Dayan remained active in public life after leaving the Defense Ministry. His appointment as foreign minister in 1977 gave him a leading role in Israel’s negotiations with Egypt. He supported renewed regional talks, placed particular weight on reaching an agreement with Egypt, and helped negotiate the peace treaty between the two countries. That diplomatic work added a final major chapter to a career previously defined by military command. Dayan died on October 16, 1981.

Legacy

Dayan occupies a distinctive place in Israel’s history because he held decisive military and political posts across several generations of conflict. His early Haganah service, British wartime experience, commands in 1948 and leadership of the 1956 Sinai campaign made him a prominent military figure before he entered elected office. As defense minister, he became closely identified with Israel’s victory in 1967 and with the return of Jewish access to Jerusalem’s holiest place. His Temple Mount arrangement also shaped how Jewish and Muslim religious interests were handled at the site.

His reputation carries the weight of the 1973 failure as well as the victories that preceded it. The assumption that Egypt would not attack without airpower parity proved false, and the war’s opening crisis exposed limits in Israel’s expectations of its own military strength. Dayan’s subsequent resignation marked the political cost of that failure. His later work with Begin’s government and Egyptian negotiators demonstrated another enduring feature of his career: participation in negotiations even after decades spent preparing for and directing war. Together, his command decisions, Jerusalem policy, prewar misjudgment and role in peace talks define his place in Israel’s military and diplomatic history.