unfolded 338.unf.001001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Moshe Dayan belonged to a new generation of tough home-grown military commanders. Born in 1915 to Shmuel Dayan (member of the first Knesset) in Degania near the Sea of Galilee. In 1935, he joined the Haganah in his teens, and in 1941 he lost an eye in an Allied operation against the forces of the French Vichy Government in Lebanon. During the 1948 war, his battalion captured Ramla and Lydda, and he later became the governor of Jerusalem. He held several positions in the Israel Defense Force as a chief of staff and a minister of defense during the 1967 war. When Ben-Gurion was the Prime Minister of the "Jewish state", he was regularly consulted on defense issues. Besides his military career, he also was a farmer, a secret poet, an amateur archaeologist, a politician, and a statesman, who usually spoke briefly and to the point.
Famous Quotes

Moshe Dayan stated his opinion regarding his anti-infiltration policy in the early 1950s:

"Using the moral yardstick mentioned by [Moshe Sharett], I must ask: Are [we justified] in opening fire on the [Palestinian] Arabs who cross [the border] to reap the crops they planted in our territory; they, their women, and their children? Will this stand up to moral scrutiny . . .? We shoot at those from among the 200,000 hungry [Palestinian] Arabs who cross the line [to graze their flocks]---- will this stand up to moral review? Arabs cross to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned [term often used by Israelis to describe the ethnically cleansed] villages and we set mines for them and they go back without an arm or a leg. . . . [It may be that this] cannot pass review, but I know no other method of guarding the borders. then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders." (Righteous Victims, p. 275)

In the mid-1950s, Moshe Dayan was anxious to initiate a "preventive" war against Egypt to neutralize the modernization of its army, according to Moshe Sharett's diary:

"Moshe Dayan unfolded one plan after another for direct action. The first---what should be done to force open blockade of the Gulf of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians bomb it, we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or conquer Ras al-Naqb, or open our way south of Gaza Strip to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked Moshe: Do you realize that this would mean war with Egypt?, he said: Of course." (Iron Wall, p. 105)