Historical Figure
Moshe Dayan
1915–1981
Israeli military leader and politician (1915–1981)
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Biography
Moshe Dayan was an Israeli military leader and politician. As commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–1958) during the 1956 Sinai War, and as Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967, he became a worldwide fighting symbol of the new state of Israel.
In Their Own Words (5)
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
As quoted in Newsweek (17 October 1977) , 1977
It is not in our hands to prevent the murder of workers… and families… but it is in our hands to fix a high price for our blood, so high that the Arab community and the Arab military forces will not be willing to pay it.
As quoted in Warrior : The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon (1989) , 1989
During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road.
Ma'ariv, 7 July 1968. , 1999
In two cases I did not fulfill my role as defense minister, in that I did not stop things that I was sure should have been stopped.
On Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights and in Hebron, in a private conversation in 1976 with Rami Tal, as quoted in Associated Press reports (11 May 1997) , 1976
Let's say "we don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and we'll see how this procedure will work out." For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the mountains, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime. Whoever wants to go, will want. It's possible that in five years, there will be 200,000 fewer people, and that's an enormous thing.
Strategizing an approach to the refugees in West Bank if Jordan rejects a peace deal, in Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985) by Yossi Beilin, p. 42 , 1985
Timeline
The story of Moshe Dayan, told in moments.
Born at Kibbutz Degania Alef, the first kibbutz in Palestine. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants. He learned Arabic as a boy, playing with Bedouin children. Joined the Haganah at 14.
Loses his left eye fighting Vichy French forces in Lebanon. A bullet hits the binoculars he's looking through, driving metal and glass into his eye socket. The black eyepatch becomes his trademark. He refuses a glass eye.
Serves as Minister of Defense during the Six-Day War. Israel captures the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in less than a week. He visits the Western Wall. The photograph of his eyepatch at the wall becomes an icon.
As Foreign Minister, helps negotiate the Camp David Accords. He conducts secret back-channel talks with Egyptian officials. The man known as a warrior architects a peace deal. He resigns from government a year later over disagreements about Palestinian autonomy.
Dies of a heart attack at his home in Ramat HaSharon. He was 66. An amateur archaeologist, he'd amassed one of the largest private collections of antiquities in Israel. Most of it was dug up illegally. The collection is now in a museum.
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