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Top: Jewish Leaders Folder: Moshe Dayan

DAYAN, Moshe (1915-81)

As a soldier and statesman, Moshe Dayan was the architect of Israel's military policy in three wars. These were the 1956, 1967 (Six-Day), and 1973 (Yom Kippur), wars with neighboring Arab countries.

Dayan was born on May 20, 1915, in Deganya, Palestine (now Israel). As a young man, he learned guerrilla warfare tactics from British Capt. Orde Wingate, the leader of special night patrols organized to fight Arab rebel bands. These patrols formed the nucleus of the later Israeli army. His organizing of the Haganah, an illegal military force in British-occupied Palestine, resulted in his arrest and imprisonment from 1939 to 1941. After his release he served with British forces during World War II. While in combat in Syria, he lost his left eye. The black patch he wore thereafter became a distinguishing trademark.

Dayan remained with the Haganah until 1948. That year, during the war for independence, he was in command of the Jerusalem area, and in 1949 he participated in armistice talks with Jordan. While serving as chief of staff of the armed forces from 1953 to 1958, he planned and led the invasion of the Sinai Peninsula during a conflict with Egypt.

In 1958 Dayan retired from the military and joined Israel's labor party, Mapai. The following year he was elected to the Knesset (parliament) and was appointed minister of agriculture under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He resigned in 1964 but joined Ben-Gurion in forming the new Rafi party (Alliance of Israel's Workers) in 1965 and was reelected to the Knesset.

Dayan served as minister of defense during the 1967 war and remained in the cabinet until the 1973 war. He resigned over criticism of Israel's lack of preparedness. Four years later, as Prime Minister Menachem Begin's foreign minister, he was instrumental in drawing up the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement with Egypt. Angered by Begin's policy of establishing Israeli settlements in the West Bank area, still legally part of Jordan, he resigned in 1979. In 1981 he formed a new party, Telem, which advocated unilateral disengagement from the territories occupied in the 1967 war, but he died shortly thereafter, on Oct. 16, 1981, in Tel Aviv.

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Excerpted from Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia

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