We shared in part one how Moshe Dayan rose to fame as a military hero. He joined the Hagana militia at the age of 14 and guided Israel through the Six Day War to one of the most lopsided victories in the history of warfare. In Part two we learn However, in 73, with Dayan still the defense minister, the Arabs launched a surprise attack from Syria and Egypt on Yom Kippur. While Israelis were fasting all over the nation, Egypt and Syria attacked. Expect for a few IDF commanders whose concerns fell upon deaf ears, no one saw it coming. Israel was caught off guard.
As we will detail in our episode on the Valley of Tears, Israel, though outnumbered by the Soviet-backed Syrians, miraculously drove the them out of the Golan Heights. Israel won the Yom Kippur War, but it was Dayan who blamed for not being battle-ready.
Dayan’s actions just after the miraculous recapturing of Jerusalem during the Six-Day-War may have sealed his fate, if you believe that God was behind the victory and had an opinion regrding the aftermath. After removing the Israeli flag from the Temple Mount, and then commanding the paratroopers to evacuate, Moshe Dayan declared, “We have returned to the holiest of our places, never to be parted from them again…We did not come to conquer the sacred sites of others or to restrict their religious rights, but rather to ensure the integrity of the city and to live in it with others in fraternity.”
On the one hand, this showed that Israelis were not like the Jordanians, who destroyed every Jewish building or symbol after 1948, when all Jews were removed from the ancient Old City of Jerusalem. On the other hand, if God had returned the Temple Mount to Israel, who were we to allow Islamists free access…to the point that today, I, as an Israeli can only visit the Temple Mount and that with great difficulty, while Hamas activists have constant and free access.
Dayan made it possible for Jews to visit the Temple Mount, but were forbidden to pray. Later, the secularist Dayan remarked that the Temple Mount is a Prayer mosque for Muslims, but merely an historical site for Jews.
I remember many years ago, leading a group of tourists up on the Temple Mount. I didn’t know the rules. As I gathered them together I boldly declared, “I don’t care what the Muslims say! This is our Temple Mount and we will pray here whether they like it or not.” As I began to pray the tour guide broke through our little circle in a panic, “You can’t do that! They are listening to you. There are microphones everywhere.”
Suddenly I didn’t feel so bold, knowing that some Hamas activist was monitoring my bravado. How sad that neither Jews nor Christians are allowed to utter a word of thanksgiving at the place where Abraham bound Isaac, and where the first and second Temples stood—the greatest monument to the existence of Ancient Israel.
Moshe Dayan, for all his heroics, was a secularist. He was not seeking what was in God’s heart, but what was politically acceptable. He did not want to keep the Golan Heights, but wanted to trade it back to the Syrians for peace—as if that was even a possibility. He opposed the Kibbutzim, the collective farms that settled the Golan.
Dayan was thought of by his peers to be brilliant, yet irresponsible, brave, yet, not willing to be held accountable for mistakes. While he loved the Jewish people, he had little respect for Judaism, once remarking when rabbis flocked to the Temple Mount just after it was liberated, “What is this? The Vatican?”
Dayan died of a massive heart attack in 1981.
Make sure you go to God.tv so you never miss an episode and you can find me at roncantor.com. Shalom.
Moshe Dayan, the iconic eye-patch wearing soldier, is considered by many to be one of Israel’s greatest generals. But his life was not free from controversy.
intro
He was the second child born on the very first Kibbutz, or collective farm—in Israel, situated below the Sea of Galilee, right next to Yardenit on the Jordan, where millions of pilgrims come to be immersed in water. He was named Moshe after the first member of the Kibbutz that was killed by Arabs, as he was seeking medication for Moshe’s father.
At the time, Degania was part of the Ottoman Empire. This was before the first world war, after which Great Britain would take control of what would become Israel, a few decades later.
At the young age of 14 he joined the Haganah, the main forerunner to the Israeli Defense Forces, along with a few other militias. He later was accepted into an elite force led and trained under famed British Commander Orde Wingate. There Dayan would learn guerilla warfare—the only way for the outnumbered Israelis to survive. Wingate was known for his unconventional fighting tactics. He was Christian and a devout Zionist. He felt it his Biblical duty to serve the Jewish people in establishing their own state.
Wingate, who personally selected Dayan, organized the Special Night Squads or the SNS. The SNS, amongst, other responsibilities, would stealthily attack known Arab terrorists with small, but well-trained, squads in the middle of the night. They were highly successful and today, one of our nations universities bears his name—my wife Elana studied there.
Dayan continued to serve with the British and is most famous for the eyepatch that covered his left eye. On June 7th, 1941, in the midst of a firefight with the Syrians, he was looking through the scope of his rifle, when he was shot in the eye. In most cases such a wound be fatal. But Dayan recovered and his eye patch became legendary.
In 1967, he was appointed defense minister, and oversaw the miraculous victory of the Six-Day-War. Dayan was the one who boldly decided to confront the belligerent Syrians who were bombing Israeli villages from the Golan Heights. Furthermore, it was Dayan who imposed a news blackout for the first day of the war.
The effect of this blackout was remarkable. On the one hand, Israelis and Jews all over the world, were left to believe the false reports coming out of Egypt of an Arab stampede. On the other hand, this enabled Israel to achieve all her objectives without the UN interfering. No one at the UN was concerned about an Israeli loss—but an Israeli rout of her overconfident neighbors would lead to calls for an immediate ceasefire.
When the results came in, the world was shocked: Nearly 500 Arab planes destroyed, the Israelis were advancing with little resistance throughout the Sinai, all the way to the Suez Canal, 600 Egyptian tanks were taken out and 10,000 Egyptians killed or wounded, and another 5,000 plus were taken as POWs.
Moshe Dayan was celebrated around the world as one of the great military minds of our day. But his story doesn’t end there. Join me for part 2.