Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan (Kitaigorodsky) (Hebrew: משה דיין‎; 20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) was an Israeli military leader and politician. He was the second child born on the first kibbutz. As the fourth Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–58), he became a fighting symbol to the world of the new state of Israel. He went on to become Defense Minister and later Foreign Minister of Israel.

The Telem party won two seats in the 1981 elections, but Dayan died shortly thereafter, in Tel Aviv, from a massive heart attack. He had been in ill-health since 1980, after he was diagnosed with colon cancer late that year. He is buried in Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where he was raised. Dayan willed his personal belongings to his bodyguard.

In 2005, his eye patch was offered for sale on Ebay with a starting bid of $75,000 U.S. dollars.

Dayan was a complex character; his opinions were never strictly black and white. He had few close friends; his mental brilliance and charismatic manner were combined with cynicism and lack of restraint. Ariel Sharon noted about Dayan:

He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more had to be rejected; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

He had courage amounting to insanity, as well as displays of a lack of responsibility. I would not say the same about his civil courage. Once Ben Gurion had asked me – what do I think of the decision to appoint Dayan as the Minister of Agriculture in his government. I said that it is important that Dayan sits in every government because of his brilliant mind — but never as prime minister. Ben Gurion asked: "why not as prime minister?". I replied then: "because he does not accept responsibility".

Dayan combined a kibbutznik's secular identity and pragmatism with a deep love and appreciation for the Jewish people and the land of Israel—but not a religious identification. In one recollection, having seen rabbis flocking on the Temple Mount shortly after Jerusalem was captured in 1967, he asked, "What is this? Vatican?" On his religious views, Dayan was an atheist.

Dayan later ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock, and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount over to the Waqf, a Muslim council. Dayan believed that the Temple Mount was more important to Judaism as a historical rather than holy site.

Dayan was an author and claimed to be an amateur archaeologist, the latter hobby leading to significant controversy, as his amassing of historical artifacts, often with the help of his soldiers, seemed to be in breach of a number of laws. Some of his activities in this regard, whether illegal digging, looting of sites or commerce of antiquities, have been detailed by R. Kletter from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

In 2005, Moshe Dayan was voted the 73rd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.

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