Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan
The Israeli Defence Minister who secured supplies of Apartheid's uranium

Moshe Dayan (Kitaigorodsky) (20 May 1915 – 16 October 1981) was an Israeli military leader and politician. He was the second child born on the first kibbutz, but he moved with his family in 1921, and he grew up on a moshav-type communal settlement. As commander of the Jerusalem front in Israel's War of Independence, Chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (1953–58) during the 1956 Suez Crisis, but mainly as Defence Minister during the Six-Day War, he became to the world a fighting symbol of the new state of Israel.

After being blamed by some for the army's lack of preparation before the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he left the military and joined politics. As Foreign Minister Dayan played an important part in negotiating the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Early Life

Moshe Dayan was born on Kibbutz Degania Alef near the shores of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) in Palestine, Ottoman Empire. His parents were Shmuel Dayan and Devorah, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Kibbutz Degania Alef was the first kibbutz and had 11 members.

He was the second child to be born in the kibbutz (after Gideon Baratz (1913-1988)).He was named Moshe after Moshe Barsky, the first member of the kibbutz to be killed in an Arab attack, who died getting medication for his father. Soon after, Dayan's parents moved to Nahalal, the first moshav-type communal settlement to be established. Dayan attended the Agricultural School there.

Dayan was a Jewish atheist.

Eye Patch

On 7 June 1941, the night before the invasion of the Syria–Lebanon Campaign, Dayan's unit crossed the border and secured two bridges over the Litani River. When they were not relieved as expected, at 04:00 on 8 June, the unit perceived that it was exposed to possible attack and -- on its own initiative -- assaulted a nearby Vichy police station, capturing it. A few hours later, as Dayan was on the roof of the building using binoculars to scan Vichy French positions on the other side of the river, the binoculars were struck by a French rifle bullet fired by a marksman from several hundred yards away, propelling metal and glass fragments into his left eye and causing severe damage. Six hours passed before he could be evacuated, and he would have died if not for Bernard Dov Protter, who took care of him until they were evacuated. Dayan lost the eye. In addition, the damage to the extraocular muscles was such that Dayan could not be fitted with a glass eye, and he was compelled to adopt the black eyepatch that became his trademark.

In the years immediately following, the disability caused him some psychological pain. Dayan wrote in his autobiography:

"I reflected with considerable misgivings on my future as a cripple without a skill, trade, or profession to provide for my family." He added that he was "ready to make any effort and stand any suffering, if only I could get rid of my black eye patch. The attention it drew was intolerable to me. I preferred to shut myself up at home, doing anything, rather than encounter the reactions of people wherever I went."

Apartheid's uranium

In February 2015, former secret agent Tony Holland revealed that he had been spying for MI6 in South Africa in 1969 when he worked as an engineer on the design of the Rössing opencast uranium mine which was being constructed in the Namibian desert for the international firm RTZ with South African and Iranian finance.

While working in South Africa for Fraser and Chalmers, an engineering subsidiary of the British firm Mitchell Cotts, Tony Holland reported to MI6 in London on a meeting he attended in Johannesburg between mine engineers and the charismatic Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, who had signed a clandestine trade agreement under which South Africa ensured supplies of uranium oxide for the Israeli atom bomb project at Dimona.

The Rössing Uranium Mine became the world’s third-largest opencast uranium mine, lying in a desert that was controlled unlawfully by South Africa and therefore beyond the supervision of international inspectors. It became the source of un-monitored supplies of uranium oxide ‘Yellowcake’ for rogue nations seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

In an unpublished memoir, now being handled by Nick Hudson, the Australian publisher of Peter Wright's notorious book "Spycatcher", Tony Holland wrote:

"Dayan wasn’t wearing his eye patch, and there was a gouged eye underneath.

"We were told that if anyone recognised him and asked what he was doing in Johannesburg, we were to say that he was there for an operation on the eye.

"They weren’t supposed to be developing their own bomb, but we helped them by turning a blind eye."

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:My offer to Owen Jones: A tour of Nazareth	article	3 April 2017	Jonathan Cook	One has to look at what Zionism did when the Labour party was directing it – in Israel’s formative stages and for most of its history. Only then can you understand that what you see in Hebron or Nablus was created in Haifa and Nazareth first. The template was set in Israel, at a time and place where there were no security issues. It was not Palestinian bombs Israel feared from its Palestinian citizens but their wombs.

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