Moshe Dayan

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Person.png Moshe Dayan  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(soldier, politician)
Moshe Dayan.jpg
BornMay 20, 1915
Kibbutz, Degania Alef, Palestine, Ottoman Empire, Kibbutz
DiedOctober 16, 1981 (Age 66)
Tel Aviv, Israel
PartyMapai, Rafi, Israeli Labor Party
The Israeli Defence Minister who secured supplies of Apartheid's uranium

Employment.png Israel/Minister of Foreign Affairs

In office
20 June 1977 - 23 October 1979

Employment.png Israel/Minister of Defence

In office
5 June 1967 - 3 June 1974

Employment.png Israel/Minister of Agriculture

In office
17 December 1959 - 4 November 1964

Employment.png Israel/Defense Forces/Chief of Staff Wikipedia-icon.png

In office
6 December 1953 - 29 January 1958

Moshe Dayan (Kitaigorodsky) 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 1967 Six-Day War, he became to the world a fighting symbol of the new state of Israel.[1]

Moshe Dayan controversially endorsed the decision by the military to shoot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 over occupied Sinai on 21 February 1973 with the loss of 108 lives. Dayan remarried in June 1973[2] and, after being blamed by some for the IDF's lack of preparedness before the outbreak in October 1973 of the Yom Kippur War, he stepped down as Defence Minister in June 1974 and went into political eclipse for a time.

In 1977, despite having been re-elected to the Knesset for the Alignment party, Dayan accepted the offer to become Foreign Minister in the new Likud government led by Menachem Begin. He was instrumental in drawing up the 1978 Camp David Accords and the March 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which set up the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), outside the framework of the UN, to keep the peace in the Sinai Peninsula.[3]

Moshe Dayan resigned his post in October 1979, because of a disagreement with Prime Minister Begin over the Palestinian territories.

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)).[4][5][6]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.[7] 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.[8][9]

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.[10] 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 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.

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."[11]

Golan Heights pretext

In New Eastern Outlook William Engdahl writes:

In an off-record discussion with an Israeli journalist in 1976 before his death, Moshe Dayan, who gave the order in the 1967 War to take the Golan Heights, admitted that it was deliberate Israeli provocations into Syrian Golan lands that gave Israel the manufactured pretext to invade and occupy.

Dayan told that to journalist Rami Tal, who kept his notes secret for 21 years until persuaded after Dayan’s death by Dayan’s daughter and others that it was important to publish the Dayan admission. The Israeli journalist wrote that when Tal claimed to Dayan that the Golan Heights were vital for Israeli security, Dayan interrupted him:

“Never mind that. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started…It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”

In 2017, a similar provocation game is clearly in motion with provocative illegal Israeli jet strikes near Damascus and drone attacks in the Golan Heights. The new element this time is the decidedly more Israel-friendly stance of the Trump Administration compared to that of Obama.

But there is another element Dayan was not aware of in the Syrian Golan Heights. What no one is openly discussing is the treasure that Israel’s Netanyahu is lusting after in the Golan Heights – Oil, huge, recently-discovered reserves of black gold in the Golan Heights.[12]

 

Related Document

TitleTypePublication dateAuthor(s)Description
Document:My offer to Owen Jones: A tour of Nazaretharticle3 April 2017Jonathan CookOne 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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References

  1. Willard Crompton, Samuel (2007). Ariel Sharon. Infobase Publishing. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-7910-9263-7.
  2. "Dayan Surprise Wedding – Neighbours Recruited for Minyan"
  3. 10 Tactical Air Group: Canadian Contingent Multinational Force and Observers Handbook (unclassified), page A-1. DND, Ottawa, 1986.
  4. Morris, Benny (2001). Righteous Victims. Vintage Books. p. 684.
  5. Shabbatai Teveth (1973). Moshe Dayan: the soldier, the man, the legend. Houghton Mifflin. p. 1.
  6. "Jewish Women's Archive: Miriam Baratz"
  7. Israel Isaac Soldier of Israel: the story of General Moshe Dayan Taslitt, Funk and Wagnalls 1969 page 8
  8. Giulio Meotti (2011). A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism. ReadHowYouWant.com. p. 147. ISBN 9781459617414. "Even atheist and socialist Israelis like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir were marked by the stories and legends of King David and the prophets. In other words, their lives had been shaped by Hebron."
  9. Tariq Ali (2003). The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2 ed.). Verso. p. 10. ISBN 9781859844571. "Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists."
  10. Cited by Katzberg, 1988
  11. "Ex-spook admits giving ‘big, big’ names to sex dossier MP"
  12. "SYRIA: Trump and Netanyahu Lead us to Brink of Another Oil War in Golan Heights"