My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  The first four weeks of basic training, until the coveted first home-leave weekend, made the obstacles I had to face very clear. In order to retain some freedom and privacy, I had to be disciplined beyond reproach. I had to excel in order to be granted basic rights, and had to avoid the higher ranks, who were intrigued by my presence and frustrated by my “attitude.” I applied, and was fully qualified and hence accepted, to officers’ course. This, too, was taken for granted by my father, and for a brief moment, during a pre-cadet course, I developed an intense jealousy. I, for the first and last time, envied the “ordinary” girls. Not for what they were, but for being rewarded for their efforts, in a normal, touching, human way. Their fathers wrote to them to say they were proud; their mothers ironed and starched their uniforms; their little brothers looked up to them; and their boyfriends encouraged them. Where the others found support and enthusiasm, I was just doing what was expected of me, even when I was doubling my efforts. Moreover, they had post-Army dreams which I was jealous of. They knew what they wanted, and when they didn’t, they didn’t have to pretend, and were free to consult and share their doubts. Most of the other girls I was with were in love, and being loved, and many talked of the future in simple, delightful terms of home and family, number of children, a farm or a business or studying for a profession. They were not lacking in ambition, nor were they narrow or simple-minded. They were healthy, happy young women doing their duty for a couple of years and satisfying themselves with achievable aspirations. The number of children, the size of a home, or even marriage as such was absent from my pattern of future plans, and it made me feel inadequate. I felt jealous of all these girls who were treading solid ground, serving with patriotic zeal, seeing the cadet school as a highlight and a call, while I was restless, suspicious, and still a collector of experiences rather than a participant.

  I also envied their simple sense of patriotic achievement. They sang “meaningful” rhymes when they marched. They shouldered the heavy packs and rifles as if the country depended on them; they saluted the colors with tears in their eyes. The girls in the cadet school, carefully chosen, were in fact a devoted, dedicated, unselfish lot, and they were determined to “contribute to the country” whatever they could for the duration of their service. My own love of country was as great as others’, but my ability to express it or join in group enthusiasm was limited. I was saturated. From babyhood to maturity, I had been immersed and padded and injected with everything that meant love of country and roots and belonging. Now this added layer caused an overflow and a surplus—as if at birth I had been attached to an infusion bottle, and into my veins flowed all the good elements, in an overdose that almost caused an allergy.

  I worked hard at becoming an officer, and the motivation was strictly personal. I did not think: Here, dear Israel Defense Forces, an added talent is on its way, an accomplished officer is about to join the ranks and contribute whatever she can. I simply had to be very good, for my own good feeling, and was quite ambitious about it. Every officers’ course ends in an impressive ceremony, during which an “outstanding cadet” leads the parade and is the first to receive her or his rank’s insignia. The name of this selected officer is announced on the last day of the course. Two days prior to the ceremony, the base commander summoned me. “I want to share with you my dilemma,” she said uncomfortably. “You deserve to be number-one in this course, but we very much hesitate because of how it will look if we give the honor to you. You see, the obvious will be said, and you, too, will feel uncomfortable.” I did not believe my ears. They are dumb enough, I thought, not to be able to handle the situation. “What do you want me to do? Run away, so you’ll have an excuse to nominate someone else? Take sick leave? Or should we have a double ceremony, one for the outside world and one for those of us who know?” I wasn’t going to facilitate matters, and I got up to salute and leave. I later learned that my fellow cadets heard of the hesitations, sent a delegation to the commander, and demanded that full credit be given me, as it was clear that I deserved it.

  I led the parade with pride and perhaps even a tear in my eyes. I was proud of my mates, and loved them for their honesty and generosity. Obviously, in the final account, I could reach as far as I wanted. I had to come to terms with the fact that I had to put in double the work and the effort to achieve the same credit, and that the “height” was not always worth it.

  My mother was delighted and touched. My father gave me a big kiss and a hug, and in his eye was the usual “as expected” look. He would never have reproached me if I hadn’t been number-one. He simply took it for granted that I would be.

  By then, we were withdrawing from the Sinai, and although the campaign’s major objectives were accomplished, Father was bitter and frustrated. He thought little of the UN Emergency Force as a peacekeeping element and of the Secretary General of the UN as a mediator between Israel and Egypt. He did whatever he could to delay the withdrawal, if not avert it, but to no avail, for he was certain that in a short while the Egyptian Army would return to the Gaza Strip to encourage and support hostile infiltration.

  When the Israeli flag was lowered from the military governor’s house in El Arish, he told reporters: “Officers have to eat Army rations, the sweet as well as the bitter.” Ben-Gurion thought Father’s notion of keeping parts of the Sinai in order eventually to conduct direct peace negotiations was premature, and in fact only ten years later the Israeli flag was hoisted again in El Arish, and twenty years later it was lowered to trumpets announcing the peace agreement with Egypt. My father flew with Ezer Weizman in a Piper to El Arish on the day of the final withdrawal. He asked Ezer to fly over some of his favorite archaeological sites and land near the last column of half-tracks. He himself, in an uncharacteristically exhibitionistic act of protest, left the area with these last half-tracks. A rearguard, first to enter and last to leave, like the captain of a ship. The ship wasn’t going down—it had given a superb battle performance—and my father forced himself to shrink back to size, away from the strategic depth the Sinai offered, away from the wilderness Moses crossed, back to the cage-size dimensions of the international border. When I saw him after the evacuation, he was adamant in his decision to leave the service. As a military commander, he had reached the top of his ability. The Army stood up to and above expectations, and it was time for him to go, he said.

  Go where, I asked, knowing that there was no definite answer. He had to detach himself from the protection the uniform and rank offered. He was going through many changes of mood recently, and there was bound to be an in-between phase of reshaping and planning his life, which he conveniently chose to do as a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

  In a meeting with Ben-Gurion, he asked to be relieved of his duties, and declared his intention to enroll at the university. Ben-Gurion reluctantly accepted that he was determined to leave the Army, but if my father expected the old man to offer him a cabinet position or a head start in politics, he was wrong. Ben-Gurion did not as much as mention the upcoming elections of 1959, and displayed great interest in my father’s chosen courses in the university.

  To me, he simply said he wanted time off. He called it “freedom” and claimed he had no desire to pursue a political career. “You don’t really think my heart’s desire is to sit around the cabinet table with Sapir and Aranne?” he asked, and added a sentence I was to hear many times: “If they want me, they know how to reach me, and I’m not leaving the country.” He said it before, he would say it again, but after the Sinai Campaign, shedding his uniform at the age of forty-three, he had good reason to believe it wouldn’t be long before he was courted, if not actually coerced into office. He was no longer a potential, promising young leader, but a famous and recognized man. His quality as an important leader was independent, from now on, of the post he was to fill or the “power” he commanded. So far, he had been Dayan the battalion commander, Dayan the Jerusalem commander, Dayan the Chief of Staff. The rest of his life, his name alone carried the c
harisma, the controversy, and the power, regardless of title or post or position.

  The period of adjustment was turbulent for all of us. My mother went to talk to Ben-Gurion, something she had done and regretted doing every time there was a change or a crisis in my father’s career. “Moshe is facing a gap in his life, now that he is leaving the Army, and it can be terrible for him,” she said. Ben-Gurion reassured her that “Moshe will not get lost,” and talked about the value of a higher education. “It’s a lot of nonsense. After everything he’s done, I know he can’t sit quietly in a classroom and read textbooks. It’s just not possible and I know it,” she insisted. Ben-Gurion said to one of his associates, after Mother left him: “I admire this woman, not for what she said, but for what she didn’t say.” She didn’t say a multitude of things she tried to hide if not bury. She didn’t say she was seeing a man change in front of her eyes, and naïvely hoped there was a formula that could be applied to stop the process and avoid a crisis. It was true Father had become increasingly introverted, and went about systematically severing intimate friendships. His moods changed swiftly, and he reserved his more gloomy, irritable hours for the family circle. He didn’t reject the family, nor was he bored with us or loved us less, but he didn’t want to keep up a façade at home, and his frustrations, pessimism, and restlessness were expressed where there was no risk of loss of popularity—at home. A knock on the door, the phone ringing, or the arrival of a visitor, anybody, would alter his behavior immediately and he would display a charming, enchanting disposition, becoming generous and humorous in a seemingly effortless way.

  The basis of his attitude toward people was never love or hate, but respect. Respect of courage and respect of professional knowledge, whatever the field. We, members of his family, confused this set division. He loved us irrespective of our intellect, courage, or talent, yet he had to come to terms with disappointments. His mother fitted both categories; he could love and respect her, idealizing her both before and after her death. He loved his father more than he respected him, making no allowances for a generation gap which carried with it different sets of priorities. I came pretty close, at times, to this luxurious combination of someone who could be both loved and respected, whereas my brothers didn’t show at the time (and Father didn’t allow for a generation gap there, either) signs of greatness that could satisfy this emotional conflict.

  Rather than calm his restlessness, or mellow his edginess, the period of study in Jerusalem, as my mother suspected, produced the opposite results. Lack of responsibility made him irresponsible, and his impatience turned to arrogance. Not being at peace with himself resulted in bad headaches, medically diagnosed as late aftereffects of his head wound, but clearly not eased by his state of mind.

  I was transferred to the Jerusalem command, as an officer, and enrolled again at the university, hoping to finish my second year while in uniform. We were both in Jerusalem now, only in entirely different settings. Father was a civilian, living in a small apartment the Army let him use, driving a civilian jeep, and going home to Zahala for the weekend; and I was an officer, driving—since my eighteenth birthday—an Army jeep, making an occasional appearance at the campus, where we often shared classes, and being relatively busy and happy with my new Army duties.

  I lived in Jerusalem and worked in Abu Ghosh, an Arab village twenty minutes’ drive away, in the regional HQ. We were responsible for the current defense of settlements, mostly newly founded, along the Jordanian border and the Jerusalem corridor. The settlers were newcomers from a variety of Arab countries, and it was essential to give them basic training, so that, in addition to feeling secure, they could in fact protect their own homes and farms. The long working hours in tough weather conditions, in villages remote from the main road and in many cases not yet supplied with electricity, demanded dedication and patience. I found both in myself and was fully rewarded by results, as slow as they were in coming. There was something miraculous in the adaptation of these people. Many of the women were illiterate. There was disease and a rejection of modern medicine. Farming was a mystery to them, and they had to be coached into a new, taxing world with loving hearts and attentive hands. What began as a dialogue between deaf and mute developed into a common language, and I could actually see roots taking hold in the rocky, bare soil, backs straighten, and faces change expression from bewildered despair to acceptance, to the pride of belonging. When I felt guilty about Nahalal or Deganya being what they were, I had to remind myself of my grandparents, of the malaria and trachoma they had fought, of the marches and the field fires, of their own encounter with a hostile, foreign, often deadly environment. The men we trained were not soldiers, and so we didn’t emphasize discipline or drill routines. My job was minor, supervising and keeping track, making sure every male had some training, and, when on night duty, reporting emergencies to the central command or going out to a settlement to calm the people in case of a false emergency. Involved as I was, I found myself again leading a kind of double life, and I began to think I somehow needed this duality. From a clinic in Lachish where I might spend an afternoon convincing a mother to let the young doctor treat her fevered child, rather than apply primitive medicine blessed by a “miracle worker,” I would drive back to the city and spend a long evening in a restaurant bar with the Spanish consul. After night duty in Abu Ghosh, where the phone rang to report restlessness in a cowshed and the stealing of three goats, I was treated to a royal breakfast at the King David Hotel by a wealthy, caring student friend. A day that began with a demonstration of the numerous parts of an FN machine gun to a group of bearded, elderly Yemenites continued in a classroom where I listened to a brilliant lecture on totalitarian regimes in the nineteenth century, and, with me still in uniform, ended in a quiet dinner in a small restaurant with my father, or two UN observers, or the son of the Guatemalan ambassador.

  I was not condescending with the settlers; I was very obedient with my commander—an adorable major my father’s age; and I was not carried to snobbish social heights by the fact that my companions’ cars had diplomatic plates. They were an extension of something intangible. As if, where the sign said STOP—BORDER—NO TRESPASSING, there was an unseen continuous road that their cars and houses and language enabled me to follow. There was no sex, or very little of it, and no feeling of conquest. I did not complain about the provinciality of my own country; neither did I blindly admire theirs. I was fun to be with, and their curiosity concerning my father was mixed with the added excitement of dating a girl soldier. I don’t remember ever being asked about military affairs, and I was not in possession of any classified material. If my occasional enthusiasm about my work was contagious, it had to do with social or economic achievements of the people under my command. I shared freely and with pleasure information relating to the emergence of people from backward countries into a technologically advanced age.

  When my father moved to Jerusalem, I thought we would spend more time together, and was quite disappointed when I discovered how full and busy his life as a student was. He had first place on my own busy calendar, and when he did call or show up, there was nothing and nobody that couldn’t be postponed or set aside. My mother’s presence in my life was reduced to almost nothing. I went to Zahala on weekends whenever I could, shared with her my Army experience, with which she was very familiar, but there seemed no way of communicating on any other subject. I wasn’t grumbling and didn’t blame her; it suited me fine and enabled her to avoid confrontations. I was old enough not to interpret her seeming lack of interest as neglect, and I had no illusions as to what she thought of my style of life. As self-centered as I was, I couldn’t but notice she was going through a very tough time, fighting to preserve my father’s love, if not their very marriage. The fact that we were both in Jerusalem and made guest appearances to enjoy a good meal on Fridays and a Saturday-night outing to the movies put us into the category of parasites, as if all we expected from home was the rendering of occasional services. Both my father an
d I held Mother in great respect as far as her work was concerned, and admired the initiative and imagination she put into it. I suspect we both were grateful that she was “building something of her own,” which gave us license, with different legitimacies, to absent ourselves from her life whenever we wished. She traveled occasionally, and geographic distance allowed her to write letters and express feelings and thoughts she didn’t dare put forth in a more direct manner.

  In his answer to one of her letters, in the winter of 1958, Father sums up best where he stood and what he wanted. “If we were to get married now, we wouldn’t have done it, but this is not the choice we are facing. The question is whether to live together, or apart, and if together, how. When you married me you didn’t know me well, and what I am today is totally different from the person you did know. You think my attention is divided between five-thousand-year-old antiques and corrupt young women, that I’m not devoted to the children or to you. If you think that a husband who behaves like that is not tolerable to you, the decision is fully yours. I don’t regret anything that happened in the past, nor do I promise or think I can change in the future. The day you ask for a divorce, I’ll grant you one, but it’s entirely up to you.

  “You should have many reasons to be satisfied with your accomplishments at work. These are all the result of your own effort and talent. You are satisfied also with the way you fulfill the role of mother and wife; I’m not sure I agree there. But there our expectations differ. I don’t expect you to be more than you are; I don’t think we should be a model family living in a model home or that you should be a model mother. I make no pretenses to be a model or an example, as anything to anybody. If you could accept me as I really am and not as you or your friends wish me to be, I don’t have any wish to separate. Our life together can be based on mutual respect, common friends, and twenty-two years of marriage, children, and home. I am sure there are couples who share more, who pick anemones every winter until they are 120, who eat the same cake every Saturday, read together the literary supplement, and visit the neighbors regularly, without trying something else or testing other sensations. We are, or at least I am, not made this way. We can base our life on sympathy—and I don’t write ‘love’ so as not to mislead you, though I don’t know the difference between ‘to like’ and ‘to love,’ and friendship, common ideology, and respect. We have children; they are grown already. I’m not satisfied with Yaël’s life at present, and although you are sure I’m to blame, I don’t think things are so simple. She is at an age and in a position where she is on her own, and if her friends are not to my liking, there is no way I can prevent her from associating with them. Udi is growing up too, and if our home is not an ideal one, it is still better than no home for the three of them. It should be available to them, when and if they want to use it.