My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  His post-war status reached heights which began to affect him. Every magazine in the world had his face on its cover; every second headline had Dayan in it. Every word he spoke and every gesture he made was recorded and eternalized, and even if it added to his ego, he was still careful with his words and selective and responsible in his actions and statements.

  For a while, he contributed time and effort to the rehabilitation of the Army, which, victorious as it was, had suffered a loss of equipment and had to look ahead to the new generation of technological developments. Research and development had priority. The Gabriel and Shafrir missiles went into production; missile-carrying craft and the next generation of combat aircraft were budgeted for and rolled into development. For a few months, Father entertained hopes of “peace around the corner,” but even when it failed to materialize, and the Arab League’s Khartoum decisions meant an all-out burial of our hopes for peace, he invested all he had in the “living together” option. He was encouraged by the fluent dialogue he managed to have with West Bank municipal and even intellectual leadership. He marveled at the leap in the standard of living, and misinterpreted his own popularity as indicative of a general good-neighbor atmosphere. Friction, strikes, clashes, and demonstrations he regarded as local incidents, rather than as representing a large and deeper dissatisfaction, and even when he realized there were no shortcuts, he did not give up. His search for a common approach paid some dividends, and he was realistic enough to understand that “the West Bank Arabs are not going to regard us as anything but an occupying force, but serious face-to-face talks would bring us closer together. We might remain undivided in our views, but at least we would understand each other.” While he was preparing the ground for plowing, and perhaps even sowing seeds of understanding, Egypt and Syria plainly declared: “What has been taken by force will be retrieved by force.” While rehabilitating their armies with massive Soviet aid, they supported terrorist operations, mostly carried out from Jordan, where King Hussein failed to put a stop to them.

  A major reprisal operation was set for March 21, 1968, against the important terrorist base near Karameh in Jordan. My father could not follow the action personally, for he was in the hospital fighting for his life. Having gone over the operational plans for Karameh, Father planned to take a few hours off and go digging in Azur, one of his favorite sites. Aryeh, his young “discoverer” of sites and aide in excavating, had told him of a limestone mound site. Father dug a hole, to discover it led to a narrow cave entrance, and excited at finding early Bronze Age remains, he pushed his body in, when he felt a light showering sand, and seconds later the entire wall of the mound fell over him and knocked him out. The upper part of the cave gave way next, and buried him alive. As he told us later, he had just enough time and consciousness to think: “I can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t get out. This must be the end.” Aryeh summoned help and carefully dug around to expose my father’s head and later extracted him fully. His own reflection as he gained consciousness was that, “though he felt pretty awful, it wasn’t the end.” The Tel Hashomer Hospital doctors were not as optimistic.

  Ezer, my uncle, always the bearer of good and bad news, the one-man UN of the family, was the one to call me at home and carefully suggest I should go to Tel Hashomer. Dov was already there, and the sight of my father took my breath away. He was black-and-blue from internal hemorrhaging. One of his vocal cords was severed and he couldn’t speak. And some of his ribs and vertebrae were injured. I rushed to his bedside with my mother, and she could tell me not to worry. She knew his willpower and physical strength. She had seen him endure pain and injury and she rightly believed, as he did, that his body would heal itself. When they wheeled the X-ray machine to his bed, they suggested I leave the room. “In case you are pregnant.” I was one month pregnant, and this was a strange time and place to let my parents know it.

  Father must have been near death many a time, and I had learned to think of him as immune. My inability to stop crying in the corridor of Tel Hashomer Hospital had to do with a horrible new sensation. He was out of danger, and there was no question about it, but he was not immortal. One day, sooner or later, I would be sitting in a hospital corridor and he would cease to be. In self-defense we prelive the experience of other people’s death, as well as our own. I thought of my mother dying, my grandparents, my husband, even my unborn children, but managed to suppress the notion with regard to my father. Now it flooded over me, and the pain was unbearable. It seemed a bad omen that the accident had happened while I was carrying my first baby, as if one generation had to make room and be replaced by a new one.

  For three weeks he lay there, in traction and in pain. Impossible to be with, and unwilling to be left alone. He was as demanding as a ten-year-old, and Mother cooked and carried, helped wash and soothe him, to collapse each night, fatigued and drained. When my mother left him at night—and often we left together or with Dov—Rahel would show up for a late-night visit. She didn’t have to bring his favorite soup or fruit compote or run errands for him, and if this was a turning point for Mother, a blow to her dignity, and humiliating, inconsiderate behavior on his part, I could, for the first time, understand how rotten she must feel. Being married myself, free of jealousies and in love unshadowed by the slightest suspicion, I began to admire the enormity of her love. How long could it go on and why had she endured it all these years were not questions for me to ask or reply to.

  Father left the hospital after three weeks, working hard to restore his speech, and depending on painkillers. He was in plaster, shuffling rather than walking, and was unable to sleep without barbiturates. His body and willpower did defy medical predictions, but for some biological reason, unknown to me, the injury initiated a process of deterioration in his health. He would never, from then on, be totally well.

  Assi was happily married. Udi had two children, whom my father adored and doted on, but his marriage proved unsatisfactory and had little chance of lasting. Mother had involved herself with the development of crafts in the West Bank territories, promoting Gaza pottery and Bethlehem lace and embroidery. And I was in that serene state of mind in which the whole universe is compressed into the wonderment of a developing embryo. Physically, I was not well, and had literally to stay put for several months, following a cervix stitching. Dov was an angel, considering the fact that he wasn’t half as eager as I was to reproduce, and my parents spoiled me as if I were their newborn baby rather than a mother-to-be. Dov was appointed military attaché to the embassy in Paris, and we decided I should stay and have the baby at home and join him as soon as I could. Meanwhile, we were both studying French and marveling at my changing silhouette. Father resumed his duties, and it was in 1968 that his Rafi Party was reunited formally with the Labor alignment. Ben-Gurion opposed the merger and was now, as a member of the Knesset, a party of one. I doubt whether my father, who still regarded Ben-Gurion as his supreme leader and mentor, guessed or suspected that his own political career would follow the same pattern.

  My father was torn between hopes for an early settlement resulting from the war and the realization that, for a variety of reasons, this was not going to be a speedy process. Hussein was licking his wounds and intent upon keeping a calm border, but the Soviets were clearly propelling both Nasser and Assad toward an escalation of hostilities. What was termed the War of Attrition began with a few episodes in the spring of 1968. Nasser declared: “We have reached the consolidation stage,” and a few months later: “The Egyptian Army has moved to ‘active deterrence.’” “Active deterrence” meant raids, artillery and small-arms fire on Israeli forces, and heavy pounding of our positions along the canal. Soviet experts built fortified positions on the west bank of the canal, and our answer was the Bar-Lev line (General Haim Bar-Lev replaced Rabin as Chief of Staff; Rabin had become Israel’s ambassador to Washington), a series of strongholds that dominated the waterline, each covered by a small mobile tank squad.

  The miniforts were completed, and communi
cation routes to the rear, which crisscrossed the western Sinai. The Air Force had control of the skies, but the number of casualties mounted and the ceasefire lost all meaning.

  In October of 1968, Dov reluctantly left for Paris. He had accepted the appointment when everything seemed positive and peaceful, and when he had to leave, we were again in the midst of a frustrating, costly semi-war. Dan, our first child, was born in Tel Hashomer Hospital on November 25, after nine hours of labor and an easy delivery. Within minutes of his birth, Dov called the maternity ward from Paris, by intuition, and actually heard the baby’s first cries. He took the first available flight home, and the first and last time I saw him cry was as he gazed at his own son, bundled in white in the hospital cradle. A healthy, handsome baby, third-generation sabra on his mother’s side, who would never know his father’s parents and might not even be able to grasp the tragedy that befell them. Mother was with me, and my father came over within a short time to be dressed in a sterile gown and hold his grandson. “Lucky for you, he doesn’t look like me,” he said, which wasn’t at all true. He took from his pocket a little “treasure” in a box. It was an Egyptian soft-stone figurine of a she-wolf. Between her front legs, well protected, stands her cub. It was raining outside and I was exhausted, so he sat by my bed and talked for a while, and I must have fallen asleep, as I barely felt him kiss my forehead and tiptoe away. Three days later I was in Zahala, with Dov and Dan, breast-feeding around the clock and doubting that I would ever be happier.

  My parents’ marriage seemed to be holding, somehow, accommodating the large cracks that continued to threaten it. My father was preoccupied with his work, and, with a new touch of vanity, with himself. He still found time to indulge in amorous adventures. I knew, as did my mother, of his frequent meetings with Rahel, and when my mother asked or reproached him, she later told me, he had an easy, unkind way of dismissing her as: “She is utterly crazy.” He assumed the pose of a man chased, nagged, and irritated by women, Rahel included, and claimed the “affairs” would have been over and forgotten were it not for his partners’ insistence, at times followed by actual blackmail, emotional—a suicide attempt—or financial. He was not going to change, he repeated. He did not wish to divorce, he loved his home and family, and he saw no reason to be melodramatic about his behavior. The bond that tied us together was a strong bond of love and respect. My brothers had their own lives, and so did I, but Zahala was home more than ever before. We accepted each other’s faults and shared political views and visions for the future. There was no competition among us, as we chose different ways to express ourselves, and if our ambitions exceeded our achievement, we were lighthearted about it. Udi, having served a long term of duty in the naval command unit—a fighting arm reserved for the bravest and fittest—was now set to take over the farm in Nahalal, much to my father’s delight. Assi succeeded as an actor and saw his future as a film director, actor, producer, and obviously had enough talent to pursue a career in this field. I had gotten excellent reviews on my last novel, and had a happy marriage and, what seemed to me a unique achievement, a hungry, kicking, healthy son. In our own happiness, we failed to notice what Mother was going through. Father was drifting away from her, not because of comforts found in other beds, not because of Elisheva or Rahel or Dalia, but because, as she put it: “He succumbed slowly to being ‘a legend.’” I left Zahala with Dan for Paris, without enthusiasm. I loved Paris best of any European city and had looked forward to getting to know it better with Dov. I was also intent on being a fulltime mother, and wanted soon to have another baby, so the physical locale didn’t make much difference, but I hated to be geographically removed from the uncertainties and mounting negative prospects Israel faced.

  Father was very good, and called us a few times a week on the phone. He ignored security restrictions, or rather set his own rules, and whenever something happened, or was about to happen, he made sure I was among the first to know, alerting me when the Soviets introduced, installed, and put into operation the new sophisticated SAM-3 missile batteries; when we shot down in a dogfight five Soviet MIG 21s manned by Soviet pilots; and when, in February 1969, Eshkol died and Golda Meir replaced him as Premier. Father was not jubilant about “beating the Russians.” One of his traumatic concerns had to do with an intensive Soviet involvement in the Middle East which might force the Americans to activate troops on our behalf. He feared, and he knew his history well, that Israel would become a global battleground, and whoever the winner might be, we would be destroyed in the process. He was uncertain as to how he would work with Golda, but his doubts vanished after a short time. He found her straightforward and direct, a change from the vague evasiveness of her predecessor, and she gave him full authority within his sphere of work. There was a sad, long talk when his sister Aviva died, of an accidental overdose, but obviously following a no-return route of self-destruction. He had not been close to her in recent years, and perhaps reproached himself for it. Of the Dayan family, only Shmuel and he had survived, and in 1970, another sad long-distance phone call announced the passing of my grandfather. Shmuel had remarried a few years after my grandmother died, and lived in Jerusalem. We saw him as often as we could, and he was a most loving grandfather and great-grandfather. He worshipped my father and treasured every moment my father gave him of his time, and unlike my mother, delighted in being the father of a “legend.” On his deathbed, he said he died in peace, having been privileged to see his son lead our people in the Six-Day War. He was buried in Nahalal, next to my grandmother, Aviva, and Zorik. My father, unable to sleep, and taking sleeping pills, which made him drowsy, explained to me at two in the morning, on the phone, that it was now his turn. His parents, brother, and sister were waiting for him in Shimron; so were the worms. But he intended to do a few things still before he departed.

  Although the painkillers and other pills he took blurred only his speech, and not his clarity of thinking, I was extremely worried. My mother felt desperate about it, and appealed to doctors he trusted to force him to stop. He was not becoming an addict, but he was developing a dependence, and it was amazing, to the doctors too, that his decision-making capacity, precise thinking, and physical activity during the day were not impaired. I noticed a new streak of deep pessimism in his talks. No loss of heart, no loss of control, no despair; simply a big question mark, following a series of disillusionments.

  He came to visit us a couple of times. I joined him twice on a trip to London, and when our U.J.A. fund-raising trips coincided, we met in New York. He took no delight in travel, and if he had, it became less and less evident. He developed a cynical, impatient attitude toward his own fame, the way outsiders regarded it, and switched moods abruptly. On occasion he would patiently pose with fifty couples for a picture with the “General,” or stand on a receiving line in black-tie, saying a couple of words to each of the guests, and—this happened more and more often—on other occasions he would trim his schedule to a minimum. “No reception, no cocktails, no photographs, no dinner. I’ll come at the end of the meal, give a speech, answer questions for ten minutes, and leave.” My U.J.A. friends—Irving Bernstein, the executive director, and Sy Lesser, the head of the speakers’ bureau—adapted fast to his moody fluctuations and found a way to accommodate them. He was still the greatest attracter of audiences, a symbol of everything a Diaspora Jew would wish to be proudly identified with, and although his speeches varied from brilliant to weak, a standing ovation and a flow of contributions always followed.

  The War of Attrition lasted almost three years. The number of casualties grew monthly, and totaled 740 dead. The general feeling was one of frustration and futility. We were defending the east bank of the canal, away from pre-’67 Israel, maintaining a static formation, without any obvious operational purpose. A war one could not lose or win, costly and seemingly purposeless, a war that was imposed on us, as were its Russian tactics and rules. Several special operations across the Egyptian lines were very successful, since they were carried out wi
th typical mobile, unconventional imaginative tactics. Naval commandos captured the Green Island in the Gulf of Suez; an armored battalion was landed on the west bank of the canal to destroy a variety of targets, including important sophisticated radar installations; another Soviet radar was lifted from its site by a helicopter task force and flown “home,” to be examined carefully.

  The new Phantom air bombers engaged in long-range raids into central Egypt, and the canal cities were evacuated. Nasser asked for additional Soviet aid, and Washington was supportive of the Israeli attitude that pressuring Egypt harder would result in a ceasefire. By 1970, there were fifteen thousand Soviet experts, pilots, instructors, and operators in Egypt, and eighty missile batteries, which were gradually moved toward the canal. Both sides were losers, and ready for a ceasefire. What began as the “Rogers initiative” a couple of months earlier as a response to a request from Nasser, the “peace initiative” that basically demanded a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops to the pre-’67 lines, failed to offer us full peace in return, but did result in a new ceasefire agreement which became effective in August 1970. In September, one month later, Nasser died, and Anwar Sadat replaced him as President of Egypt.

  Sadat declared 1971 to be the “year of decision.” For me, it was a year in bed, as I was pregnant again and had to be immobile (having lost a baby a few months earlier), and for my father it was a year of making concessions.

  He was quite consistent in his attitude toward the presence of Israeli forces along the Suez Canal. He opposed the advance of troops all the way to the waterline in 1967, and believed Israel should withdraw from the canal to a second line as part of a partial agreement. He believed, as he did with reference to the West Bank, that normalization facilitates coexistence, that once the canal was open to international navigation, the canal ghost cities reinhabited, and the entire canal zone rehabilitated, the casus belli, the immediate one, would be removed and Egypt would be motivated to seek further agreements. Secretary of State Rogers and Assistant Secretary Sisco were the intermediaries, but Father encountered opposition within the cabinet. Most of the ministers were against the partial-withdrawal concept, unless and until a full peace was assured in return. Even though it was a cardinal issue, and in fact it was a strategy which he consistently advocated, he did not resign when his suggestions were rejected. He did not resign when Golda and her cabinet overruled his choice for new Chief of Staff. He proposed General Gavish, but Bar-Lev was replaced by General Elazar (Dado), and my father reluctantly accepted the decision. Both concessions were major, and indicative of a state of mind, considering the fact that it was clear that sooner or later Israel would be engaged in another major war, at least with Syria and Egypt. Where our western defense line would be, how strong a motivation would Egypt have, and who would command the Army were not minor tactical issues. He was not growing tired of thinking, planning, or searching for solutions, but he was not up to a losing battle for a “principle.” “All I can do is propose. It’s a democracy and if I am outvoted I have to accept majority decisions. If I had to resign every time the cabinet disagrees with me, I could not last as a Defense Minister one week …” And he was comfortable in his post as Minister of Defense. He still concentrated on “normalization” on the West Bank, negotiated good arms deals with the U.S., and regarded his position as “the highest they would let me reach”—they, in this instance, meant the group of people surrounding Golda Meir, her “kitchen cabinet” and entourage. He still felt like an outsider, and although he worked well with Golda and was extremely loyal to her, he remembered how strongly she had opposed his nomination on the eve of the Six-Day War.