My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  Sadat’s “year of decision” passed uneventfully. I came home in the summer of 1971, to spend the last month of pregnancy in Zahala. Raheli was born on June 23, in Tel Hashomer Hospital, to Dan’s dismay and my great delight. Dov was a trifle worried about having a daughter, and a very pretty one, but my father quickly reassured him: “It’s the best thing one can ask for; look at my daughter!” A statement Dov was in no position to contradict. I stayed in Zahala for a month, and we returned to Paris, a family of four, for one more year. When we posed for photographs with my parents in the garden, I hardly suspected that when I next came home, it would be to my father’s house with my mother living in her own new home as Ruth Dayan, the ex-wife of General Dayan …

  Our last year in Paris was a very pleasant one. I was not confined to bed, for a change, and both children were growing nicely. There was time to take in everything that enchanting city had to offer, and Dov’s work took us to Belgium and Holland as well. We were surrounded by warm, caring friends like Alain and Marie de Rothschild, Yaakov Agam and family, the Najar family, and others, and Dov’s work produced good returns. When my mother visited with us in Paris in the fall of 1971, and mentioned the possibility of a divorce, it didn’t quite register. Both Dov and I, and, as I learned later, her parents too, were strongly opposed to it. It wasn’t our lives; we didn’t know what the limits of her patience and endurance were; but we felt that if she had managed all these years, perhaps with our help and encouragement she could go on. She didn’t seek our advice, and didn’t share her reasoning with us. I felt there was a realm of her emotional makeup which I could not penetrate. She knew he would never divorce her of his own volition. She had been through the worst of scandals, some recent ones involving tapings of my father done by his lover and her mother, followed by blackmail. She did not stop loving him, but insisted she loved the Moshe he had been and not the person he was becoming. She talked of his hunger for money, of materialism, of loss of ideals, megalomania. She was bitterly exaggerating, and when she left, we doubted whether any of the things we said had an impact, or whether she even heard.

  She didn’t want me to come home with her, and on a bleak, rainy day, she simply announced to us on the phone, as did my father, that they were divorced. She moved to Herzlia, to her parents’ summer house, took a few things she chose to have from Zahala, and accepted whatever settlement my father’s lawyer offered her, after thirty-five years of marriage.

  Father sounded apologetic. He didn’t beg her to reconsider, but it was entirely her decision, and he respected it. I should know, he said to me, that he would always remain a friend of Mother’s, that he had no intention of remarrying, and Zahala would always be home for me and my family. He wasn’t convincing, and there was something pathetic about his statements. He was testing me for a reaction, and I wasn’t cooperating. I felt very close to my mother but couldn’t help resenting her decision. My brothers and I were adults, and there was no “children of a broken home” element to cope with. When I wept for hours, it was with love for both my parents, regretting the weaknesses which made it impossible for them to live together.

  Dov and I returned to Israel in the summer, to our new apartment on the twelfth floor of a high-rise building just north of Tel Aviv. While waiting for Dov and the furniture to arrive, I stayed with the children in Zahala with my father. This was my way of not taking sides, though my mother naturally misinterpreted it. Her home, wherever she was, was mine, and I could count on it, come what may. My father’s house, which I loved and in which I grew up, felt strange and empty. The garden was as beautiful, my small children filled the rooms with laughter and chatter, but the warmth was gone. Father was quite pedantic in his habits. He washed his teacup as soon as it was empty, and his cupboards were quite neat, as were his papers and medications. His books and archaeological pieces were all in place, but the large living room felt like a museum. He was not lonely but seemed grateful enough to have me around for a short while. His real deep anxiety had to do with the missiles along the canal and the imminent, he thought, prospect of war.

  I found a changed Israel upon my return in the summer of 1972. The post-war affluence was badly digested. Unskilled Arab manual laborers replaced many Israeli workers, and since Hussein did not take the hand of peace extended to him, people quickly assumed the role of occupants in the territories, dismissing the possibility of ever returning them. The war of attrition over, there was talk of a status quo that “one could live with,” and “peace” was no longer a top priority. Father contributed to this by declaring that he’d rather have Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh, and he encouraged the settlement of Israelis in the northern Sinai. Jews bought cheap land in the West Bank, and Orthodox religious youth settled where they claimed their roots were, in a land belonging to others but promised their ancestors by God. The Palestinian issue was a time bomb, with a delayed fuse simply because we were too concerned, and for good reason, with our southwestern and northern frontiers.

  I realized my father was meeting daily with Rahel, at her place, and was not surprised when he finally suggested that we meet. He was nervous about it, said again that he had no intention of remarrying, added that she didn’t want to get married either, and we made a date for afternoon tea in Zahala. Before her arrival, he said, almost pleading, that he hoped I would like her. “She is a fine woman, and I love her. There is nothing in the world that would please me more than that you two get along.” I tried to be light-hearted, saying: “Whenever Mother asked you about her, you said she was crazy”—but he didn’t think that was funny. The meeting was cool and pleasant enough, and it was obvious that we both made an effort in order to please my father. We were worlds apart—in looks, in manner and temperament, in values, and in priorities. Her love and my love for my father were then and for the next nine years our one strong common denominator. The rest demanded a certain effort. There were times I liked her, and many moments I felt extremely uncomfortable in her presence. She had enough intuition not to stand between me and my father, and I was wise enough to know the limits of my domain. If the competition between mother and daughter is natural, the same when applied to a stepmother is distasteful. My father’s health was far from good, and I felt he reached the stage of being a one woman’s man not one minute sooner than his body forced him to.

  The changes that took place in Zahala, in his life and behavior, and finally in his priorities were not sudden or even immediately noticeable. I was not inclined to attribute them solely to Rahel’s influence. Israeli society as a whole underwent a change for the worse, because it lost the strength to resist the chance of an easy life and skin-deep temptations. I supposed the sorry changes in my father’s way of life and attitudes resulted from a similar weakness. If Rahel was at all to blame, he wasn’t uncooperative, not my father …

  They were married in June 1973, four months before the miserable, heroic, and traumatic Yom Kippur War. On Saturday, October 6, we were in Ein Hod with the children. It was Yom Kippur, and I preferred to be in our country house, where the imposed silence of this holiest day did not feel like a threat. There was no telegram this time, but an early phone call from my father. He simply said: “War will break out today. I suggest you and the children stay in Ein Hod; it’s safer. And Dov should get to HQ as soon as he can.” The road was empty when we drove back, all of us, to Ramat Aviv, but for a few Army vehicles headed in both directions. The radio silence, customary on Yom Kippur, was broken, and a general mobilization was announced. Dov went to his office. I prepared a small bag of supplies in case we had to go to the shelter, and tried to keep the children busy. Both my brothers were mobilized, and I talked to their wives. At 2:05 p.m., Syrian aircraft had crossed our air space and Egyptian rafts were crossing the canal while Army bases in the western Sinai and Sharm el-Sheikh were being bombed. A siren sounded, but I couldn’t budge. War had started.

  Not unexpected, not unprepared for, yet a total surprise.

  TWELVE
: 1973–1977

  The Yom Kippur War is, by now, so overloaded with “what-if’s” that it has become difficult to distinguish between facts and wishful hindsight thinking. Unquestionably, Israel was mistaken in rejecting, or not pursuing to its end, Father’s suggestion to pull away from the Suez Canal. He had argued, but had failed to convince the cabinet, that an interim agreement by which we would withdraw ten or twenty miles might remove the immediate incentive for an all-out war. Navigation would then have been resumed in the Suez Canal, the canal-zone cities would have been rehabilitated, and some of the pressure would have been removed. Father was basically a believer in normalization, in the canal zone as much as in the West Bank. Where daily life is possible, where trade and agriculture flourish, where children go to school and shops open in the morning, the cannons and missile batteries are of secondary importance. If peace could not be achieved, in direct talks or by fighting another war, peaceful coexistence would be the best starting point toward it.

  But we stayed on the eastern bank of the canal; Russia persistently armed, equipped, and trained the Egyptian and Syrian forces, and in mid-’73 the question was not whether but when.

  In May 1973, Father held a meeting of the General Staff and issued orders for the IDF to be prepared to confront an all-out attack by the end of the summer. Extra funds were allocated to speed up the acquisition of tanks and artillery; and detailed plans were worked out for both the Northern and the Southern Commands (dubbed Operation Chalk and Operation Dovecote, respectively), based on the assumption that there would be an advance warning of twenty-four hours, a long enough period in which to reinforce the troops on both fronts with mobilized reservists.

  A hot summer went by, and though a few alerts proved false, by September there were ample grounds for mounting anxiety, especially regarding the Syrian front, dense with sophisticated antiaircraft missiles. In a meeting at the end of September, my father stated his anxieties and was partly satisfied with an increase in the number of tanks along the line. He remained uneasy, however, and when he visited the front on the eve of our New Year, meeting representatives of the settlements, he decided to strengthen the line even more. At the next General Staff meeting, he defined the situation in extreme terms: “On the Jordanian border we have civilian settlements but no enemy. On the Egyptian border we have an enemy but no settlements. On the Syrian border we have both. If the Syrians get to our settlements, it will be calamitous.” Golda was out of the country, and as soon as she returned, on October 3, a meeting was arranged. Father reported intelligence data indicating massive reinforcements, and the small gathering—attended by two other ministers, the Chief of Staff, the head of the Air Force Staff, and the acting intelligence commander—accepted the Chief of Staff’s recommendation that Israeli armor and artillery remain at peak strength, and buttressed the Air Force to high alert.

  The intelligence representative said that, although the Egyptian and Syrian forces were deployed in offensive positions, he did not think they were about to launch an attack. He suggested the Egyptians were preparing for their annual maneuvers. A twenty-four-hour advance warning still seemed a reasonable possibility, and on the basis of all reports, there was no good cause to believe we would be deprived of such a warning. During the night of October 4, however, Soviet passenger planes evacuated Russian families from Syria and Egypt, and on October 5 a C-alert, the highest, was ordered for the Army, and full alert for the Air Force. The High Command post was activated; military leaves were canceled, and preparations were under way for a full public mobilization. Yom Kippur was to begin that evening, with traffic and radio broadcasting coming to a complete halt at sundown.

  The evaluation of the Chief of Intelligence, that noon, was that an attack was not likely. General Elazar, the Armed Services Chief of Staff, accepted this assumption, which matched the American evaluation as well. Father disagreed, pointing out that the Egyptians and the Syrians were in a position to start a war within hours. He requested that the Prime Minister be given authority to approve the mobilization of reserves if she should be asked to do so the next day. Next day was Yom Kippur, and convening the cabinet might be impossible on short notice.

  Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the religious day of reckoning. A solemn day of fasting, begging forgiveness, and prayer. My family, my parents and my grandparents, never observed Yom Kippur in the customary way. We didn’t attend services, or ever fast, and if we begged forgiveness, we did so privately. God was absent from our lives, as from our education, and the imposed quiet that descends on the land had a disquieting, enervating effect on us all.

  When the siren sounded the alarm at 2 p.m. on October 6, I was alone with the children and decided not to go down to the shelter. I looked out of the window at a clear blue sky and felt quite safe. The possibility of the hinterland, the Tel Aviv area, being hurt or touched in case of war seemed preposterous, and the sight of squadrons of fighter-bombers flying north along the coastline added to my sense of security. At that very moment, the Egyptian and Syrian artillery had started shelling Israeli positions. In the south, Egyptian infantry and armor crossed the canal eastward, along its entire length. In the north, using artillery barrage for cover, Syrian tanks moved to attack. Our infantry on both fronts was outnumbered roughly ten to one. A similar disparity existed in armor and artillery. We were numerically inferior in the air, and we faced a sophisticated ground-to-air missile grid which put us at a further disadvantage. The gap in quality was narrowing, as the enemy infantry was highly motivated, deriving extra security from effective anti-tank weapons and the new Soviet shoulder-held antiaircraft missile.

  All radio systems were activated now. The streets were bustling with cars and military vehicles and men, still in synagogue attire, hurrying to their units. After eight hours of fighting, the Chief of Staff reported that the situation was under control, considering the circumstances…

  The Egyptians had hurtled the water obstacle, but the Syrians did not break through our lines in the Golan. The Golan could be reinforced within twenty-four hours, significantly, but the southern front was miles of desert away, and although a sizable armor force was on its way, it could not be fully activated before October 8. The Air Force had to be deployed full-force in the south, to fill in the time gap. For the first time since the War of Independence, in many years of war, we were on the defensive. Our morale, self-esteem, and self-image were traumatized, and it would take courage and self-discipline to face reality and act according to it, rather than ignore and smooth out an unfavorable scenario.

  At the end of the first day of fighting, my father found himself isolated in his anxiety, and on a different wavelength, and thus proposed a course of action different from what his colleagues, both in the Army command and in the cabinet, advocated. The Chief of Staff’s appraisal satisfied their wishful thinking: the GOC Southern Command estimated that we could drive the Egyptians back to the west bank of the canal very soon and resume control of the Sinai. After evaluating the events of the day, my father predicted that the outcome of the next few days’ battles would be different from the more optimistic forecast offered by the Army command. He figured that if a large number of tanks reached the Golan Heights during the following day, the Syrian momentum could be checked. Father remained deeply concerned about the canal zone. He evaluated the enemy as “good troops, using good equipment and fighting with determination.” He doubted whether we could interrupt the canal crossing for the next couple of days, and predicted a grim, costly result of the following day’s planned battle and the Air Force involvement. He proposed to retire to a second line to fight the enemy from a belt twelve miles east of the canal, and to mass our strength before striking again. He spoke of the heavy blow we had suffered, and the powerful gains the Egyptians had achieved, with relatively little damage and minor casualties.

  When he was through, there was silence and discomfort. The cabinet members did not like what they had just heard, and had no means or data with which to bridge the
gap between the two contradictory readings. The easiest thing was to attribute his assessment to a softening of the heart, a loss of faith, or his habitual, ingrained pessimism. If ever the term “lone wolf” fitted him, it was on that night. He went to the “pit,” the Army war room, which was humming with activity, but he sensed that cool and balanced thinking was lacking there as well. In the Air Force war room, he listened to the next day’s operational plans and wasn’t satisfied either. He believed the Air Force should concentrate on destruction of armor and on air support to ground forces, rather than attempt an attack, as was planned, on the missile sites and airports. At 2 a.m., twelve hours after the beginning of the war, Father went to his office for a couple of hours’ sleep. What upset him most, as he recounted later, was a gap in credibility between the high command of the Army and himself. The Commander in Chief, who had been appointed over his objections, and several other commanders, were, he felt, covering up for themselves, and ignoring his evaluation of developments at all levels. For the first time, Father was not entirely at home with the IDF. He was the political authority, able to give operational advice but not orders, and, contrary to 1967, he was not an integral part of the team, no longer its commander and father figure. He found out, painfully, that the organizational and technical arrangements intended to repel an enemy attack on the canal strongholds had not been carried out, the tank detachments were too far to the rear, and weapons and ammunition were often below the required level. The fighting spirit was supreme, but very heavy casualties were inflicted on us as a result of numerous mishaps.