My Father, His Daughter

by Yaël Dayan

  On the following morning, I reported to Tel Hashomer Hospital and within a few hours was back in uniform, on duty as an officer responsible for volunteers in Israel’s Army hospital. I made arrangements for the children to be taken care of, and took short breaks to visit them at home whenever I could. The civilian sick were evacuated, the helipad prepared, and soon we did not need false or true reports from the front, debated on the radio or the TV. We had the sad and depressing firsthand accounts from the men brought in on stretchers.

  The eyeless and the burnt, the paraplegic and the bandaged, told of bravery, of self-sacrifice, of unprecedented heroism, but not of victory. The first few days of this war had an aura of loss and futility, and for the first time, the strong supportive link between the front and the civilians was shattered. People didn’t know, and what they found out they didn’t wish to believe. The official reports were vague, and at times encouraging, and deep, sad anxiety settled in the cracks between reality and rumors. Reports of eyewitnesses arriving in the hospital clashed with comforting official statements, and I myself walked among the infusion bottles and the questioning eyes in a slight daze. I talked to my father once or twice in the first few days, and he had no reason to soothe me or to try to cheer me up. It looked bad; there were obstacles and defeats; and he was tired. He was not broken; he was not hopeless. He estimated we needed a few more days to launch a counter-attack. He even mentioned with confidence the eventual victory, but he was cautious about the way to get there, with fewer casualties, at a lower price. Any attempt earlier and without precaution, he regarded as too costly. He absorbed the first defeat quicker than the others, and was perhaps more confident than others about the end results. He saw no reason for speeding up events at the highest cost, to reach an objective that we could reach with confidence a short while later. My brothers were all right, he assured me. So were my cousins—all in combat units. He summed up his predicament with a degree of sadness rather than with anger. He was not in control; people heard what they wanted to hear …

  On Monday, October 8, a counter-attack was launched prematurely. It took a while for the Southern Command to realize that just about everything had gone wrong, and the day ended with our line, in some cases, farther back than it had been before. My father had accumulated the anger and frustration I had hoped he would, and was only sorry it didn’t happen earlier. He flew to the Sinai after midnight, summed up the day as “wasted, frittered away, leaving in its trail disappointment, casualties and retreat,” and demanded to replace the GOC of the Southern Command. His own candidates were Arik Sharon, who commanded a division, and Chaim Bar-Lev, the former Chief of Staff. He told the Chief of Staff he thought a counter-attack should be launched when the Army was ready for it, and suggested that the nation be told the truth. Top priority should be given to the acquisition of arms and ammunition from the United States, and the Golan fighting force should be ordered not to retreat, to fight to the last man and not give an inch. He believed that only then should we concentrate all our forces against Egypt. Father saw Golda early in the morning and got her approval and blessing for the new strategy—the appointment of Bar-Lev and the bombing of military targets in the Damascus area. They agreed that Golda herself should fly to Washington to procure understanding support, and the supply of arms so badly and so urgently needed. But other members of the cabinet still viewed my father as an incurable pessimist, and attributed our problems to some weakness in his character, and not to the objective military situation.

  Father was front-hopping everywhere. He did not want to rely on reports, air photographs, or maps, and he kept to his custom of inspecting the battle from the battlefield. The lower the echelon, the more comfortable he felt, inspired by the personal courage of others, and inspiring the local commanders with his own. He felt comfortable with the divisional commanders, who had fought under his command before, and he respected their judgment. He wore Army fatigues without badges of rank, and a windbreaker, a Vietnam rear-echelon crumpled cloth one that served him well, and dust goggles to protect his good right eye. On the fifth day of the war, October 10, he intimated that he had stopped fearing the Arabs might overrun our territory. The President of the United States approved, on that day, most of the electronic equipment Golda had requested, and some additional planes, and agreed, as a matter of policy, to replace and restore whatever matériel we lost in battle. The Soviets carried out a massive airlift, transporting arms to Syria and Egypt on October 9–10, and the U.S. began a military airlift on October 14, which replenished our stocks and clearly boosted our morale. On this October 10, Father visited the southern Sinai and managed a short meeting with Assi, who was serving as a heavy-mortar man with a paratroop unit. He proceeded to Southern Command HQ and made it clear that a counter-attack would be undertaken as soon as the Syrians were dealt a hard blow. He thought about and talked of capturing territory west of the canal. In the north, he clarified the final line that would put Damascus within our artillery range. Always having been considered a pessimist, or at best a pragmatist, my father could not now be accused of imaginary, farfetched, wishful-thinking objectives.

  On October 13, a successful counter-attack was launched which brought our lines a few miles closer to Damascus. On October 15, Father flew south to be on hand for the start of the battle for the crossing of the Suez Canal. Arik Sharon, whom my Father judged to be our best field commander, was in command of the attack, and Father was not going to follow this battle from the pit or be satisfied with a report afterward. Arik launched his assault after preparatory aerial bombing and artillery shelling of the crossing area, at Deversoir.

  When the armor reached the canal, my father talked to Sharon on the phone, asking for a jeep to come for him and drive him to observe the crossing. His heart was with Danny Matt, the paratroopers’ commander, who was preparing to cross on rubber rafts to establish a bridgehead in “Africa.” Arik was apologetic. The access road was blocked; the crossing sector was under heavy fire; and all he could do was share with Father the sights he beheld. The advancing tanks silhouetted against a sky lit in red, reflected in the water of the Great Bitter Lake.

  The roadblock prevented the mobile bridges from reaching the water during the night, but a decision was made to cross anyway. At 1:20 a.m. on October 16 came the good news: “Danny Matt’s force on the water.” And soon after: “Paratroopers on the west bank of the canal.” It wasn’t Jerusalem; it wasn’t the materialization of a lifelong dream; but it was more than a turning point. This toughest of wars, against all odds, would end in a tremendous victory. For all the reasons and elements my father had advocated and fostered for decades. Quality, initiative, imagination, and a good measure of caution paid off. Where the price was very high, it was due to commanders deviating from these elements.

  By dawn, rafts were ferrying tanks to the west bank, and three major battles were in progress to secure the east-bank crossing sector, to open an alternate route for the bridges’ equipment. Bren’s division thrust north at the Egyptian Second Army on the access road; south, to prevent the Third Army from sending reinforcements; and west—the Chinese Farm battle—to secure a wider corridor to the bridgehead, linking with Arik Sharon’s units. Father stayed in the south. These battles were in the best tradition of the Israeli forces. Commanders and soldiers alike fought with all their might and defeated an enemy that had much at stake and fought well.

  The battles lasted the whole day and into the night, extracting a heavy toll, but it was clear that they won us the war. The road was opened, and the heavy bridges reached the canal. By then, a full brigade was establishing itself on the west bank, and my father left with Arik for the crossing point. Rafts and rubber boats were bringing men and equipment from east to west under a heavy barrage, while the engineers were preparing the ground for the projected bridgehead. Reaching the other side, my father preferred to walk rather than ride an armored car. Arik’s forehead was bandaged, as he had been hit in the crossing, and the two walked among the weary
troops, along the cultivated land and the Sweet Water canals. The war was not over, but it had been won.

  For a few days after the initial crossing, the combat continued. The Egyptian forces were deployed for defense, and the initiative had passed into our hands. Negotiations between the Americans and the Russians began feverishly to call for a ceasefire resolution in the Security Council, and we had to act with speed to make sure that the final line suited us strategically and included some vital positions. On October 22, Radio Cairo announced that President Sadat had accepted the ceasefire, and in the early hours of October 23, Syria announced its acceptance. In fact, however, it was on the twenty-fourth that the ceasefire was implemented, and by then several last-minute positions had been captured, including parts of the city of Suez, the port of Abadiah, and Jebel Ataka in the south, giving us an unbroken hold on the Ismailia-Gulf of Suez line, and isolating the Third Army and the city of Suez. In the north, Mount Hermon’s Syrian positions were recaptured in the early hours of October 22.

  The fronts were quiet, but the battle for life and recovery continued in the wards of Tel Hashomer Hospital, where I worked days and often throughout the sad nights. Hospital life during a war acquires a pace of its own, being the recipient of casualties of battles—lost and won. Surgeons operated around the clock; relatives and volunteers crowded the corridors. The emotional burden was heavier than the medical, and each hospital bed harbored a story of human struggle for survival. There were days when the entire meaning of the war lay in the success of a skin graft, or the failure of an eye-saving operation. Time was measured by infusion bottles and blood transfusions; decisions in the surgical wards weighed tons; and the strain and tension taxed us all. I saw my father several times, and we talked as often as we could. Our lives ran parallel, sharing an agony and a final victory, and there was no need for many words.

  If I indulged my readers and myself in somewhat detailed war accounts, I did so because no sooner was the war with the Arabs over than the “Jewish wars” began. The question of “what had happened to us,” referring to the outbreak of the war, was on everybody’s lips and minds, and accusations, bitterness, and blame crept into most of the answers. To avoid being seen as an apologist, I preferred to give my father’s account of the events, from his point of view, as expressed and written by him. In his account there was no apology, and in his own eyes he was not responsible for the desperate, disastrous events of the first days of the war.

  Many people—at given times, “the people” themselves—thought differently. The wave of victorious pride that lifted him high in 1967, attributing to him personally achievements which at times he deserved by proxy only, plunged now to a depth of malice and hurt self-pride and turned him into a scapegoat for all the mishaps that befell us. “Dayan lost his nerve”; “Dayan suffered a nervous breakdown” were statements rather than rumors, and when some of the statements bordered on hysteria, there was no way to deny, discuss, or examine them. Bereaved parents wanted an answer, war victims demanded explanations, generals reproached each other, and the appointment of an inquiry commission, chaired by Supreme Court Justice Agranat, did only little to calm the heated spirits.

  I watched my father in his pain, and he did not try to hide it. He was not equipped to handle hysteria and avoided blaming others. Again, he stood alone, backed only by Golda, who rejected his offer to resign, and waited patiently for the results of the inquiry commission. He was busy negotiating the disengagement agreements, in which Dov participated as well, and with the surge of protest movements, he was quite concerned about the coming elections. To remain as Minister of Defense was basically his wish, but the decision was not entirely in his hands. The Prime Minister, the party, the electorate, and the outcome of the Agranat Commission, would all help determine his political future.

  Golda Meir was reelected to lead the party by a large majority, and she made it clear that she intended to offer my father the Defense portfolio in her next cabinet. The party went along with her decision with mixed feelings. Many of the Labor delegates carried placards saying: “Dayan go home,” but they refrained from opposing Golda. The electorate reduced the strength of the Labor Party by five percent, giving it seven fewer seats in the Knesset (49 out of 120).

  The elections were over, but the public was not pacified. It demanded a change, a change in policy and in leadership, in concept and in personalities. The Yom Kippur leaders were stigmatized, and if it fell to my father to be the symbol of the mishap and the target for demonstrators, it would soon spread to others. Golda sensed this. She presented a new cabinet, with my father and Peres representing Rafi in it, but could not stand the pressure from within. Her own ministers suggested that the nation had lost its confidence in this “war government,” and she subsequently resigned in April 1974. This automatically meant the resignation of the whole government. A new cabinet was sworn in, with Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister and Shimon Peres as Minister of Defense. My father was out, with a certain feeling of relief for a while. He did need time off, and made it very clear that he was not retiring from political life. The Agranat investigation had found no fault in the way he had carried out his duties as Defense Minister; most of the blame fell on the military echelons. Four intelligence officers were relieved of their posts, including the Chief of Intelligence. General Shmuel Gonen, who was in charge of the Southern Command, was suspended from active duty, and the commission recommended that the term of office of Lieutenant General Elazar, the Chief of Staff, be “terminated.” The full Agranat report was not made public, but my father was satisfied with the partial publication. His integrity was never doubted, but it did help him resume some degree of peace of mind. The emotional damage, the piercing pain he felt when widows and bereaved parents shouted “Murderer” at him, could never be removed; it added a fresh scar to the many his body had received, an undeserved scar that was never to heal.

  I stayed in the hospital for a few more weeks, as long as my services were of use. Accusations against my father were reaching me through the back door, in the mail, in staring eyes and occasional remarks, as well as in hostile media attention. The hospital was my escape, and making myself useful was a form of therapy. Dov was away much of the time, in “Africa” with Arik for a while, and in the Egypt–Israeli KM 101 talks, which resulted ultimately in a disengagement agreement. War had brought us together in 1967, and war kept us apart now, and we took for granted that national events and demands always have priority over personal whims and desires.

  I did miss him and, even more, needed him, and the fact that words and sentiments that needed to be said and expressed were left in abeyance in his absence only added to my chagrin. The hospital was soon able to accommodate civilians, and among the patients in the internal ward was David Ben-Gurion. On December 1, 1973, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. My father visited him before the end, but the old man was only partially conscious and could not communicate. Although Father had not been close to Ben-Gurion during the last few years of his life, his death orphaned him in a way. It is difficult to define their relationship as friendship, yet the old man’s absence only emphasized my father’s aloneness. After seven years in the Defense Ministry, Father was a civilian, contributing occasionally to parliamentary life, and resuming his archaeological pursuits. From center-stage he was tossed to the sidelines, with time on his hands to write, speak, and meditate, things he was capable of doing very well, even though he did not find them totally satisfying.

  Did I reproach him in any way, he asked me when we sat together, as we often did, on a sunny winter morning in the garden.

  “Not more than you reproach yourself,” I said in a low voice. He was hard of hearing and definitely selective in what he took in. There was compassion and love in my eyes, and he knew how deeply I felt for him during and after the war. “I only wish you would get angry more often. Calm and acceptance don’t suit you. When you are on edge, you may seem less ‘civilized,’ but you put up a better fight.”

  He s
ighed. He wanted to change the topic. He told me, not for the first time, how he went to Golda twice and offered to resign. How she wouldn’t hear of it. He was formalizing something while I was speaking about a missing spark. He spoke of Agranat, I spoke about Moshe Dayan—only it wasn’t the same Moshe Dayan. For a while now, there had been a screen between us, thin to transparency, but spreading and thickening like a cataract, protecting and comforting him like a cocoon in the wrongest of time for incubation.