Moshe Dayan

May 15, 2012
Succinct biography of the "lone wolf" defense minister during Israel's decisive first campaigns. Bar-On (A Never-Ending Conflict: A Guide to Israeli Military History, 2004, etc.) states from the first sentence of this crisp, selective new biography that "the story of Moshe Dayan is the story of the State of Israel," and thereby, this contains all of its inspiring, problematic and confounding mythology. Dayan (1915-1981), like Israel, was full of contradictions, which were part of his mystique and magnetism. The child of educated Ukrainian immigrants to Palestine committed to eking out a living on one of the earliest kibbutzim in Palestine, Dayan connected first and foremost with the land. His early experience in the farming cooperative involved the moshav, which his "trailblazer" parents forged, draining swamps and enduring Arab reprisals--an experience that would inform his later work as Israel's minister of agriculture and his "lifelong ambivalence toward treatment of the Palestinians." Dayan's fearlessness, which verged on recklessness, characterized his youth, as he learned the basic rules of military field conduct in the fledgling Haganah and lost an eye during an invasion of Syria in 1941, after which he was convinced his military career was over. Occasionally recruited to quell the infighting from the Irgun, he found many of his old colleagues now commanders, and he hitched his star to David Ben-Gurion, who appointed him first as commander of Jerusalem, then head of the Israeli Defense Force, and later defense minister during the Six-Day War. Architect of the doomed reprisals policy along the borders, sidelined and vilified for his role in the Yom Kippur debacle, and unable to accept Palestinian autonomy, Dayan wrestled ceaselessly between hubris and humanity. A sharp, fully fleshed, somewhat biased portrait of "one of the most fascinating and compelling figures to have appeared on Israel's stage."

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June 1, 2012
In the 1960s and 1970s, the audaciousness and sheer brilliance of Israeli military success was often symbolized by Moshe Dayan, whose electric smile and eye patch seemed to radiate confidence, flamboyance, and daring. The man behind the public image was more complex and perhaps more interesting. Bar-On writes with considerable personal knowledge of his subject, having served as Dayan's bureau chief in the Israeli Defense Forces. Using that knowledge as well as extensive archival material, he portrays Dayan as a driven, daring man who frequently felt and acted an outsider despite his achievements as a soldier, politician, and diplomat. Dayan was born on a kibbutz, and he was imbued with a life-long love for the land and those who toiled on it. Yet he found the collective ethos of kibbutz life to be suffocating. As he rose rapidly through the ranks of the military, he frequently clashed with his colleagues and political leaders, who feared his independence and recklessness. In his personal life, his restless spirit led to embarrassing episodes of womanizing. This is a revealing and engrossing account of the life of an often admirable but frustratingly enigmatic man.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)