YAEL DAYAN 1939-2024

At 0815 hours on 5 June [1967] we gambled all we had. What for other countries would have been defeat, for us would mean extermination. It was not possible for us to lose the war and survive and each man carried this knowledge in his heart when we moved west.

Yael Dayan wrote Israel Journal: June 1967 in two weeks, in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. She wrote it in English. To this day, I would put it in the top fifty books ever written on war.

Yael Dayan

Ms. Dayan was the daughter of Moshe Dayan, who as Army chief of staff and later Minister of Defense, saved the fledgling nation of Israel twice (in the ’56 Sinai Campaign against Egypt and the Six Day War of 1967 against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan), as well as nearly losing everything in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Yael’s father, Moshe Dayan

Yael had become something of a celebrity herself, at age twenty-eight, as a novelist and journalist. She was in Athens in June ’67 when Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, sent a thousand tanks and 100,000 men to Israel’s southern border, vowing to wipe out the Jewish state. Ms. Dayan was then a segen mishne, a second lieutenant, in the Israel Defense Forces. She returned at once and was assigned as a correspondent to the armored division under General Arik Sharon (later Prime Minister) on the Egyptian frontier.

Whatever side you may find yourself on in the current Gaza War, I highly recommend Ms. Dayan’s account of her experiences over those fatal next few days. Israel Journal: June 1967 provides the deep context—historical and political—that seems missing in so much of today’s press coverage. It’s a short read, packed with vivid characters and insights. 

I should add that, whatever literary style I myself may possess, I stole wholesale from Yael Dayan.   

Ms. Dayan was a lifelong and passionate supporter of the idea of a Palestinian state. She was the first member of the Knesset to meet with Yasser Arafat. She was much criticized, even vilified, for these acts, which she stood by all her life. Neither stopped her from being a fierce patriot for the state of Israel.

Yael Dayan

I interviewed her in 2012 in her office at the City of Tel Aviv for my own book, The Lion’s Gate. I had read all her stuff and was wildly psyched to get her first-person takes on certain incidents and personalities. But to every one of my questions, she answered, “It’s in my book.” I couldn’t get anything more out of her. Finally I said, “Do I have your permission then to paraphrase from your books as if you had answered in-person in this interview?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “I hope you’ll make the stories better.”

I tried, but I couldn’t top her. She was a great one. Yael Dayan. “We will not see her like again.”

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