When we were 13 years old, my friend Xavier wrote to General Moshe Dayan to congratulate him on the victory in the Six-Day War (June 5-10, 1967). A lightning victory for the Israeli army over a coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, loosely supervised by the USSR. Israel responded to the Egyptian army’s movements in the Sinai and the blockade of the port of Eilat; and he won in stunning fashion: he greatly expanded the territory that the UN had approved as the homeland of the Jews and expelled more than 250,000 Palestinians, who ended up in refugee camps.
Moshe Dayan was a charismatic character. Because of his military expertise and his pirate’s eye, he lost fighting with the Allies during World War II. In reality, he took credit as Defense Minister for a plan that Yitzhak Rabin (who would later be the great hope for peace, assassinated by an Israeli fanatic) had devised. Israel’s victory had an impact on Franco’s Spain, where the threat of the “Judeo-Masonic collusion” still resonated and where children a little older than me had participated in the infamous Catholic liturgy of “killing Jews.”
Moshe Dayan responded by letter to Xavier; which impressed all of his friends. We celebrate, euphorically, the success of the Jews. This is how we become, in childhood, supporters of one or the other. As an adult, I read that Dayan, the son of Jews from the tsar’s Ukraine, was the second child to be born (1915) in the Degania Aleph, one of the first kibbutz of the future Israel, located on the shores of the evangelical Lake of Galilee, in a land that some Persians from Beirut sold to the incipient Zionist movement. So the territory did not belong to the Palestinians, as they say: it was administered by the Ottoman Empire. Throughout his life, Dayan, who learned the military trade from a British general, went through phases of an anti-Arab hawk and others of a peacemaking dove. Now, aware of the fragility of his country, surrounded by mortal enemies, he wrote a phrase that summarizes the terrible strategic destiny of Israel: “The enemy must perceive us as a crazy dog, too dangerous to be bothered.”
The savage massacres that the Hamas militias carried out the other day in Israeli territory show that Dayan’s dog is very confused (the internal division has weakened Israel). The cruelty of the massacres also shows that the accumulated unrest in the Gaza Strip, a kind of gigantic prison in which two million Palestinians have been living poorly, has created a very pure hatred. An infinite rage, which can only be calmed by dying and killing at the same time.
Ariel Sharon, in agreement with President George W. Bush, eliminated Jewish colonies from the strip in 2005. He believed he was offering a poisoned gift to the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. The architect of the Jewish evacuation, Dov Weissglas, said it would be “tremendous pressure on the Palestinians.” He argued it with contemptuous irony: “For the first time they have a segment of land with total continuity through which they can wander from one end to the other driving their Ferraris. And the whole world will watch them, not us.” He concluded: “We will negotiate with the Palestinians when they become Finns.” Weissglas was completely wrong. Now Gaza is a trap. If Israel invades it, it will be a hornet’s nest or a massacre. If it does not invade it, Israel will forever cease to be the crazy dog ??that Moshe Dayan recommended.
