When we were 13 years old, my friend Xavier wrote to General Moshe Dayan congratulating him on his victory in the Six Day War (June 5-10, 1967). A lightning victory of the Israeli army over a coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, vaguely supervised by the USSR. Israel attacked in response to the movements of the Egyptian army in the Sinai and the blockade of the port of Elat; and he won in a flash: he enormously expanded the territory that the UN had approved as the homeland of the Jews and expelled more than 250,000 Palestinians, who ended up confined in refugee camps.
Moshe Dayan was a charismatic character, due to his military expertise and his pirate’s eye, lost fighting with the Allies during the Second World War. In fact, he appropriated as Minister of Defense the merit of a plan that had been devised by Yitzhak Rabin (who would later be the great hope for peace, killed by an Israeli fanatic). Israel’s victory had an impact on Franco’s Spain, where the threat of the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” still resounded and where children a little older than me had celebrated, during Holy Week, the infamous Catholic liturgy of “killing Jews “.
Moshe Dayan replied by letter to Xavier; and this made a great impact on all his friends. We celebrated, euphoric, the success of the Jews. This is how we become, as children, supporters of one or the other. As an adult, I read that Dayan, the son of some Jews from the tsar’s Ukraine, was the second child born (1915) in the Alef Deanery, one of the first kibbutzim of the future Israel, located on the banks of the evangelical Lake of Galilee, on a piece of land that Persians from Beirut sold to the nascent Zionist movement. At that time the territory did not belong to the Palestinians, as they say, but was administered by the Ottoman Empire. Throughout his life, Dayan, who learned the military trade with a British general, went through phases of anti-Arab hawk and others of peacemaking dove. However, knowing the fragility of his country, surrounded by mortal enemies, he left a sentence written that summarizes the terrible strategic fate of Israel: “The enemy must perceive us as a mad dog, too dangerous to be disturbed “.
The savage massacres that Hamas militias carried out the other day in Israeli territory show that Dayan’s dog was very clueless (the internal division has weakened Israel). The cruelty of the killings also shows that the unrest accumulated in the Gaza Strip, a kind of gigantic prison where two million Palestinians have been languishing, has manufactured 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, removed the Jewish settlements from the strip in 2005, convinced that it offered a poisoned gift to the Palestinian Authority of Mahmud Abbas. The architect of the Jewish evacuation, Dov Weissglas, said it would be “tremendous pressure on the Palestinians.” And he argued it with disdainful irony: “For the first time they have a segment of land with total continuity where they can wander from one end to the other driving their Ferraris. And the whole world will watch over them, not us.” He concluded: “We will negotiate with the Palestinians when they become Finns.” Weissglas dodged completely. Now Gaza is a trap. If Israel invades it, it will be a vesper or a massacre. If it is not invaded, Israel ceases forever to be the mad dog that Moshe Dayan recommended.
