Word: dayan
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...Dayan is as much a sabra as an Israeli can be. He was born on May 20, 1915, in the first Jewish kibbutz established in Palestine. When he was seven, his Russian émigré parents moved the family to a moshav, a cooperative farm where, unlike a kibbutz, the members own their land. Moshe liked both farming and books, but he soon found himself learning the arts of war as well. The British sent him to prison in 1939 for belonging to a unit of the Haganah, the Jewish underground...
...work as a scout for the Australians against the Vichy French in Syria. During a fire fight, a bullet drove his binoculars into the left side of his face, destroying an eye, which he has kept covered ever since with a Hathaway-style black patch. Despite his wound, Dayan was eventually back in action, leading the Haganah commandos in 1948. Soon after, he took command of the Jerusalem front in Israel's first war with the Arabs. In 1953, he was made Chief of Staff, and he taught the Israeli army his uncompromising philosophy of battle?speed, emphasis on surprise...
...been in the army. Against determined opposition, he broke up the large dairy cooperatives, which he felt were not operating in the nation's best economic interest. He seemed on the way to eventual premiership. Then, when Ben-Gurion resigned and left the ruling Mapai party, Dayan followed; he became a Knesset member of B-G's splinter Rafi party...
Fiercely independent, and an outspoken iconoclast, Dayan was a success at every job he tried. But the profession of arms is his first love. He went back into uniform last week with calm confidence. If he had any complaint, it was that the desk-bound duties of a Defense Minister kept him from spending as much time as he would have liked with his troops; there was too much paper work waiting in his command bunker in Jerusalem. Even so, at least once a day he motored, flew or helicoptered to inspect some military field position. He wanted...
Disappointed Troopers. To the south of Israel, Nasser's soldiers were having considerably more trouble sticking to their guns. By Wednesday night, the third day of war, all Israel brimmed with the sense of victory. As Dayan's chief of staff, Major General Yitzhak Rabin, summed it up succinctly: "We have inflicted almost total destruction on the Egyptian army, delivered a crushing blow to the Jordanian army, captured most of the relevant parts of the Sinai Peninsula and the west bank of the Jordan, and we have destroyed almost totally the air forces of four countries." Eager young Israeli paratroopers...