Moshe Dayan

Moshe Dayan was an Israeli military commander and politician whose black eyepatch made him one of the most recognizable figures of the twentieth-century Middle East. Born on May 20, 1915, on Kibbutz Degania Alef on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he was the first child born on a kibbutz and was raised in Nahalal, the country's first moshav.

He joined the Haganah at age fourteen and served alongside British forces in the 1941 invasion of Vichy-controlled Syria. A French sniper's bullet struck the binoculars he was using, driving glass and metal into his left eye socket and forcing the eyepatch he wore for the rest of his life. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War he commanded the defense of Jewish settlements in the Jordan Valley and later the Jerusalem front.

As Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 1953 to 1958, he reshaped the army into a swifter, more aggressive force and led it through the 1956 Sinai Campaign. Elected to the Knesset in 1959, he served as Minister of Agriculture and then, on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War, was appointed Defense Minister. Israel's capture of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem made him a national hero.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War badly tarnished his reputation amid charges of complacent intelligence assessments, and he resigned in 1974. As Foreign Minister under Menachem Begin he helped negotiate the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt. He died of cancer in Tel Aviv on October 16, 1981.

The name Moshe is the Hebrew form of Moses, traditionally derived from the verb mashah, to draw out. He bore the masculine form.