for Dayan to be a real party leader. When Ben-Gurion broke away from Mapai, on the eve of the 1965 elections, and formed the Rafi party, Dayan joined at the very last moment, just hours before the deadline for submitting the names of the candidates. Since then, he has seldom attended party meetings or even visited his office at party headquarters.

* * *

What produced such a man? What makes him tick? The answer, as close as one can come to it, is a mixture of psychology and Zionist history.

The key may lie in some sentences written, rather innocently, by his daughter Yael: "He is a lonely man who consciously and intentionally chose to be lonely. He himself holds the key to his own prison. Nevertheless, there are chinks in his armor. I believe that he was deeply attached to his mother, my Grandma Devora, even if he was sometimes as impatient toward her as toward anyone else. He did not weep when she died...." Without doubt, Dayan was very close to his mother in childhood, an attachment which may have determined his whole character. He did not have a similarly close relationship with his father, Shmuel Dayan, whom he displaced in the Knesset. When his father recently remarried, Moshe became even more distant toward him.

The boy Moshe, who grew up in the co-operative village Nahalal in the shadow of his mother, was gentle and sensitive. Pictures taken when he was three show him with a sweet, round face, his left eye a bit smaller than the right, a hereditary trait of the Dayan family. It is the face of a boy who later would have become, in a different society, a sentimental man, perhaps an actor, perhaps a poet. (Indeed, until a very late age, he wrote poems, not very good ones, but not very bad either.) After primary school, he went to the agricultural high school. This is rather odd in itself, because it was a school for girls, and Moshe Dayan

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