assignment for a dashing young commander at the height of a war.
He achieved his first great victory when he conquered the town of Lydda, nearly by accident. Taking the wrong turn, his motorized battalion dashed into the town, wildly shooting in all directions, and swamped the place before anyone realized what was happening. It was a great success, but it hardly established his reputation. His carefree, debonair way of making war never left Moshe. He was accused of mismanaging the battle of Kharatia in the Negev because his troop of jeeps and armored cars, an imitation of the by-now famous Samson's Foxes, never reached their objective, held up first by an armored car stuck in a narrow wadi. Waiting for it to be dragged out, Dayan lay down to sleep for a few minutes; when the time came, his soldiers couldn't find him among the bushes, losing valuable time. Subsequently, he was accused of failing to capture Bethlehem and Hebron when given the job to do so. In the latter part of the war he was appointed military commander of Jerusalem, a more diplomatic than military job, because at the time fighting in that sector had died down and negotiations with King Abdallah were in progress.
The end of the war might have brought an end to Dayan's military career, as it did to the army career of many of the more outstanding commanders. But Ben-Gurion, who was re-organizing the army to eliminate left-wing influences, decided otherwise. His disbanding of the Palmach command, a carryover from the old Haganah days, had just outraged the veterans and created a national controversy, never resolved. (Even today, it is an Israeli joke to get up after a lecture, during the question period, and ask the one question guaranteed to bring the house down: "Why was the Palmach disbanded?" It is a question which has no parallel, except, perhaps, the Lavon Affair question: "Who gave the order?") Ben-Gurion thought Dayan