picture hung in a lower Manhattan shop window or appeared on the cover of a magazine in West Berlin, everyone knew the patch and its owner. (Ben-Gurion's shock of white hair, Castro's beard set them apart in the same way.) Yet Dayan is not happy with the patch.
He has every right to be proud of it, reflecting as it does his long service to the nation. He was wounded in 1941, when he acted as a liaison officer with the Australian forces advancing into Lebanon during the campaign of the British and the Free French to evict the Vichy regime from Syria. Dayan and some other Haganah members were with an advance unit of the Australian Army which captured bridges and outposts along the way. After taking a police building, Dayan went to the roof and looked through his binoculars, with typical nonchalance, at the enemy still surrounding the building. A French sniper hit the binoculars, which smashed into his left eyesocket and stuck there. A comrade tried to remove them but only made the wound worse; throughout, Dayan never lost consciousness. For years later, Dayan consulted world-famous specialists, who tried to fit him with an artificial eye, but because of the wound in the socket, this was impossible. Dayan still suffers a great deal from this injury: When he wears the patch, the warm air behind it presses on the wound, causing him irritation and pain. As a result, he does not wear it at home or in the office-and suffers the instinctive reaction of visitors who see him without it.
Thus, his eyepatch is a source of conflict for Dayan. He knows very well that the patch is of great publicity value to him, and he takes advantage of this unhesitatingly. Nonetheless, he is sensitive about it, longs for the moment he can take it off and, therefore, hates meetings, conferences, lectures-any contact with people which compels him to put it on. When a magazine once printed a cover portrait of Dayan emphasizing the left side of his face, he took it as an insult, yet there is not one politician in the country who does not envy his trademark.
There are other physical paradoxes. In Israel, Dayan is