come tough at that age, stayed that way. This may be the explanation for the public image of eternal youth, an image which had not changed by the time he was fifty- two, and which will not disappear until he dies. (A few months ago I picked up a young soldier who was hitchhiking to his base. On the way we argued about Dayan. And when I mentioned that the General was fifty-two years old, the soldier was so shocked he offered to bet his monthly salary that Dayan was not over thirty-five.)
There is something strikingly adolescent about everything Dayan does. He personally taught his three children, including the girl, how to handle a rifle, a skill hardly necessary for the pampered children of Zahala, a fashionable Tel Aviv suburb. He encouraged his older son to join the Naval Commandos and his younger son to become a paratrooper. Although he never devoted much other time to his children, he managed to take them, while they were quite small, on long desert treks. He is famous in the country for several typical exploits. Once, when he found the shortest way to his home blocked by barrels the traffic police had put up, he simply got out of his car, in a full general's uniform, removed the barrels and went on. An amateur archeologist, like many Israelis, Dayan used to break the Israeli law which forbids people to remove archeological objects, and not only occasionally, like other amateurs. During the Sinai War, when an archeological site was discovered by an advancing army unit, he had the military police close off the whole area until he had time to dig and remove some finds. His home in Zahala is wellstocked with ancient columns and jugs, each a reminder of law-breaking, a fact which does not prevent the Minister of Defense from having official receptions there between digs. "Like a child, he is proud of the negative publicity he gets as an enfant terrible," Yael Dayan has written.
When quite young, Dayan married Ruth Schwartz-the daughter of a well-established Jerusalem lawyer. She was a classmate of his in the Nahalal school. But there never