He was born in 1915, during World War I. His parents, both immigrants from the Ukraine, met in Degania A, the first kibbutz in Palestine, and married against the decision of the kibbutz. (At the time it was still believed that marriage and child-bearing, like everything else, were proper subjects for communal decision; this orthodox attitude has since been modified.) When Moshe, the son of Shmuel and Devora Kitaigrodsky, was born, the situation between kibbutz and its Arab neighbors was tense. In fact, he was named Moshe in memory of a neighbor, Moshe Barsky, a member of the commune who was killed by Arabs while riding home from a distant Jewish village, bringing medicine to his father. When Moshe was five, his parents left Degania and joined Nahalal, preferring a moshav to a kibbutz. (While in a kibbutz everything is communally owned and operated, and the children live in the communal children's home, the basic family unit is preserved in a moshav. Members have individual houses, where they live with their children, surrounded by their own livestock and their own small plots. The main production areas are operated by the co-operative, which also markets all produce and operates the co-operative store.)
An old story has it that a young kibbutz member, when asked how he views the Arab problem, answers, "Through the sights of a rifle." This is how a youngster like Dayan, growing up in Nahalal, on the road from Haifa to Nazareth, must have seen the problem, too. Neighborly relations with the Arab villages in the vicinity were non-existent. Trouble over land and employment in the area was quite frequent; Arab shepherds tended to let their flocks graze on fields the settlers had brought forth with much sweat. Similar disputes had happened in Palestine since Cain slew Abel, causing bloodshed from the beginning of recorded history. But when the shepherds were Arabs, and the tillers of the soil were Jews, these occurrences became impregnated with national pride. The settlers were not only upset by the destruction the goats caused, but they