Syrian campaign; he went straight from prison into action. He lost his left eye on June 7, at the age of twenty-six, exactly twenty-six years before the soldiers under his direction reached the Suez Canal at the height of the Six-Day War.
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Dayan's great hour might have come when the War of Liberation broke out at the end of 1947. During its first days his brother Zohar was killed while leading his men into action against a Druze ambush.
But oddly enough, during the 1948 war his star almost fell. His was not one of the great success stories of that war. The commanders of the new army, all of them Haganah veterans, never considered Moshe one of them, perhaps because he was a Mapai man in a closely knit group composed almost exclusively of left-wing officers. Also, he was not considered an outstanding tactician or responsible commander.
Thus, in the beginning of the war, no real command was given him. The high command, at long last, sent him on a rather undefined assignment to the Northern Front. There, as usual, he defied orders and acted on his own. Once he so outraged a local commander-one of the few foreign Jewish officers who had come as volunteers and held command posts in the new army-that Dayan was sentenced to be shot for insubordination. Only with great difficulty was this officer, a South African, convinced that this was not quite the way things were done in the Haganah army.
In the middle of the war, Dayan was sent abroad, on a purely decorative mission. The American Colonel David "Mickey" Marcus, also one of the foreign volunteers in the army, had been accidentally shot by a sentry at night. Dayan was sent to represent the Israeli government at the funeral in the United States, hardly an appropriate