would strengthen Mapai influence over the army and also be loyal to him personally. He appointed him chief of the southern command, and later, just before resigning for the first time, Chief of Staff. It was then that Dayan became a public figure in his own right and the symbol of the Israeli Army. As commander, he gave the army an aggressive spirit, a doctrine of "when in doubt, attack,'' a cavalry spirit in the tradition of Rommel and Patton. On the other hand, he has not been an organizing force, and his influence on teamwork was disruptive.
As a political leader Dayan was the apostle of "activism," believing as he does, that peace is an illusory objective and that the Israeli-Arab conflict will last for a long time. His attitude leads inevitably to the idea of preventive war whenever the Arabs are in the process of gaining the upper hand in the arms race or on the verge of combining forces. While Dayan is not much more loyal to Ben-Gurion than he is to anyone else, he can be considered a direct successor, pupil and heir to Ben-Gurion, a Joshua to BenGurion's Moses. Believing himself to be devoid of any ideology, he is nevertheless steeped in the philosophy of Ben-Gurion, so much so that he needn't be conscious of this orientation in order to act on it. Israelis associate Dayan with a Hebrew slang slogan which can be roughly translated into English as "bang and be done with it." This is the doctrine which led to the retaliation raids of 1953-56, and the Sinai Campaign, which turned Dayan into an international figure. The victory of 1956 established him as a great general. Actually, from a purely military point of view, it was a faulty campaign, not to be compared to the brilliant campaign of 1967, in which a vastly improved Israeli Army, without allies or foreign help, beat three Arab armies instead of one and reached the southern tip of Sinai in half the time.
* * *
Immediately after the 1956 war, Dayan finished his tour