of duty as Chief of Staff and left the army. Some malicious tongues whispered that Ben-Gurion preferred to stand alone in the reviewing stand during the first Independence Day parade after the war.
What could a man like Dayan do outside the army? It was a bad time for him. At first he tried to study, listening to lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sitting next to his daughter, another student, but he was not really interested. In 1959, he was included in the Mapai list for parliament, replacing his father, and was appointed Minister of Agriculture. In this post he managed to be as controversial as ever, without being considered very successful. The two ministries which he really wanted, Defense or Foreign, were held by members of the old guard, who in Israel, even more than anywhere else, are loath to turn over their posts to the younger people before being compelled to do so by the Divine Harvester.
The decline of Dayan was only a manifestation of the decline of activism as such. The retreat of the army from Sinai and Gaza following the astounding military victory of 1956 was a deep shock to the Israelis, intensified by the mere twenty-four hours between the victory announcement of Ben-Gurion, proclaiming the "Third Kingdom of Israel" and his speech announcing, in a broken voice, that he had acceded to President Eisenhower's request and agreed to the retreat. (The Third Kingdom referred to was meant to draw a line from the First Kingdom, that of David in biblical times; through the Second Kingdom, that of the Hasmonean Dynasty after the Maccabee Revolt against the successors of Alexander the Great, to a greater Israel of today. These terms correspond in time to the concept of First, Second and Third Temples.) The retreat seemed to show that military means had become obsolete as an instrument of policy in the Middle East. The fruits of victory-the opening of the Tiran Straits and the continued quiet on the southern frontier-seemed small indeed compared to the magnitude of the military success.