Activism ceased to be fashionable in Israel for nearly ten years, until the sudden crisis immediately preceding the 1967 war.
In 1963 the crudest blow befell Dayan. Without telling anyone beforehand, Ben-Gurion resigned. Dayan, whose political fortunes were bound up with those of BenGurion, was left out in the cold. Ben-Gurion could easily have managed to establish him securely in the Ministry of Defense before resigning himself. But he did not care anymore. He was disillusioned with Dayan, as he was with everyone else, because Dayan failed to support him vigorously in his request to re-open the Lavon Affair. Thus, Dayan, still the thankless Minister of Agriculture, was left without any political support. After a time, he resigned, an unusual thing in Israel, hinting vaguely at disagreements with Eshkol.
While Ben-Gurion set about disrupting the Mapai party and setting up his own party, which Dayan joined only at the last possible moment and then under duress, Dayan became more and more impatient. As his daughter tells it, "When political life relegated him to the back benches of the opposition, he became irritable and restless. He was born for action, for being in the center of events, for showing people the way."
The new Raft party, representing eight per cent of the vote, was hardly the center of events, nor was it showing the people any well defined way. Prospects seemed bleak indeed. Out of sheer boredom, one suspects, and in order again to attract some attention, Dayan went to Viet Nam as a widely publicized war correspondent. His daughter goes on: "He found some release in his trip to Viet Nam. When he came back, the question arose again, ‘What to do now?'."
The answer was provided by Gamal Abd-el-Nasser. Immediately before the crisis, in a public opinion poll in which people were asked who they would prefer as Prime Minister, Dayan got only fourteen per cent (a not very