A portrait of Israel’s first family — and Israel, itself
Moshe Dayan at the White House in 1978. Image by Getty Images/Consolidated News Pictures
By PJ Grisar June 11, 2020
Moshe Dayan was an icon with an eyepatch. He commanded the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, marched victorious through the Lions’ Gate in the 1967 Six Day War and served six prime ministers in matters of war and state.
But he wasn’t alone either in his achievements or his eventual decline. The Dayans, a dynasty of statesmen, movie stars, fashion designers, poets and musicians frequently referred to as the Israeli Kennedys, were Israel’s favorite tabloid subject from the time of the country’s independence until the 2010s.
Anat Goren’s new four-part docuseries “Dayan: The First Family,” now available to stream as part of the Manhattan JCC’s Israel Film Festival, outlines why three generations of the family captured the Israeli imagination. It’s a portrait of a legacy of parental neglect, mental illness and nearly nonexistent boundaries with the press, made more compelling by Goren’s incredible access to the surviving family and a glut of documentary footage, photographs and home movies.
Yet the series surpasses its subject to tell a broader story of Israel. By tracking one family in the public eye, it neatly illustrates the generational divides and ideological differences that carried the Jewish state from its prehistory to today.
Each generation readily stands in for some trend in national life. Through the story of Dayan’s immigrant parents, Shmuel and Devorah — members of Israel’s first kibbutz, Degania Alef — the first episode shows how bootstrap Socialism served as the bedrock of much of early Zionist dogma. (The pair ultimately left for a farming community in Nahalal when the kibbutzniks insist on raising their child communally).
With Dayan and Ruth, his first wife and the mother of his three children, the series shows how the communal spirit of the early Zionist settlers yielded Israel’s first fighting generation, a group that, in the words of Dayan’s nephew Yehonatan Geffen, “lived for national goals and collective ideas,” and “weren’t interested in personal salvation.”
As the third generation came of age in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they spurned that attitude. Dayan and Ruth’s sons, the actor and filmmaker Assi Dayan and the sculptor Udi Dayan, place their own self-discovery — often drug-fueled — at the core of their lives, and questioned the sacrifices demanded by their government. In the instance of the Dayan sons, the series portrays this inner journey as often coming at the expense of their children. The change is starkly demonstrated by Assi Dayan’s surrender of his son Lior to a kibbutz, effectively welcoming the very practice his grandparents uprooted their lives to prevent.
It’s no mistake that the Dayans commanded so much of the public interest. Public relations, the journalist Uri Avnery argues in the series, was Moshe Dayan’s real job and greatest legacy. Dayan was known to stage moments to secure his reputation as both a hero and man with the common touch: His victorious entrance into Jerusalem during the Six Day War was, for instance, carefully orchestrated to be caught on camera. But his ongoing PR campaign allowed the family to be a target of the country’s frustration while at the same time providing a vast platform for his sons’ rebellions. Underlying Assi and Udi’s much-publicized grappling with their father was a familial distance that was always present in the salacious headlines — which covered marital affairs, drug arrests and outrageous nude magazine spreads — but was rarely examined with any degree of empathy.
After the 1941 incident that claimed his eye and left shrapnel in the frontal lobe of his brain, Dayan was never the same, Ruth says in the series. (Dayan scaled the roof of a Lebanese police station, then was shot through binoculars by a French sniper.) But the resulting change in his behavior, which the series never clearly details, was only the start of the public and personal difficulties that would plague him and complicate his family’s life.
The unspoken specter of depression haunted the family, leading Dayan’s sister to take her own life and his sons to develop crippling drug addictions. The general had many affairs, which Ruth tolerated along with her children. But upon Dayan’s 1973 marriage to Rachel Korem, his sons bristled at his choice to leave their mother — especially when it led to their disinheritance.
When the 1973 Yom Kippur war proved to be a pyrrhic victory, ending in nearly 3,000 Israeli deaths, public opinion soured, declaring Dayan a murderer and blaming him for the IDF’s lack of preparedness. While other people’s kids protested him on the streets, his own son Assi was busy denouncing him in print and on television for not resigning after Golda Meier rejected his proposal to pull back from the Suez Canal. At the same time, Yehonatan Geffen was writing the first major exposé about the failures of the war, and candidly examining the concerns that dogged his and so many other Israeli families — PTSD, mental illness and the dubious value of patriotism.
These days, the strains of being a Dayan have lost their appeal for the family’s younger members. Dayan’s grandchildren, many of whom are interviewed in the series, have largely opted to make a break from the family’s ubiquity in the media and politics, with some leaving Israel for the United States and Thailand.
But while the Dayan family’s public sparring and scandals track with much of Israel’s own generational rifts and play into a fair amount of its popular culture, there is at least one way in which they remain distinct. The Dayans have stayed a determinedly liberal family — with the exception of a few more distant relations — even as Israel’s politics have shifted to the right. Moshe Dayan, a career general who first advanced due to his Workers’ Party membership, was often dovish and — if his family is to be believed — spent the remainder of his political career after 1973 trying to atone for the morass of the Yom Kippur War.
He was expelled from the Labor party when he served as the minister of foreign affairs to Menachem Begin. He accepted the position under a Likud leader in the hopes of advancing compromise, helping engineer the Camp David Accords, but regularly chaffed at the party’s policies, resigning from his post when Begin’s party moved to increase settlements in the West Bank and so blow up his hopes for peace talks with the Palestinians. His daughter, Yael, a novelist and journalist, echoed her father’s own meetings with the pro-PLO leaders, becoming the first member of the Knesset to meet with Yasser Arafat to discuss prospects for peace. Aviv Geffen, Dayan’s great-nephew, is an eyeliner-smeared rockstar whose music skewers the IDF and deals frankly with mental illness. Ruth, now 103, expresses her dismay at the country her great-grandchildren are inheriting and its ever-retreating prospect of peace.
“I’m part of this country,” she says towards the documentary’s end. “But I’m not a Zionist.”
But the documentary series retains some optimism. While the threat of annexation and the groundswell of Israeli nationalism rattle what many of the Dayans stand for, by exiting the political arena, the family has been able to work on itself.
In a light moment, Lior follows his toddler son out of a building and tells him to get acquainted with the camera “the most important instrument of the Dayan family.” When the bashful tot turns away from the documentary crew to face an antique cannon, his father says. “Ok get acquainted with the cannon instead. It’s either the cannon or the camera, Arad. One of them.”
While a good line, that dichotomy no longer applies. Even for the Dayans, the choice between a life in the military or in front of a camera —in fact, the two were never that seperate — can be avoided.
By the end of Goron’s series, we sense a page is being turned. The next generation will not be so myopic as their patriarch, or the sons that he primed for absentee parenting.
The Dayans are finally becoming a family that functions. We can only hope that Israel once again follows their lead.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected]
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