From Retaliation to Open Bridges: Moshe Dayan's Evolving Approach toward the Population in Counter Insurgency

Abstract

Moshe Dayan was Israel's most influential and original soldier. He shaped the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF's) culture first as chief of staff in the 1956 campaign and later as defense minister during both the conventional wars of 1967 and 1973. However, before, between, and during these large conventional engagements, the IDF conducted ‘Current Security Operations,’ small military operations against Arab insurgency. After 1967, the IDF faced the challenge of controlling the population in West Bank and Gaza. Moshe Dayan was instrumental in setting the policy toward the population from the foundation of the IDF to the crucial time after 1967; his ideas on and practices in counterinsurgency form a tradition in themselves. Dayan's attitude toward the population developed first under the mentorship years of Charles Orde Wingate, the British Army, and the Palmach (the Jewish strike units) during the British mandate in Palestine; then the reprisals period in the early 1950s, subsequently as a reporter and an observer in Vietnam in 1966, and finally in the ‘open bridges policy,’ developed by Dayan immediately after the Six-Day War.