The eulogy famed Israeli military commander Moshe Dayan delivered for Roi Rotberg on April 30, 1956, sixty-nine years ago today, has been called “the defining speech of Zionism.” Like most things having to do with Zionism, it is complicated, at once aspirational and combative, lofty and edgy. And like the most memorable valedictions, it is mercifully short: 285 words in Hebrew, or thirteen words longer than the Gettysburg Address. The two speeches are united by more than just brevity, though. In both, grief springs from the fissure between a nation’s aspirations and its realities.
“It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood,” Dayan, then the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said as mourners at the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the border with Gaza laid Rotberg, who had been ambushed the day before by Palestinian militants, to rest. The rage of a penned-in Palestinian populace did not surprise him; the arrogant passivity of Israel did. “How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?”
Nahal Oz was one of the communities in southern Israel targeted by Hamas on October 7. Fifteen of its residents were killed, another eight kidnapped. As they mourned, as they rightly raged against the Netanyahu administration, Israelis remembered what Dayan had said. “He intended to eulogize a single fallen comrade, but in doing so, he penned an ethos, succinct and brutal, defiant and tragic,” said Yochai Maital on Israel Story, a podcast he helped create, “that has, over the decades, been adopted by both the right and the left, both of whom saw in it an ideological rallying cry.”
The journalist Amir Tibon, who writes for Haaretz, survived the Hamas attack on Nahal Oz. His new book, The Gates of Gaza, is imbued with the horror of that day—and the historical context that, much as one might want to avoid it, demands recognition from perpetrator and victim alike. Discussing the Dayan eulogy with NPR, Tibon captured its full complexity. Dayan delivers “a radical message that shows some deep understanding of the tragedy that the Palestinians went through,” Tibon says.
But at the same time, Dayan, the flinty warrior, goes on to caution that “if we lay down our sword for even one second, we will be killed. So it becomes a very dark and pessimistic speech.”
If that makes no sense, then dark congratulations are in order, for you have grasped the maddening, irresolvable contradictions that animate the Middle East.
“It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood.”
Rotberg had come from Tel Aviv, where he was born in 1935. At seventeen, he volunteered for the Nahal Brigade, a combination of military and agricultural service that erected farming settlements in defensive positions along Israel’s borders, to prevent cross-border raids by Palestinian fedayeen—and to prepare for war against Egypt, Lebanon, and other hostile neighbors.
After his service was over, Rotberg decided to settle at Nahal Oz, a kibbutz founded in 1951 on the site of the former Palestinian village Khirbet al-Wahidi. Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist, editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and a fierce critic of Israel, has written that Nahal Oz had a single purpose: “to harass Palestinian farmers who had been driven out of their villages and had become refugees in Gaza.” The Israelis contend that they were the ones who were being harassed.
Rotberg was in charge of security at Nahal Oz. He lived there with his wife and young son, Boaz. He was 21 on the morning of April 29, 1956, when he saw intruders in the settlement’s agricultural fields. He “rode toward them to drive them away, as he had several times in the past,” Anita Shapira writes in her history of Israel. “But this time the harvesters disappeared and were replaced by armed men who shot [Rotberg], smashed in his skull, and dragged his body into the Gaza Strip. When [United Nations] observers returned the body to Israel, it was clear that it had been abused.”
It was pure coincidence that Dayan was at Nahal Oz on April 29; he had arrived the evening before, ahead of a double wedding. After he learned of Rotberg’s killing, Dayan went into a cottage to write a tribute to the fallen youth. It took him half an hour.
The kibbutzniks gathered before Rotberg’s open grave on April 30. Present on the scene was Leon Uris, future author of Exodus, the bestselling, hyper-Zionist saga about the founding of Israel. “There were no tears on that sunbaked mound, no hatred,” he wrote, according to his biographer, Ira B. Nadel. “Everyone knew his job and repeated a silent vow to never quit.”
As the kibbutzniks clustered around him, Dayan began to speak. “Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered,” he said. “The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him, and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow.”
“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today,” he continued. “Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”
Dayan then delivered this eulogy on Israeli radio the following day. “But something was missing,” writes Omer Bartov, an Israeli historian. “Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors… [He] knew well what the Israeli public could accept.”
Dayan at once sympathized with Palestinian animus and sought to punish its expressions at every step. He had learned counterinsurgency strategies, the military historian Eitan Shamir has written, from Yitzhak Sadeh, a gifted Russian military officer who helped found the elite Haganah branch known as the Palmach, and Orde Wingate, the idiosyncratic British officer from the Mandate period who favored unconventional methods and endorsed retribution against civilians as a counterinsurgency tactic.
“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”
Even before October 7, Dayan’s speech was invoked as a referendum on what the Jewish state was becoming throughout Israel’s drift to the political and religious right under current prime minister Netanyahu—a drift that began in the final years of Dayan’s life, when the inveterate warrior emerged as an unlikely peacemaker.
Writing in Al-Quds al-Arabi in 2014, Wadi’h ‘Awawda praised Dayan for “rare Israeli frankness” about having turned Gaza into a “Palestinian ghetto.” At the time, the Israel Defense Forces were pummeling the Strip as part of Operation Protective Edge, in response to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket fire. In justifying the operation, Netanyahu said that he would “not allow Israel’s citizens to live in this reality,” but that reality persisted for people on both side of the border—and still does.
Eight years after Protective Edge—eight more years of tit and tat, and so much blood—the Israeli writer Daniel Gordis saw another meaning entirely in Dayan’s response to Rotberg’s death: evidence that “the sword will consume forever,” as he put it. Israel could never give up its military vigilance. The peacemaker was always second. Four months later, as if to prove his very point, Israel launched a three-day campaign of airstrikes in Gaza, a preview of what was to come, on a much grander scale, in the final months of 2023.
The reality that Dayan understood, and which October 7 tragically underscored, is that the proximity of Israelis and Palestinians cannot be wished away. No technology, no accord, can erase the fact that they are neighbors. “There is simply no way around it: unless there is a Palestinian state that enables the Palestinians to live in dignity and free from external control, Israel itself will never be truly secure,” said Trita Parsi, head of the anti-interventionist Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C., and an unstinting critic of Israel, when we spoke last year.
Dayan certainly knew about the sword: he had joined the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF, at 14. By 1956, he was IDF Chief of Staff. “This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down,” he said as Nahal Oz laid Rotberg to rest. I can’t think of another elegy that comes so close to sounding like a rebuke. Much has been said of Israeli cruelty to the Palestinians; much more subtle is the cruelty Israel directs at itself.
Throughout the 1950s, Dayan carried out reprisal attacks against both Palestinian villages and the armed forces of Arab nations. The year before the Rotberg killing, he had approved Operation Black Arrow, a retaliatory raid into Gaza that killed thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers and was payback for a fedayeen raid on Rehovot, a city south of Tel Aviv. His hardened vision allowed for sympathy but not restraint. An eye for an eye was an all-too-real a mantra for Dayan, who had lost his left one during World War II, when a bullet hit the telescope through which he was surveying a battle in Lebanon.
“We will make our reckoning with ourselves today,” Dayan eulogized Rotberg. “We are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.”
He had always lived among Palestinians and understood why 1948, celebrated in Israel for the achievement of independence, was a nakba for them. When he said, on April 30, that “a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path,” he was only acknowledging the Palestinians’ desire to rectify that catastrophe, just as the Jews had rectified theirs, known as the shoah.
Israel could never give up its military vigilance. The peacemaker was always second.
“When this war eventually winds down,” the influential American diplomat Aaron David Miller told me, “the tragedy but inescapable reality will be this: Israelis and Palestinians may say to one another, ‘It’s not that we don’t understand one another; it’s that we understand one another only too well.’”
Dayan’s views about how to negotiate that “sea of hatred” began to change after touring Vietnam in 1966. Despite assurances from Pentagon chiefs that the United States was winning, Dayan was not at all convinced. “The war should be won, Dayan thought, through winning hearts and minds, [and] this should be done through social justice, treating the refugees fairly, and offering an attractive alternative ideology to communism, such an alternative ideology that addresses the people’s needs,” Dayan biographer Eitan Shamir wrote.
The following year, Israel triumphed in the Six Day War, conquering the most coveted prize of all: Jerusalem. “To our Arab neighbours we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace,” Dayan said at the Western Wall. “We did not come to Jerusalem for the sake of other peoples’ Holy Places, and not to interfere with the adherents of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and to live there together with others, in unity.”
Was he entirely sincere? Probably not. Since the 1967 war, the Israeli government had been revoking Palestinian residency in East Jerusalem, a practice that would continue for decades. Still, to compare Dayan’s words to the provocations of modern-day extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir—Netanyahu’s security chief, one who has never had any military experience because the IDF rejected him from the army for extremist views—is to understand the distance Israel has traveled in recent decades.
A decade later, in 1977, Menachem Begin came to power. He was the first prime minister to emerge from Likud, then the center-right party, the party of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyhu. Labor began its long decline, from which it has not recovered and will not recover.
Dayan briefly joined Begin’s government, where he was a poor fit. Meetings with PLO officials in the West Bank in 1979 angered other cabinet members, and Dayan resigned later that year. It was, a New York Times editorial said, “the plainest signal yet that the present Government of Israel will not relinquish real control over the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” At least, the newspaper offered, “Mr. Dayan’s departure … brings all of Israel closer to a re‐examination of its policies.”
He had come to favor Palestinian autonomy informed by Israeli military authority during what he described as a “transitional period” of peaceful coexistence. He rejected walls, which alienated people while exacerbating tensions. But other particulars of his plan are not entirely clear.
“There is no reason to establish a Palestinian state. It would just cause troubles,” he told The New York Times in 1979. But in an interview with Time that same year, he offered a different kind of assurance: “The Palestinians want peace and they’re ripe for some kind of settlement. I’m convinced it can be done.”
Dayan died two years later, at only 66. The years to follow would see the first Intifada (the so-called “intifada of rocks”), the emergence of Hamas from the Muslim Brotherhood, several failed attempts at peace, a second Intifada (this one of bombs), and the rise of an increasingly unrestrained Israeli right, now infused with messianic fervor among the settlers and a refusal to serve in the military among the ultra-religious haredim.
“Dayan’s ideas may outlive him,” read a UPI headline upon his passing. The ideas he expressed in the eulogy for Roi Rotberg were complex and contradictory. The words were few; Israel wrestles with them to this day.