General's Words Shed a New Light on the Golan

General's Words Shed a New Light on the Golan

By SERGE SCHMEMANN
Published: May 11, 1997

It is an article of faith among Israelis that the Golan Heights were seized in the 1967 Middle East war to stop Syria from shelling the Israeli settlements down below. The future of the Golan Heights is central to the search for peace in the Middle East, and much of the case against giving the Golan Heights back to Syria rests on the fear of reviving that threat.

But like many another of Israel's founding legends, this one has come under question lately, and from a most surprising quarter: Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan.

General Dayan died in 1981. But in conversations with a young reporter five years earlier, he said he regretted not having stuck to his initial opposition to storming the Golan Heights. There really was no pressing reason to do so, he said, because many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland.

General Dayan did not mean the conversations as an interview, and the reporter, Rami Tal, kept his notes secret for 21 years -- until he was persuaded by a friend to make them public. They were authenticated by historians and by General Dayan's daughter Yael Dayan, a member of Parliament, and published two weeks ago in the weekend magazine of the newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

Historians have already begun to debate whether General Dayan was giving an accurate account of the situation in 1967 or whether his version of what happened was colored by his disgrace after the 1973 Middle East war, when he was forced to resign as Defense Minister over the failure to anticipate the Arab attack.

But on a more immediate level, the general's 21-year-old comments play directly into the current dispute over whether the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria in exchange for peace. The Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is firmly opposed to returning the Golan, contending that the high ground is vital for Israel's security.

''Look, it's possible to talk in terms of 'the Syrians are bastards, you have to get them, and this is the right time,' and other such talk, but that is not policy,'' General Dayan told Mr. Tal in 1976. ''You don't strike at the enemy because he is a bastard, but because he threatens you. And the Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.''

According to the published notes, Mr. Tal began to remonstrate, ''But they were sitting on the Golan Heights, and . . . ''

General Dayan interrupted: ''Never mind that. After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was.''

General Dayan's resistance to storming the Golan Heights in the first days of the 1967 war is established history, as is his abrupt change of mind on June 9, the fourth day of the war, when he called the northern commander directly -- bypassing the Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol -- and ordered him to go to war against Syria.

The common wisdom is that General Dayan was wary of stretching military resources until the wars with Egypt and Jordan were settled and that he feared provoking the Soviet Union by an attack on its main client-state, and that the uncertain offensive would cost many lives. The swift victories over Egypt and Jordan then changed his mind.

But in the conversations with Mr. Tal, General Dayan raised another consideration. ''What he told me, what is quoted in the conversation, is that he understood even in time of war that we would be compelled to return most of the territories that we won if we wanted peace with the Arabs,'' Mr. Tal said. In the Golan Heights, General Dayan anticipated that Israeli farmers would waste no time settling on the fertile land, making it difficult to withdraw.

General Dayan said in his conversations with Mr. Tal that the kibbutz leaders who had urgently demanded that Israel take the Golan Heights had done so largely for the land.

''The kibbutzim there saw land that was good for agriculture,'' he said. ''And you must remember, this was a time in which agricultural land was considered the most important and valuable thing.''

Mr. Tal asked, ''So all the kibbutzim wanted was land?''

And General Dayan answered: ''I'm not saying that. Of course they wanted the Syrians to get out of their face. They suffered a lot because of the Syrians. Look, as I said before, they were sitting in the kibbutzim and they worked the land and had kids and lived there and wanted to live there. The Syrians across from them were soldiers who fired at them, and of course they didn't like it.

''But I can tell you with absolute confidence, the delegation that came to persuade Eshkol to take the heights was not thinking of these things. They were thinking about the heights' land. Listen, I'm a farmer, too. After all, I'm from Nahalal, not from Tel Aviv, and I know about it. I saw them, and I spoke to them. They didn't even try to hide their greed for that land.''

That contention was hotly denied by Muky Tsur, a longtime leader of the United Kibbutz Movement.

''For sure there were discussions about going up the Golan Heights or not going up the Golan Heights, but the discussions were about security for the kibbutzim in Galilee,'' he said. ''I think that Dayan himself didn't want to go to the Golan Heights. This is something we've known for many years. But no kibbutz got any land from conquering the Golan Heights. People who went there went on their own. It's cynicism to say the kibbutzim wanted land.''

Inevitably, the doubts General Dayan expressed were seized on by advocates of making peace with Syria.

Historians took a cautious approach, noting that the conversations had not been a formal interview. Mr. Tal, who was then a reporter on a short-lived paper of which General Dayan was editor, said in a telephone interview that they held several conversations at the time, and it was his impression that General Dayan had been testing ideas for his memoirs, which were never completed.

''He didn't intend to give a full, rounded interview,'' said Shabtai Teveth, a biographer of Dayan. ''Here he singles out the kibbutzim, which is not a very balanced picture. Israel was very attentive to Soviet reactions at the time, and he was one of the wisest Israelis in politics, so he must have taken that into consideration. Second, Dayan by 1967 was very cognizant that some Israeli conquests would be nullified by the U.N., and therefore wondered whether it was really worthwhile, since it might be costly in blood.''

Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, a senior researcher at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies in Tel Aviv, said he was troubled that the published conversations could overshadow other factors in the decision to strike Syria.

''I'm concerned that this will become the whole story, that people will lose sight of how the '67 war broke out, how Syria was the catalyst, how it was seeking a rise in tensions, seeking to goad Egypt into action,'' Mr. Maddy-Weitzman said. ''There is a lot of toying with founding myths. Revisionism is one thing, but when we throw out the context in which things were occurring, we are sapping ourselves unjustifiably.''