The Person Behind the Patch

I love, I love without shame . . . I love to keep my hands in my pocket

And I love to crack sunflower seeds, To walk the road in sandals in

summer And in trousers with a patch an acre-wide,

1 love hot corn and felafel*And to lick ice cream out of a

cardboard cup in the street.

Understandably, the author of these lines is better known as a warrior than as a poet. He is Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, 56. As the legendary hero of the Sinai campaign of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967,

Dayan has become a larger-than-life figure, and his black eye patch a cartoonists' symbol of Israeli military proficiency. The man behind the eye patch, a laconic loner, is less well known. Now a number of fresh glimpses are provided in Moshe Dayan--A Biography, a 601-page study published in Israel last week and scheduled to be issued in the U.S. by Random House next fall.

Fastest Wit. The author is Hungarian-born Shabtai Teveth, 45, a leading Israeli journalist and writer (The Tanks of Tammuz), who had nine lengthy interviews with Dayan. Teveth portrays an earthy, sometimes unpredictable man --and the fastest wit in the Middle East. Stopped on one occasion by a military policeman for driving 75 m.p.h. when the military speed limit was 44 m.p.h., Dayan said with a wry smile: "I have only one eye. What do you want me to watch--the speedometer or the road?"

Called "Moussik," a diminutive of Moshe, by his mother, Dayan was 18 before his first girl friend persuaded him to change from short pants to long trousers as the mark of a man. A year later, another girl turned down a proposal of marriage from the kibbutz-born Dayan because, she said, she did not want to be married to a farm boy.

Dayan lost his left eye in 1941 when, fighting for the British army, he led a raid into Vichy-held Syria. He was peering through field glasses when a bullet hit the eyepiece, driving metal and glass splinters into his eye. He had to wait six hours for transport to a hospital.

Later he told a friend: "No matter. I've lived for 26 years with two eyes and now I shall go on living with one." Nonetheless, he has never adjusted to wearing the famous black patch.

Doctors in Jerusalem, Paris and Johannesburg have failed in attempts to fit him with an artificial eye. Author Teveth says that Dayan still frets that his patch makes him look like a highwayman and sometimes frightens small children.

Tale out of School. During the Six-Day War, the book reveals, Dayan wanted the advancing Israeli forces to halt at the Mitla Pass or at Jidi in the Sinai. He opposed their going as far as the Suez Canal because, he argued, the waterway was essential to Egyptian prestige, and the war could never truly end with Israeli forces dug in on its bank. The army, however, reached the banks of the canal before Dayan's orders could effectively stop it. During the 1969-70 "war of attrition," he often visited the Israeli fortifications on the canal, which were bombarded daily by Egyptian artillery. "We have a lot of soldiers, but only one Minister of Defense," cautioned an officer. Replied Dayan: "You'll be surprised to learn the number of candidates waiting for the opening."

Dayan also told Teveth a tale out of school. In September 1956, on his way to Paris to confer with the French on plans for that year's invasion of Egypt, Dayan alighted from a French bomber at Bizerte. As the base commander shook hands with Dayan, his Gallic glance fell on a pair of female legs groping helplessly from the underside of the plane for a ladder that was not yet there. "We choose secretaries with prettier legs than those," cracked the Frenchman. Moments later Golda Meir, then Foreign Minister, emerged from the plane.

*A highly spiced mash of chickpeas rolled into balls, deep-fried and stuffed into flat, round bread.

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