ISRAEL: Life with Moshe | TIME

The amorous exploits of Israel’s charismatic Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, are almost as well known in Israel as his military victories. Through battlefield coups and bedroom conquests, Ruth Dayan, Moshe’s wife for 36 years until their divorce in 1971, remained silent. Now she has come out with a poignant memoir, which has become an overnight bestseller in Israel, of her life with the famous warrior.

The book, an autobiography written with the help of Jerusalem Post Reporter Helga Dudman, is called …Or Did I Dream a Dream? For most of its 275 pages, it recalls a full and interesting life: a young German Jewish girl of good family marries a struggling farmer-soldier who later becomes Israel’s Chief of Staff and then its Defense Minister. The book ends with a description of the somewhat humiliating ritual prescribed by the rabbinical divorce court where, in accordance with Jewish law, she is “cast out” by her husband, who then drops the get (divorce) papers into her cupped hands. Although the entire autobiography is being serialized in two Israeli newspapers, the main reason for its success is a candid chapter on Moshe’s extramarital love life.

His affairs were often tempestuous. Once, according to Mrs. Dayan, a sobbing girl telephoned the Dayan home and demanded to know why Moshe had hung up on her. “That husband of yours is deceiving me with another woman,” the girl screamed. Another of Dayan’s ex-lovers wrote a thinly veiled “novel” about their romance. As for Dayan, he would telephone from home “to the woman of his longest-lasting romance, and I heard these conversations because he was never concerned about such details as lowering his voice.”

Largely because Dayan is something of a living legend in Israel, there has been no scandal over the book, and no comment by the government; Dayan himself has been silent. By and large, Israelis seem to share the tolerant attitude of former Premier David Ben-Gurion: he once pointed out to a husband whose wife had run off with Dayan that Lord Nelson (who was also blind in one eye) had an affair with Lady Hamilton that did not tarnish his heroic image “even in puritanical England.” When Ruth Dayan complained directly to Ben-Gurion about her husband, he replied dryly that “in the case of great men, the private and public lives will often run parallel but will never meet.”

Now 55, Ruth Dayan does not seem bitter. She insists that love between them died long before 1971, and that she sought a divorce primarily to gain her freedom. “It just wasn’t worth it any more,” she said in Tel Aviv last week. “It was like living in chains. If I were still his wife, there would be six guards here. Now I can drive my car to the Gaza Strip or wherever I want in freedom.” One thing she does still fault Dayan on, though, is his choice of girlfriends: “It’s too bad he has such bad taste. He could have any woman in the world, but he does not know how to choose.”

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