My Father, His Daughter

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 25 cm. [12], 289, [3] pages. Illustrations. DJ has small tear at top of front flap. Ya�l Dayan (born 12 February 1939) is an Israeli politician and author. She served as a member of the Knesset between 1992 and 2003, and from 2008 to 2013 was the chair of Tel Aviv city council. Her service on the city council ended with the 2013 election. She is the daughter of Moshe Dayan. Dayan first made a name for herself as an author and newspaper columnist, writing columns for Yedioth Ahronoth, Ma'ariv, Al HaMishmar and Davar. She has published five novels as well as a memoir of the Six-Day War called Israel Journal: June 1967 and a biography of her father called My Father, His Daughter. In 1992, Dayan was elected to the Knesset on the Labor Party list and served as chairwoman of the Committee on the Status of Women. She was instrumental in pushing forward Israel's sexual harassment law in the 1990s. Reelected in 1996 and 1999 (as a member of One Israel, an alliance of Labor, Meimad and Gesher), Dayan became chairwoman of the Committee on the Status of Women for a second time in 1999. Yael Dayan writes about her father, Moshe Dayan, Israel's foremost military leader. Moshe Dayan (20 May 1915 - 16 October 1981) was an Israeli military leader and politician. As commander of the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953-58) during the 1956 Suez Crisis, but mainly as Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967, he became to the world a fighting symbol of the new state of Israel. In the 1930s, Dayan joined the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defense force of Mandatory Palestine. He served in the Special Night Squads under Orde Wingate during the Arab revolt in Palestine and later lost an eye in a raid on Vichy forces in Lebanon during World War II. Dayan was close to David Ben-Gurion and joined him in leaving the Mapai party and setting up the Rafi party in 1965 with Shimon Peres. Dayan became Defence Minister just before the 1967 Six-Day War. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, during which Dayan served as Defense Minister, he was blamed for the lack of preparedness; after some time he resigned. In 1977, following the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, Dayan joined the Likud-led government as Foreign Minister, playing an important part in negotiating the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Moshe Dayan was one of the greatest military leaders in Israel's short history. A child of the first kibbutz movement in British Palestine, he went on to lead Israel to victory in the 1948 War of Independence and to liberate Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War. Dayan was not only a soldier but a politician, an archaeologist, and a larger-than-life figure who helped shape the state of Israel. In My Father, His Daughter, Ya�l Dayan, who herself served in the Israeli Parliament, shares an uncensored look into her father's life and her own conflicted relationship with him. With poignancy and candor, Dayan creates a profound yet nuanced profile of her father. She relates his strong national pride, his boldness in dealing with other world leaders, and his troubles at home to his disintegrating marriage and multiple affairs. As revealing as My Father, His Daughter is of the man behind the myth, it is also a snapshot of a loving relationship between Ya�l and Moshe Dayan, and of a daughter's admiration and respect for a complicated but loving father.