Yael Dayan, the renowned Israeli author who entered politics after the death of her father, Moshe Dayan, a war hero and politician, and became an advocate of women’s rights, LGBTQ issues, and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, passed away on May 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85 years old.
His daughter, Racheli Siong Salido, said the cause of death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Dayan was the last surviving member of the Israeli-Israeli family, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. With his distinctive black eye patch (he lost his left eye in combat with British forces in World War II), Mr. Dayan was the undisputed patriarch of a family many in Israel compare to the Kennedys.
Dayan’s wife, Ruth, is the founder of the fashion house Maskit, his son Assi is an actor and filmmaker, and his other son, Ehud, is a sculptor.
Dayan rose to literary stardom at the age of 20 with her 1959 English-language autobiographical novel, “The Rookie in the Mirror,” about a young female soldier whose father is a military commander.
“My father came to camp one day,” she wrote, “said he was passing by and decided to stop by. He never admitted that he had come to see me. Of course, his arrival was an event, an occasion for judicious and often unnecessary salutes and wary, inquisitive eyes. Would he kiss her as he left?”
Novelist Anzia Jezierska wrote in the New York Times Book Review that The New Face in the Mirror is “an extraordinary record of the interior life of a rebellious young woman searching for self-actualization,” adding that “her storytelling has a sincerity and compelling intensity that stays with us long after we’ve finished the book.”
Other books followed. In 1967, Mr. Dayan published two books: “Death Has Two Sons,” a father-son novel set during the Holocaust, and “The Israel Journal,” a diary about his experiences during the Six-Day War under the command of future prime minister Ariel Sharon.
In prose that Charles Poore, a Times book critic for nearly 40 years, has compared to the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dayan wrote in the Israel Journal of how the war had changed her: “Everything has changed now. I have seen the end of life, the destruction of matter, the grief of the destroyer, the agony of the victor. And it must leave its mark.”
After his father died in 1981, Dayan decided to try his luck in politics.
“As long as he was alive, it just didn’t seem right,” she told the Jewish-American magazine Lilith.
She served three terms in the Knesset as a Labor member, where she helped pass legislation banning sexual harassment, established the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, and supported measures to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.
Dayan has been a sometimes divisive figure in Israeli politics.
In 1992, she was photographed by tabloids in a bikini on a Tel Aviv beach during Yom Kippur, the holiest holiday in the Jewish calendar, infuriating the party and its leader, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Meanwhile, Dayan was outraged that her sunbathing had become a national scandal.
“Aren’t photos of women in swimsuits forbidden for religious people?” she said in an interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadashot. “Why are they looking at this photo?”
Her most controversial political move came the following year when she became the first Knesset member to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: she presented him with a copy of her book about her father, My Father, His Daughter (1985), in which she wrote about his numerous extramarital affairs.
Arafat “is not very charming in public,” she told the Toronto Star after the meeting, “but that charm quickly fades. He’s a good listener, very tactful. He’s good-humoured and calm. When I met him he was a very concerned man.”
She believed that the only solution to the Palestinian conflict was a separate state, and she never wavered in that opinion. She opposed Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“I can’t imagine we still have to debate the right of Palestinians to self-determination,” she told The Star. “We still doubt whether they are human beings. This is so stupid, it’s like an ostrich burying its head.”
Yael Dayan was born on February 12, 1939 in Nahalal, a rural village in what is now northern Israel.
She was deemed a prodigy at an early age, learning to read and write at age 3, and skipping several grades in primary school. She began writing “A New Face in the Mirror” at age 17.
She served as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces Public Affairs Corps and studied international relations at the Hebrew University.
Ms. Dayan married Dov Zion, a colonel who served under Mr. Sharon during the Six-Day War, in 1967. Mr. Zion died in 2003. Ms. Dayan is survived by her daughter, her son Dan Zion, and four grandchildren.
Dayan continued to advocate for peace despite the dangers.
In 1996, Dayan was sightseeing in Hebron, a West Bank city home to hundreds of settlers, when a Jewish extremist approached her and offered her tea. She accepted, and then, according to The Jerusalem Post, he smashed the tea in her face, leaving her with burns to her neck and chest.
Dayan continued his tour.
A few days later, someone mailed her a newspaper photo of the incident and wrote, “Too bad there was no acid.”
