2023-11-05 08:00:00
From left: Itzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Israeli Air Force Chief Mordechai Hod, at a rally to celebrate Israel’s military victory in the Six-Day War. In southern Israel, July 1967. BETTMANN ARCHIVE / VIA GETTY IMAGES
The kibbutz of Nahal Oz, in the northeast of the Gaza Strip, was one of the localities martyred by the Hamas terrorist offensive on October 7. In 1951, it was the first establishment of the “Youth Pioneer Fighter”, whose Hebrew acronym is Nahal. This Nahal program, designed by David Ben-Gurion at the end of the first Israeli-Arab war of 1948-1949, aimed to anchor outposts, both civilian and militarized, in the most sensitive border areas.
In April 1956, one of Nahal Oz’s guards, Roï Rothberg, was assassinated by Palestinians infiltrating from Gaza. The emotion was then such in Israel that the Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, came in person to Nahal Oz to deliver a eulogy whose words particularly resonate in the current tragedy.
“Blood Money”
“Today let us not curse his assassins. What do we know about their savage hatred towards us? They have been living in Gaza for eight years in refugee camps, while we seize before their eyes the lands and their villages where they lived and where their ancestors lived. It is not from the Arabs of Gaza that we must ask the blood price, but from ourselves. » The chief of staff then urged his compatriots never to forget that, “beyond the furrow that marks the border, extends an ocean of hatred with a desire for revenge”.
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In November 1956, Israeli troops occupied the Gaza Strip with the stated objective of eliminating the presence of the fedayeen, as the Palestinian fighters are called. The four months of occupation left a thousand deaths among the population of Gaza, or one in three hundred inhabitants.
Ten years later, Dayan, who had become defense minister, seized the Gaza Strip again, with Yitzhak Rabin as chief of staff. The two heroes of this Six-Day War, in June 1967, were in favor of occupation without colonization. Dayan ordered the erasure of any visible separation between Israel and the Palestinian territory, whose population was encouraged to work in Israel, soon making those wages Gaza’s main resource.
Dayan joined Menachem Begin’s government as foreign minister after Likud’s historic victory over Labor in May 1977. But Begin concluded peace with Egypt in March 1979 only to be able to better colonize the West Bank and Gaza, leading Dayan to resign. The extremism of the Likud ended up giving rise to the emergence in Israel of a “peace camp”, winner of the elections of June 1992 under the leadership of the Labor Party Rabin.
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