Moshe Dayan - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

The Telem party won two seats in the 1981 elections, but Dayan died shortly thereafter, in Tel Aviv, from a massive heart attack. He had been in ill-health since 1980, after he was diagnosed with colon cancer late that year. He is buried in Nahalal in the moshav (a collective village) where he was raised. Dayan willed his personal belongings to his bodyguard.

In 2005, his eye patch was offered for sale on Ebay with a starting bid of $75,000 U.S. dollars.

Dayan was a complex character; his opinions were never strictly black and white. He had few close friends; his mental brilliance and charismatic manner were combined with cynicism and lack of restraint. Ariel Sharon noted about Dayan:

He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

Dayan combined a kibbutznik's secular identity and pragmatism with a deep love and appreciation for the Jewish people and the land of Israel --but not a religious identification. In one recollection, having seen rabbis flocking on the Temple Mount shortly after Jerusalem was captured in 1967, he asked, "What is this? Vatican?"

Dayan later ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock, and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount over to the Waqf, a Muslim council. Dayan believed that the Temple Mount was more important to Judaism as a historical rather than holy site.

Dayan was an author and an amateur archaeologist, the latter hobby leading to some controversy, as his amassing of historical artifacts, often with the help of his soldiers, seemed to be in breach of a number of laws.

In 2005, Moshe Dayan was voted the 73rd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.