The Eulogy That Explains Israel’s Current Tragedy

This understanding, as Dayan no doubt intended, is tragic. In the opening passage, he announces this theme: “Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.”

Deftly using scriptural images, ranging from Isaac’s binding to Samson’s tearing asunder gates of Gaza, Dayan then assumes a prophetic voice: “How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation’s mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart?” He concludes, bleakly and candidly, “This is the choice of our lives—to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”

Seventy years to this day have passed since Dayan gave his eulogy, one that academics and commentators continue to ponder and parse. The editor in chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, underscored Dayan’s “remarkably sympathetic” understanding of the Nakba—the “catastrophe” of the violent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Benn nevertheless suggests that if Dayan were alive today, he would have used Rotberg’s death to blast the inhumanity of his killers.

Arie Dubnov, a historian at Stanford, instead dismissed the eulogy, remarked in a book that it amounts to little more than the “quintessence of Jewish ethnonationalism” that smacks of the writings of Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist who was a proponent of an authoritarian state and, not coincidentally, apologist for the Nazi state. Then, again, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren has underscored Dayan’s seeming conviction that “the conflict is not about this border or that, but about us—Israel—and our existence. It’s about the Palestinians’ refusal to accept our existence, their commitment to destroy us, and our need to internalize that. Peace, Dayan was saying, is seductive, but it must not blind us to our fate.”

None of these accounts, though, notes there are not one but two eulogies. As the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov writes in his newly published book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, in the eulogy given at Nahal Oz, as well as in the subsequently published version, the opening passage, quoted earlier, acknowledges the Palestinians’ legitimate rage over the ancestral land from which they were exiled. But in the recorded version—the one found on YouTube—Dayan omits this same passage. “Because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history,” Bartov speculates, “the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations.”

It may well be that even the full version fails to take the full measure of the tragic character to this conflict, one that grows ever darker and starker since Oct. 7, 2023. Tragedy is not simply when bad things happen to good people, but as the ancient Greeks took as tragedy: the clash of two equally legitimate and compelling legal, political, or ethical claims. Such tragedies unfold ineluctably in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Take the former’s Agamemnon, in which the titular king is in an impossible position. To sail for Troy, as commanded by Zeus, he must sacrifice, as demanded by Artemis, his daughter, Iphigenia. As Agamemnon cries, “A heavy doom is disobedience, but heavy too if I shall rend my daughter.”

What to do? Certainly not what Agamemnon does when, as the Chorus chants, he slips “his neck through the yoke-strap of necessity.” Instead of seeing Iphigenia as his beloved daughter, deaf to her cries of “Father!”, he now sees her, as he instructs his sailors, as a “goat” to be lifted onto the altar and slaughtered like an animal. This tragedy, the moral and legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum once observed, invites us to see how easily, “with dexterous sleight-of-hand, we take the human for animal under the pressures endemic to life in a world where choice is constrained by necessity.”

Yet when Israel’s political and military leaders slipped their collective necks through a similar yoke strap, they did not even hesitate, unlike Agamemnon, before swapping the human for animal as literally as did the ancient Greek king. Then-Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant described the Palestinians as “human animals” against whom the IDF would be “acting accordingly,” while Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, went a step further, declaring, “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.”

The results of this dehumanizing rhetoric are well-known: In a recently published study in the Lancet, a team of researchers estimated that 75,200 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women, children, and the old, were killed by Israeli military operations between Oct. 7, 2023, and Jan. 5, 2025. Other experts, given the likelihood of thousands of other victims still buried under rubble, believe the actual number of fatalities is significantly higher. Moreover, the number of those who will carry the physical wounds wrought by Israel’s military operations in Gaza now approaches 200,000. As for the emotional trauma inflicted on the Palestinian population, now crowded into half of the blasted Gaza Strip, no one can take its measure or duration.

On the 70th anniversary of Dayan’s eulogy for Rotberg, the distance Israel has since traveled appears both remarkably short and terribly long. As the late Mordechai Bar-On, who served under Dayan as the IDF bureau chief, has recounted, his former boss resisted the great temptation to reduce the Palestinians, including those who took up arms against Israel, to animals. He rarely lost sight of the humanity of the uprooted Palestinians and grasped the roots of their anger. The nationalism of Palestinians, he understood, was no less legitimate than the Zionism of Jewish Israelis. As a result, while pushing for a continued military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he also sought to make the occupation as invisible as possible. But this position was as fundamentally unrealistic as that of his contemporary, Albert Camus, who during the Algerian war of independence maintained that while the indigenous population be given the same political and civil rights as the French pieds-noirs, Algeria must nevertheless remain French.

By the late 1970s, Dayan seems to have acknowledged the tragic dimensions, worthy of an Aeschylus or Sophocles, of the conflict. In this case, though, there would be no deus ex machina to save the day. Knowing that the military occupation could not be maintained indefinitely, Dayan conceded the necessity of granting, if not full independence, autonomy and self-government to Palestinians on the West Bank. It is a fool’s errand to know what he would say today, but so too is it foolish to deny the truth of an observation Dayan made toward the end of his life: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

Correction, April 30, 2026: This piece was amended to more accurately reflect the scale of Palestinian displacement in the Nakba.