Yael Dayan, a celebrated Israeli writer who, after the death of her father, war hero and statesman Moshe Dayan, entered politics and became an advocate for women’s rights, LGBTQ issues, and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, died in May. 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85 years old.
His daughter, Racheli Sion-Sarid, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Ms. Dayan was the last surviving daughter of Mr. Dayan, who served as Israel’s Defense Minister during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With her distinctive black eye patch (there were lost his left eye in combat). she with the British in World War II: she was the unmistakable patriarch of a family dynasty that many in Israel have compared to the Kennedys.
Mr. Dayan’s wife, Ruth, was the founder of the Maskit fashion house. His son Assi was an actor and filmmaker. Another son, Ehud, was a sculptor.
Dayan rose to literary stardom at age 20 with “New Face in the Mirror” (1959), an autobiographical novel written in English about a young soldier whose father is a military commander.
“One day my father came to camp,” he wrote. “He said that he was passing through and that he had decided to stop by here. He would never have admitted that he had come to see me. His arrival was, of course, an event: an occasion for intelligent and often unnecessary greetings, for alert and curious glances. Will he kiss her when he leaves?
Novelist Anzia Yezierska, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called “New Face in the Mirror” “an extraordinary record of the inner life of a rebellious teenager in search of self-realization.” She added: “There is an honesty and a compulsive intensity in the telling of his story that haunts us, long after we finish the book.”
Other books followed. In 1967, Ms. Dayan published two books: “Death Has Two Sons,” a father-son novel set during the Holocaust, and “Israel Journal,” a diary of her experiences during the Six-Day War under the command of Ariel Sharon, who later became prime minister.
In prose that Charles Poore, a Times book critic for nearly 40 years, compared to that of Ernest Hemingway, Mrs. Dayan wrote in the “Israel Journal” about how the war had changed her: “Nothing will be the same now. I have contemplated the cessation of life, the destruction of matter, the pain of the destroyers, the agony of the victorious, and I had to leave a mark.”
Ms. Dayan decided to try politics after her father’s death in 1981.
“It never seemed right while he was alive,” he told the American Jewish magazine Lilith.
As a member of the Labor Party, he served three terms in the Knesset. She was instrumental in passing legislation prohibiting sexual harassment. She also founded the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality and supported measures protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.
Ms. Dayan was at times a divisive figure in Israeli politics.
In 1992, she outraged her party and its leader, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, when a tabloid newspaper photographed her in a bikini on a Tel Aviv beach during Yom Kippur, the holiest holiday in the Jewish calendar.
Mrs. Dayan, in turn, was outraged that her sunbathing had become a national scandal.
“Isn’t a photo of a woman in a swimsuit prohibited for religious people?” she said in an interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadashot. “Why are you looking at this photo?”
His most controversial political act came the following year, when he became the first Knesset member to meet with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. She gave him a copy of “My Father, His Daughter” (1985), a book about her father in which she wrote about his numerous extramarital affairs.
Arafat “has a public appearance that is not very attractive,” he told The Toronto Star newspaper after their meeting. “But that disappears quickly. He is a good listener. Very fast. Humorous and gentle. He was very worried when I saw him.”
He believed that the only solution to the Palestinian conflict was separate states, and he never abandoned that view. He opposed Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“It is inconceivable that we still have to discuss the Palestinian right to self-determination,” he told The Star. “We are still doubting that they are people. This is so stupid that it is like an ostrich burying its head.”
Yael Dayan was born on February 12, 1939 in Nahalal, a farming community in what is now northern Israel.
Considered a prodigy from an early age, she was already reading at the age of 3. She skipped several grades in elementary school. She began writing “New Face in the Mirror” when she was 17 years old.
After serving as a captain in the public relations unit of the Israel Defense Forces, she studied international relations at the Hebrew University.
Ms. Dayan married Dov Sion, a colonel under Mr. Sharon during the Six-Day War, in 1967. He died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Dan Sion, and four grandchildren.
Ms. Dayan persevered in her defense of peace even when it endangered it.
In 1996, while touring Hebron, the West Bank city that is home to hundreds of settlers, a Jewish extremist approached her and offered her a cup of tea. Mrs. Dayan accepted. According to The Jerusalem Post, the man threw the tea in her face. Her neck and chest were scalded.
Ms. Dayan continued her tour.
A few days later, someone mailed him a newspaper photograph of the incident and wrote, “It’s a shame there was no acid.”