Two Israeli generals who had played prominent roles in Israel’s War of Liberation retorted sharply today to a statement by former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had implied that a third general would have been much more successful in the field against the Arab forces in 1948-49.
Mr. Ben-Gurion sparked the dispute in an interview in Haboker, a morning newspaper here, in which he stated that, had Moshe Dayan been Israel’s chief of staff during the 1948-49 defensive war against the Arabs, israel’s borders would have been “different” and its military achievements “greater.” (During that war, Mr. Dayan was in charge of a commando unit that had scored great successes. He became chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces in 1953, and was the general in charge when Israel defeated the Egyptians in the Sinai campaign in 1956-57. He is now Minister of Agriculture.)
By making that statement, Mr. Ben-Gurion was seen as having downgraded the military achievements of three former generals–Gen. Yaacov Dori, now president of Technion, who was chief of staff in 1948; Gen. Yigael Yadin, chief of operations under Dori, later chief of staff, now a prominent archeologist; and Maj. Gen. Yigal Allon, who commanded several important fronts in 1948, now Israel’s Minister of Labor. Gen. Dori has declined thus far to be drawn into the controversy. But Yadin and Allon have replied tartly.
General Yadin counter changed with an assertion that Mr. Ben-Gurion himself, as Premier and Minister of Defense, was responsible for political decisions which resulted in withdrawal of successful Israeli forces from some of the conquered areas. Conceding that some of Mr. Ben-Gurion’s political decisions may have been partly justified at the time, he insisted, nevertheless, that Mr. Ben-Gurion’s “wrongful intrusions into tactical matters” had also caused some military setbacks for the Israeli army.
Gen-Gurion went further Referring to Mr. Ben-Gurion, he said today: “When the Premier-Defense Minister ordered a halt in our army’s advance, the Israeli army was at the height of its military victories, all the way from Lebanon in the north to the Sinai in Egypt. In a few more days, Israel could have completed the destruction of the invading forces and the freeing of the whole of Israel.”
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