…There was even in the years surrounding the War of Independence a small clique of artists and other intellectuals who said they were “Canaanites,” meaning, born in this land, patriotic like any man about his homeland, but religion had nothing to do with it.

In fact, in Moshe Dayan’s autobiography, on the last page he relates how as an amateur archaeologist (and antiquities thief) discovered the tomb of a man who, from all the signs, had died before Avraham Avinu had come from Ur Casdim. Dayan said that he looked at the bones and thought this man loved this country, his homeland, like any normal man and he did too, and like the Canaanite before, religion had nothing to do with. In this Dayan identified with the pre-Abrahamic Canaanites.

When he said to Sidney Zion that he would not want to live in Israel without Arabs, he was saying he did not want to be identified with just Jews.

His first wife Ruth, raised like him in the Labor Zionist movement, bragged that in the few years she lived in London as a girl, she always played with the gentile girls, never the Jewish ones. She was proud of that. No Jewish chauvinist she.

And their late son Assi Dayan always bragged he never once set foot in a synagogue and never would…