A Soldier's Diary: Sinai 1967.

A Soldier's Diary: Sinai 1967 (1967; also published as Israel Journal: June 1967) is one of the most vivid and consequential firsthand accounts of the Six Day War, written by Lieutenant Yael Dayan (1939-2024), novelist, journalist, and daughter of General Moshe Dayan, who served as the Israeli Defense Minister during the conflict. Written in English in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, the book was composed in just two weeks and has been described by novelist Steven Pressfield as one of the top fifty books ever written on war, a judgment that reflects both the quality of Dayan's prose and the exceptional position she occupied as an eyewitness. A second lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces who was in Athens when Egypt deployed a thousand tanks and 100,000 men to Israel's southern border, Dayan returned immediately and was assigned as a correspondent to the armored division under General Arik Sharon on the Egyptian frontier, placing her at the center of the most decisive military operation of the campaign. The volume provides a firsthand account of Sharon's division as it fought through the Sinai, encompassing the opening air strikes, the ground assault through the Egyptian fortifications at Abu Agheila, the advance to the Mitla Pass, and the larger historical and political dimensions of a war whose outcome Dayan understood from the outset to be existential. In her career beyond the battlefield, Dayan went on to serve as a member of the Israeli Knesset and as Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv, and was throughout her life a passionate and principled advocate for the establishment of a Palestinian state, a commitment that gave the testimony of this early work its full retrospective complexity and weight.