Yosef Dayan

Yosef Dayan was born in 1945 in Mexico to Sephardic Jewish parents from Aleppo, Syria, where the Dayan family had lived for some seven hundred years. Most genealogists and rabbis recognize that the Dayan family have the best claim to the Davidic line as they can trace their ancestry in a direct paternal line to the Medieval Babylonian Exilarchs, who in part were direct paternal descendants of the Davidic line. The family paternally descends from Hasan ben Zakkai, the younger brother of the Exilarch David ben Zakkai (d. 940). One of Hasan's descendants Solomon ben Azariah HaNasi settled in Aleppo were the family became Dayan's (judges) of the city and thus adopted the surname Dayan.[1][2] In 1933, Yosef Dayan's cousin Yitzak Dayan was considered by many leading Orthodox rabbis to be the heir and titular "King of Israel". After his death none of his three sons pursued their father's dynastic claims. After Yosef Dayan made Aliyah to Israel in 1968, he was encouraged by several leading Orthodox rabbis to be an active claimant to the throne. Soon after this, Dayan became a member of the right-wing Kach movement, where he was instrumental in establishing the Hebron Hills settlement of El-Nakam, which was destroyed on the orders of the then-Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens in 1982. Dayan later founded "Malchut Israel", a right-wing religious-political group in Israel advocating a return of the monarchy. In 2004, he became a member of the newly reconstituted Sanhedrin, a duplicate of the religious tribunal which convened during the time of the Second Temple, a group that had traditionally had seventy-one members.[3][4] He has also achieved certain notoriety for his alleged central participation in so-called "death curse" ceremonies or Pulsa diNura aimed at Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. These curses were presumably to request divine retribution after those former Prime Ministers advocated Israeli withdrawal from certain areas considered by some as inalienable parts of the promised land. Incidentally, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered soon after the first curse, and Ariel Sharon left in a persistent vegetative state after a brain haemorrhage following the second.[5] He is also known to have supported Baruch Goldstein's (a fellow Meir Kahane disciple) terrorist actions in the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre.

His son Sgt. Hananel Dayan-Meged is notorious for his refusal to shake the hand of Dan Halutz, the (former) Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Force, while receiving the "President of Israel excellence citation" during the Israeli Independence Day celebrations.[6]

• Malchut Yisra'el Website
• Soldier who snubbed Halutz ejected
• Davidic dynasty