After the Middle East department, Gazit served as an adviser at the Foreign Ministry and head of its special-assignments division. “I was thinking of a sabbatical and of writing a study, but the war got in the way a little,” he later told the Agranat Commission, the inquiry into the Yom Kippur War.
The war reached home, too: the family recalls that on its first day, 5 June 1967, he learned through his duties, as events unfolded, that his nephew, the pilot Dan Engel, his sister Sarah’s son, had been killed. His grandson Dan-Eyal is named, in part, after him.
At the end of 1968 he moved to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, and until May 1970 he was its deputy director-general, in the years when Israel was absorbing the wave of immigration that followed the Six-Day War. The ministry had been founded only months earlier, under Yigal AllonDeputy Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister in Rabin’s government.What they wanted: Defensible borders, and a territorial compromise with Jordan (the “Allon Plan”).More on Yigal Allon in “People and events” →, and Gazit was one of its first senior civil servants.
His appointment as deputy director-general was announced in May 1969. He then returned to the Foreign Ministry as deputy director-general responsible for relations with the United States and Canada.
Sources (5)
- Mordechai Gazit — Hebrew Wikipedia Biography
- Mordechai Gazit — Wikipedia Biography
- Maariv — Mordechai Gazit named deputy director-general of the Absorption Ministry Biography
- Mordechai Gazit’s testimony to the Agranat Commission, 6 December 1973 (Hebrew) Diplomatic record
- Dan (Dani) Arel Engel — Yizkor Family
Israel and the world
A new ministry for immigrant absorption
The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption was established in 1968, with Yigal AllonDeputy Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister in Rabin’s government.What they wanted: Defensible borders, and a territorial compromise with Jordan (the “Allon Plan”).More on Yigal Allon in “People and events” → as its first minister.
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