Uri Dan, who died on 2006 at the age of 71, was one of the great journalists of his time. To thousands of New Yorkers he was known for his dispatches in the New York Post, which he served for 25 years as its correspondent in Israel. In 1954, he started writing for an Israel Defense Force paper.
Journalist Uri Dan,  who wrote for Maariv, the Israel Defense Forces magazine Bamahaneh and the New York Post, was a close friend of former prime minister Ariel Sharon. Dan was born Shlomo Uri in Tel Aviv. At 17 he began to study mechanical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa as part of the army's academic service deferal program. Two years into his studies he left school, enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and began to write for Bamahaneh. He received permission from Sharon, who was then commander of paratroop battalion 890, to cover its retaliatory raids with the troops. He also parachuted into the Mitla Pass in the Sinai Campaign in 1956. After his release from army service he joined Ma'ariv and became the paper's Paris correspondent.
  

In the summer of 1973, Sharon retired from the army after he was not appointed chief of staff, and Dan coined the phrase "those who didn't want him as chief of staff will get him as defense minister." When the Yom Kippur War broke, Dan joined the battalion under Sharon's command and sent daily updates to Maariv from the front. When Sharon was forced to resign as defense minister following the investigation into the Sabra and Chatila massacres, Dan, who had been his media adviser, coined an even more famous phrase; "Those who didn't want Sharon as defense minister will get him as prime minister." From the 1980s and until his death, Dan was the Israel correspondent for the New York Post and also worked for Fox News. He wrote 20 books over the years, including one recently completed on his friendship with Sharon. Yedioth Ahronoth's Shimon Shiffer said yesterday that Dan's only public disagreements with Sharon were over disengagement and leaving the Likud, but he always remained in Sharon's inner circle.


What became clear over the years since is that Uri Dan had one of the truest understandings of Israel and the wider world in all of newspaperdom. This was apparent in his thousands of dispatches, broadcasts, and magazine articles, not to mention the books, that poured from his pen or the photographs that got captured by his camera. We may be in an age where the preoccupation is with the medium — the rise of the Internet, the fate of newspapers, the fragmentation of radio, the erosion of the big networks. Yet Uri Dan still worked with a pen. He made his mark not by pioneering a new medium but by championing a great cause.

And by becoming a master of the scoop. Back in the days when Yuri Andropov was still Soviet party boss, Eric Fettmann once took a call on the foreign desk of the New York Post only to discover it was Uri Dan calling from a pay phone in some place like Cyprus. Dan asked Mr. Fettmann to fetch, while Dan stayed on the line, the folder of clippings on Soviet agriculture. When a panting Mr. Fettmann came back on the line, Dan asked him to read every name in the file. At the name "Mikhail Gorbachev," Dan exclaimed, "That's it! Take a story!" and proceeded to dictate a world exclusive about how the Soviet Politburo, meeting in secret session, had decided on an obscure official in the Agricultural Ministry to lead the Soviet Union toward the 21st century.

It was as a result of such sagacity that people began to recognize that even when in the company of the greatest figures, Uri Dan himself was a man to be reckoned with. No doubt this is why his friendship with Mr. Sharon was so mutual and so enduring. It was not just that Dan had parachuted into the Mitla Pass with Mr. Sharon or been with him in the crossing of the Suez, when the future prime minister surrounded the Egyptians and saved the Jewish state. It was also his constant reporting, the vast array of his sources, and the fidelity of his spirit.

 

Dan was not a partisan of disengagement, but he hung back from public criticism of his great friend, taking up his differences in private. Mr. Sharon returned the favor on the advice, it turns out, of his mother, who'd coached him never to break off a friendship over politics. For his part, Dan had learned early in life one of the most important journalistic lessons, which is that it is okay for a reporter to have heroes.

This has too often been forgotten in an age of cynicism and careerism. But it was talked about when, two years ago, Dan was honored at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, which had mounted an exhibit of Dan's photographs of Ariel Sharon in the Sinai. It was a remarkable exhibit, capturing a friendship, a war, a chapter of history, and journalism as art. It was an example of how Uri Dan — in allowing himself to have a hero, in helping others to see one — became a hero in his own right.