Tzvi Tzur (, also transliterated Zvi Tsur,17 April 1923 – 28 December 2004) was an Israeli officer who served as the IDF's 6th Chief of Staff (1961–1963). Biography Early life Tzur was born in the Zaslav in the Soviet Union (now Iziaslav in Ukraine) in 1923, as Tsvi Tsera Tsertenko, and made Aliyah to Mandatory Palestine at the age of two. In 1936, at the peak of the Arab revolt and the 1936–1939 pogroms he joined the Haganah in order to help protect the Jews from Arab rioters. Military career With the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Tzur was appointed battalion leader in the Givati Brigade, and participated in Operation Pleshet, among others. Tzur was the founder of the fast jeep reconnaissance company, Samson's Foxes, which fought on the southern front. After the end of the war, he undertook organizing roles and went to study manpower management in the United States. In 1956 he was promoted to the rank of Major General and was appointed as the commander of the central front. In 1958 he was appointed as deputy chief of staff and went for long period of study in France. He returned in September 1960. The following year he replaced Haim Laskov as the IDF chief of staff. Chief of Staff In January 1961 Tzur was appointed as the IDF Chief of Staff. One of his first actions was to appoint Major General Yitzhak Rabin as his deputy. Tzur's term was relatively quiet, except for border incidents with Syria, which shelled Israeli villages from the Golan Heights. The biggest IDF operation during Tzur's term, named Operation Swallow, was held on 16 March 1962, when the Golani Brigade raided Syrian outposts to the north of the Sea of Galilee in order to stop Syrian shelling. Seven Israeli soldiers and thirty Syrian soldiers were killed during the battle. However, the shelling was not stopped in the area and on 19 August 1963, Syrian forces murdered two civilians in Almagor. Tzur sought to draw quality manpower to the IDF and decided in June 1961 to provide officers with a private car for their personal usage. The model chosen was a Citroën 2CV. Tzur also prepared the IDF for a war with the Arab armies and built up the defense forces so that it could stop Arab attacks. In August 1961, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser, revealed that Israel had