The Yom Kippur War has become a crystal ball of the past. There is a tendency to see any reflection or glimmer of light as meaningful. Every event on the continuum of years suddenly turns out to be the result of October 6. Or the night of October 4 and 5, or maybe the 14th of the same month.
Sometimes you see on a protrusion in your bathroom a ray of light that draws half a face, and so it repeats at the same time every day; And once you even managed to photograph the reflection. Not to mention the meanings you discovered when you split a pear in half. Or foreground again with a meaningful reflection in an empty glass of cognac.
The girls who were kept secret, and did not materialize. Dinitz (left), Meir and Kissinger, photo: Moshe Milner/GPO
But the passing years do include new dimensions into the picture of 1973 that scholars have not been inclined to think about since, while they were preoccupied with the dry facts, the transcripts of the protocols, the reports of Ambassador Simcha Dinitz from Washington, and the discovery of more documents such as Hagai Soref and Meir Boimfeld's book "The Day Will Come When the Archives Will Be Opened."
In this spirit, I write under the shock of concentrating conversations with quite a few researchers of the various aspects of the Yom Kippur War, as part of a podcast project I conducted at this newspaper on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the war. In one of the recordings, in which Prof. Zaki Shalom, Dr. Yaniv Friedman and Omri Adomi – the last two from the IDF's History Department – participated, Shalom noted two very important aspects, which I have not encountered as he presents them in any historical coverage of the war: It is known that the expectations of the IDF leaders, who caught up with the political echelon in their perception, were that if war broke out it would last about four days. Maybe a week. The expectation turned into an understanding with the Americans, and on this understanding the aid plan for Israel was built, in order to maintain the status quo vis-à-vis the Egyptians. Everything was aimed at preserving the status quo.
Echoes of these understandings can be found in the reports of Ambassador Dinitz from Washington following his meetings with Henry Kissinger, especially in the first days of the war. Israel must maintain its deterrence, and the very collapse of deterrence, a vague term, could undermine its standing in the eyes of the Americans. And when something is undermined, it is required to demonstrate the ability to decisively decisively, not in a three-week war but in a war shorter than the six-day war. Prof. Shalom claims that this was a kind of deal between Israel and the United States.
"The Americans are telling Israel," says Prof. Shalom, "we will give you the weapons you need; We will avoid dependence between your policy positions and supply needs. We will let you maintain the status quo, the status quo. All this on condition that you ensure on your part a deterrent capability that will stop the Egyptians from going to war; And if war breaks out, you are supposed to cause Egypt to be defeated in a short time.
"This is actually the understanding that was formed between Israel and the United States, and it is kept secret. On the American side, Kissinger and President Nixon share the secret. They say: We won't tell the State Department that. In Israel, Golda, Mordechai Gazit and Dinitz are partners in the secret" (certainly Dayan as well).
No deterrence, no decisiveness
When it was already clear that we were going to war, Or Shabbat, Yom Kippur, October 6, the dilemma was posed: How do we ensure compliance with the plan of a short war, which, of course, saves Israel many hundreds of deaths? Prime Minister Golda Meir sends a message to the Americans that Israel has taken a great risk to secure American support and assistance; And the risk is avoiding a preemptive air strike in the early afternoon.
According to the crystal ball of the past, Israel thus secured the aid it so desperately needed from the beginning of the war. But had it initiated the first strike – and there is a difference, because a preemptive air strike is not a "preventive war" – it would have promised a significant shortening of the war and a clear victory.
Over the years, many of those involved in events at the top of the IDF have built a retrospective justification according to which it is good that we did not attack first because the IDF would have broken its head against the enemy's ready corpses. Still, there is a lot of justice in thinking that a preemptive strike would have been very beneficial, and even the Air Force's great categorist, Prof. Uri Bar Yosef, argues that a parallel air strike could have been a decisive factor that would have prevented much of the dismal outcome of the war. Israel, in the end, did not meet the conditions of understanding with the Americans. It did not create a dimension of deterrence that would prevent Egypt from going to war, nor did it succeed in creating a decisive situation within a short time.
The question is why in the end the leadership fell into paralysis and gave up the preemptive blow in its various variations. And this is paralysis and not an informed action, motivated by judgment.
"Attentive to public sentiments"
The new view simply says that the country has changed its face, and that between the War of Attrition and Yom Kippur, there has been a shift in Israeli society. The leadership did not fulfill Ben-Gurion's imperative that Israel should be prepared to defend itself by itself against any scenario that would come, and the price was high. Dependence on the United States increased, the prestige of the IDF declined, and so did the appreciation of Israel. "In the end, the U.S. was not in a position not to help Israel," says Prof. Shalom, "The Americans appreciated Israeli determination and would not turn their backs on us, partly because they support the victors."
Therefore, the main motive of the national leadership, and this trickled down to the military echelon, was to prevent war. And the deep story is why there was such an aversion to war (except that war is always bad). A syndrome of appeasement and delegitimization of Golda Meir's actions since the War of Attrition began in Israel.
"If Israeli intelligence had read the Egyptian poetry written after '67, it would have known that October '73 was inevitable. Every good intelligence officer must read poetry," Haim Guri said in an interview with Haaretz in late 2006. This motif of enemy singing had arisen in him even earlier. It can be said with certainty that Golda, Dayan, Israel Galili and Eli Zeira did not read Egyptian or Syrian poetry, although for Dayan, who had connections with Palestinian intellectuals, this is not certain. What is more, they read or absorbed the words of the local prophets - Hanoch Levin, Amos Oz, Luba Eliav.
The writer S. Yizhar described the fog of war after the war as follows, in a symposium of the magazine Keshet after the war: "Since the war is over and not over as a situation that has no form, and since this feeble situation creates hostility, discomfort and embarrassment, there is a dire need for leadership that will come and give shape and provide security... This lack of leadership has once again placed the responsibility on the people themselves."
The fog, by all indications, began even before the war. Defense Minister Dayan himself went to see one of the performances of "Queen of the Bath" in 1970, at the height of the War of Attrition. The person who saw him in the audience and reported it was Amnon Rubinstein. Dayan could see how in the Cameri Theater, in the most central part of Dizengoff, the actors encounter Hanoch Levin's cruel satirical text in his character.
No longer in the atmosphere of "our situation has never been..." The play "Queen of the Bath", photo: Israel Haramati, courtesy of the Cameri Theater Archive
Amos Oz wrote a letter to members of the new left-wing Moked party led by Meir Pa'il: "... The members of the labor movement, many of its leaders, stand amazed and helpless at this sight of a country that had such a high runway, and here it finds itself in such a steep angle of descent."
Moked was in '73 the most left-wing party in the Zionist color spectrum. Oz warned the people of Israel and the United Nations General Assembly that he would not vote in the upcoming elections: "The Labor Party is increasingly distancing itself and drifting to the right. Personalities who want humane socialism and non-drunken Zionism cannot now vote for the Labor Party..." He described foreign policy as oscillating "between hypocrisy and manhood."
Uri Avnery, in an election speech, drummed on his traditional motif that the government in Israel is tyrannical, dictatorial, as the opposition impressions used to say in Roman times. For a government that has a monopoly on television, Avnery cried out, does not need the FBI or concentration camps.
Luba Eliav, the party's forerunner, published his parable of the seagull before the war, in which he watched as if hovering with white wings, a terrible disaster that only he sees over the horizon. Since the early 70s, the government has been haunted by corruption scandals such as Netivei Petroleum and Vered, public companies in which it was barely possible to separate what was happening from the government, and suspicions, at least from a public point of view, rubbed the robes of the heads of Labor, the Histadrut, and the like.
In this situation, leaders are "attentive to public sentiments." We are gradually breaking away from the Ben-Gurionist concept of "I don't know what the people want – I know what the people want." You want to look good. In everyone's eyes. In the eyes of the Americans, in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes of your prophets, or at least your voters. You're not as decisive in pulling the trigger as you were in June of '67.
The letter of the eights from April '70 was issued in close proximity to the "Queen of the Bath" against the background of the Goldman emissary affair, which was torpedoed by Golda Meir. Film director Renan Shore, a member of the class of the Eights, described in one of our interviews how the letter spread and went straight to the top echelons of the country's ruling elite. Among the signatories were the son of Health Minister Victor Shem Tov, and Eren Patenkin, the son of senior economist Dan Patenkin, who was already involved in opposition activity against party leaders during the Lavon Affair.
Radical left-wing organizations such as Matzpen, Shaik, and others began to appear, delegitimizing the state. Above all, the sad, gloomy period of the War of Attrition was remembered. This was the image of the next war. No one wants such a thing. And the paralysis that gripped the leadership on 6 October stemmed in part from the public-social background of the period. It is hard to say goodbye to the meat pot of more than three years of quiet on our borders and the atmosphere of "our situation has never been..."
In anticipation of the Golden Document
Some of the enigmatic questions, especially on the tactical level of the war, remain unresolved to this day. But if we thought that regarding the military events themselves, agreements were belatedly beginning to form between the various writers about the war, it turns out from conversations with some of the central figures that opinions are also divided on this.
When the responsibility for disrupting the IAF's entry into the war is placed on Benny Peled (the IAF commander during the war), it is done when the investigators can no longer talk to him or to IDF Chief of Staff Dado Elazar, former Air Force Commander Eitan Ben-Eliyahu insisted. Nonetheless, the gaps are narrowing, and what has become clearer over the past 20 years is that military historiography in its narrow dimensions is very limited in order to understand the war, as indicated by social background considerations, which are not referenced in the protocols but are quite evident from the fact that the elections that year were supposed to be held at the end of October.
One of the last photos of Maj. Gen. Albert Mandler, commander of the 252nd Division, is during a tour he gave to the chairman of the elections committee, Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen, in the expanses of the Canal front. The election committee was prepared for a rapid deployment – not of the forces but of the polling stations at every outpost and at every base in Sinai and on the Canal front.
The broader and deeper meanings have been relegated to attempts to decipher and understand military events. Was there an intelligence failure, which explains the whole sequence of events from October 6 to October 25, '73? There is no doubt that the issue of surprise overshadowed everything at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War researchers' journey, followed by the question of who were the fathers of the failures. Is it the political echelon, in the form of Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, or the military echelon, headed by IDF Chief of Staff Dado Elazar, Commanding Generals Yitzhak "Haka" Hofi (North), Shmuel Gorodish (South) and Military Intelligence Chief Eli Zeira?
Has the role of the army in the processes leading up to the war been suppressed? Maj. Gen. Southern Gorodish Command, Photo: Yossi Greenberg/GPO
"The role of the army in the processes that led to the war, in the circumstances in which it broke out and in the manner in which it was conducted, was suppressed and denied under the auspices of censorship in the early years, and the policy of releasing material over the past 15 years," wrote Prof. Yoav Gelber in an article published three years ago in HaUmmah.
It can be understood from this that the releasers of banned substances in advertising over the years have largely dictated the nature of new research in the last generation. The best example is the publication of the existence and part of the Egyptian agent Ashraf Marwan. It's hard to believe, but until about 20 years ago, history was written without Marwan's presence and all the information involved in his reports and perhaps warnings.
For many years, the question has been raised: Is there any cache of materials or documents, or even one redemptive document, that can change our perception of the Yom Kippur War? The feeling was yes - but it's a misleading gut feeling. It derives, of course, from the misty landscape painting by S. Yizhar. The formless ending, with the ceasefire lines that look like a preliminary sketch of a Picasso painting, created an expectation that some secret would emerge and that the scattered parts would unite into a clear picture.
The opacity of government
For the sake of historical justice, it should be said that the IDF investigated both through internal investigations and through the activities of investigators from the History Department. As part of the committee's work
Agranat published a document called the Nevo Report, which to this day is the agreed basis for understanding the beginning of the war and the battles in the Golan Heights. Elhanan Oren carried out his long-term research on the war.
However, there was a censorship process, and any material that was exposed and investigated was immediately transferred to General Israel Tal (Talik), who was deputy chief of staff during the war, and Ariel Sharon. Both of them, for their own reasons, wanted to know what was written about them on points of contention and approved or prevented publication. I heard about this practice 20 years ago from Nissim Salomon, who served as head of history for about a month, until he was removed from his position for reasons other than professional.
Any material that was exposed was immediately reviewed by Talik and Sharon. Members of the Agranat Committee, Photo: Yaakov Saar/GPO
The recently released film, Golda, presents an uninhibited narrative of a great victory, which began with a crisis of existential proportions, and the one who won the victory was the prime minister that many Israelis, especially young people, loved to hate between 1974 and 1973. Years away, Prof. Yoav Gelber told journalist Yizhar Be'er in a podcast interview that "forgiveness should be asked mainly from Golda and Medellin."
That's a bit of an exaggeration – it's not a question of asking for forgiveness. Prime Minister Meir had a tendency toward obtuseness – some called it "smugness" – a trait that characterized her and her government, and manifested itself precisely after the war, when demands for the establishment of a commission of inquiry began to arise.
About two weeks after the ceasefire, the prime minister held a meeting with the editorial committee, a body that existed for many years and was intended mainly to direct the media by the government. At the meeting, the demand for the establishment of an investigative committee is raised, and Golda responds, according to the descriptions, with a kind of opaque condescension, with great reservations about this demand. In her view, there were failures in the war, but these are operational failures on the part of the army, and her words do not indicate any need for soul-searching about the role of the political echelon in the failure.
"There's not the slightest desire or thought that we'll shy away from finding out and researching and learning things," she tells the editors. But she and the editors—she and the public, really—talk about two different things. "I imagine that the chief of staff needs to conduct an investigation in order to know honestly what exactly happened, and even technically. Here, download such instructions; Were they fulfilled or not? Why were they not fulfilled? And who doesn't exist? He should do it, shouldn't he?"
The headlines in the newspapers with which the people of Israel went to sleep on Yom Kippur also reflect the disconnect created by the government between the public and reality. Haaretz: "Kissinger opens talks with Eban and the foreign ministers of four Arab countries." "On guard": "Zaire severs relations with Israel." The rest of the headlines deal with the terror affair against the immigrant train on the Austrian border. The same goes for Davar and Maariv: "The UN Refugee Committee is ready to accept its hatred."
Between the '67 and Km 101 lines
In the first years after the war, Yitzhak Rabin offered a narrative that both researchers and the public found difficult to digest: the failure was "security" rather than "intelligence," he said in an interview with historian Avi Shlaim. What did he mean? In part he was referring personally to Moshe Dayan, but this statement corresponds with Prof. Gelber's view that beyond surprise, the fact is that the problem in the army continued throughout the war: "There was a conception that the Egyptian army could not succeed, and if it succeeded it would be good (since then it would be exposed to an Israeli counterattack in Sinai, E.L.), and there was no mistake in capabilities, there was a mistake in intentions, and this was the result of an excess of arrogance when Dayan was the dominant factor..." If certain precautions had been taken, we would be living in a different world today, Rabin said.
"Excess arrogance". Dayan with Sharon, photo: courtesy of the IDF Archives and the Defense Establishment, photo: Avraham Vered
The speech is not overt, but it probably refers to the non-use of the special measures that were supposed to give warning. Today it seems to be a comma within the big questions. Brig. Gen. (res.) Ephraim Lapid, a prominent intelligence official who was familiar with the top-secret special sources, said that information from these sources (the "means") would not have changed the veil of opacity that created that low probability.
On this issue, Prof. Gelber completely disagrees with Rabin's view. In the introduction to his book Rahav, he says that his colleague in the Agranat Commission's team of researchers, Col. Yaakov Hasdai, "strove to discover and expose that Archimedean point, which, if discovered, would explain all or most of what happened. I believed that there is no such point: wherever you lift a finger, you will find decay or omission to one degree or another..."
In the past decade, perhaps in order to avoid the discussion of the X-ray mirroring that Israeli society received from the war, a new myth has been created, supported mainly by Yigal Kipnis' research and various television series. In other words, the Yom Kippur War could have been prevented, that a peace agreement could have been reached and all the suffering and crises brought about by the storm of war in its wings could have been spared. This, by the way, is not a new narrative. The Zionist left talked about this already in the first years after the war. In his book "No Failure: The Policy That Led to War" (1975), journalist Amnon Kapeliuk states that this is a political failure that has unfolded from the victory in '67 until the surprise of October 6.
That it was impossible to reach a peace treaty in the sense that Menachem Begin achieved in 1979 has quite a few convincing answers. They wrote about it in Boimfeld, Goldsmith and Gelber with extensive and qualified backing, as well as Dr. Yaniv Friedman. In contrast to this question, there is still an issue that leaves the war as a continuous bleeding: Did we lose or did we win?
To answer this, we need to paint a picture of defeat – if there were, what would it look like? Let me be clear: There were stages when Israel faced defeat or some kind of surrender.
From what I have learned over years of dealing with the material, had the IDF not turned the tide on October 11 in the Golan Heights and on October 14 on the Suez front, the war could have ended in a ceasefire imposed by the superpowers and dictated by the Arabs, and its main condition – withdrawal without a peace agreement to the lines of June 4, '67. The fact that the negotiations at the end of the war took place at Km 101 on Egyptian soil, with partial Egyptian recognition of the State of Israel, symbolizes victory, even if not a six-day victory.
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