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BOOKS: When the Concept Failed
Matti Friedman
Leaders� overconfidence in their strength and wisdom left the soldiers of 1973 with their backs against the wall
ON A TEL AVIV STREET IN 1979, my parents stopped a man to ask for directions. They ended up talking for a while, and he told them about himself and about his family. He had two sons, he said, and both had been soldiers in the Yom Kippur War, six years before. One had fought in Sinai and the other on the Golan Heights, the man told them, and began to cry, facing two strangers on the street. Both of his sons were killed on the same day.
No single event since the War of Independence rivals the trauma of the earthquake that struck Israel on October 6, 1973. When it abated, three weeks later, more than 2,600 men who had been alive on Yom Kippur morning were dead, thousands more were crippled, and the self-congratulation and certitude that had buoyed the country since its six-day victory in 1967 were gone. In their place came widespread anger at the political and military leadership�s perceived betrayal of the civilian army, a sentiment that lingered on since the war and which underlies any contemporary discussion of it. The Six-Day War is still everyone�s favorite, evoking as it does the Israel we like to imagine: moral, smart, invincible. Though the Yom Kippur War was arguably the more impressive victory, its residual images -- misguided arrogance, disorganization and the staggering number of unnecessary casualties that resulted -- make its memory far more bitter.
In "The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East," Abraham Rabinovich has written a superb, highly readable account of that conflict. Rabinovich, a veteran Jerusalem Post reporter and one of Israel�s most respected English-language journalists, capably synthesizes vast amounts of material from both written sources and more than 130 interviews into a narrative that remains clearly written and gripping throughout.
The most harrowing part of Rabinovich�s history unfolds in the autumn calm of 1973, before Yom Kippur, before a single Egyptian infantryman had crossed the Suez Canal. The country was still bathing in its post-1967 complacency, certain that the defeated Arabs wouldn�t dare attack again. Israel�s leaders, legends like Golda Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayan, possessed both inflated confidence in the army and a blithe and dangerously low estimation of Arab competence. This reckless negligence -- Rabinovich calls it "flabbiness of thought" -- was best expressed by General Haim Bar-Lev in 1970: "The Arab soldier," declared Bar-Lev, IDF chief of staff at the time, "lacks the characteristics necessary for modern war."
Rabinovich traces the excruciating lead-up to Yom Kippur, as the Israelis experienced remarkable success in convincing themselves that what was clearly happening really wasn�t. He places the bulk of responsibility for the critical pre-war failures of judgment on the shoulders of Military Intelligence chief Eli Zeira. Yom Kippur was a few weeks away, then days, and then hours, and troops and tanks were massing opposite the undermanned IDF positions on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. Zeira, however, remained blindly loyal to an assessment that would retroactively be dubbed "the concept": Egypt wouldn�t attack until it received long-range attack weapons from the Soviets, and Syria wouldn�t attack without Egypt. Zeira was no less loyal to the questionable idea that the country�s military posture should be based principally on such analyses of enemy intent, rather than on concrete changes on the ground.
Even though Jordan�s King Hussein personally flew over in late September to alert prime minister Meir that war was on the way, MI continued to assert a "low probability" of hostilities, attributing the offensive deployment of the Egyptian and Syrian armies to training exercises. The day before Yom Kippur, Rabinovich writes, MI prepared a 43-paragraph report noting that Egyptian soldiers had been ordered to break their Ramadan fast, all military training courses had been canceled, the Egyptian side of the canal was being prepared to allow boats access to the water, and Syrian ammunition was being moved up near the Golan. Forty-two paragraphs detailed enemy preparations for war; the 43rd reiterated that MI�s assessment of Egyptian intent had not changed, and that the probability of war was low.
Everyone knows what happened next. Israel was caught sleeping on two fronts, its reserves unmobilized. The Egyptians swarmed across the canal, overwhelming the pitifully inadequate line of defense along the waterway. The Syrians rushed the Golan, carpeting it with artillery shells and sending nearly 1,500 tanks against the 177 Israel had in place there.
It was not just the timing of the attack that made the two-pronged Arab blow so deadly. In its contingency plans for an Egyptian invasion, Rabinovich writes, the IDF had squandered the strategic depth it had gained in 1967, choosing to defend the distant Suez Canal as if it were Dizengoff Street, rather than pulling back and using the miles of empty desert between the canal and the border to draw the Egyptians into a war of movement. Israel had also failed to think up adequate responses to technological advances in the enemy armies, deadly Soviet innovations like Sagger anti-tank missiles and SAM anti-aircraft batteries. Israeli tanks charging the Egyptian bridgehead on the canal were obliterated not by other tanks but by infantrymen firing Saggers from the dunes, an enemy no one had encountered before. The air force, which had decided the Six-Day War within hours of its outbreak and which was expected to repeat that performance, suffered crippling losses and was rendered virtually helpless in the war�s opening days by the SAM umbrellas closing the skies over both fronts.
Though Israel�s skimpy war contingency plans were based on the supposedly inherent inferiority of Arab soldiers, those soldiers were fighting bravely and with skill, throwing the already stunned and outnumbered Israelis into disarray almost everywhere. All of the assumptions of Israel�s vaunted political and military leadership were wrong, the country was unprepared, and the Israeli soldiers fighting desperately and dying in Sinai and on the Golan were bearing the consequences in their burning tanks and outposts.
RABINOVICH JUMPS FROM THE bedlam in Sinai and the Golan to the decision-makers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and back again in a narrative that remains exciting and focused, expertly managing both the relentless pace of events and a huge cast of characters. He portrays most of the drama�s controversial central figures in a positive light, including chief of staff David (Dado) Elazar, Golda Meir and Dayan, but is less forgiving of some, notably Zeira and Southern Command chief Shmuel Gonen, who is depicted here as all but incompetent.
One of the story�s main characters is a forceful, talented and serially insubordinate reserve division commander named Ariel Sharon, one of the few figures to emerge from the flames of Yom Kippur with his reputation enhanced. While commending his energy, ability and charismatic command style, Rabinovich suggests that the praise Sharon garnered for his performance was not entirely deserved. In several instances, he writes, Sharon purposely misreported the situation on the ground to get his commanders to do what he thought they should do, and tried to wriggle out of orders he disagreed with. When the IDF�s cross-canal counterattack got under way, Sharon was explicitly ordered to allow Avraham (Bren) Adan�s division to cross the Suez Canal first. "He can cross first," Sharon replied over the radio. "He can cross second. It�s not important."
Moreover, writes Rabinovich, though Sharon is often given personal credit for the crossing -- the move that restored the initiative to Israel�s hands in the South -- moving forces onto the western bank of the waterway had been part of the IDF�s counterattack plan long before the war. And though Sharon pushed for a crossing early in the fighting, the timing was ultimately set by Elazar and Haim Bar-Lev, by then a cabinet minister, whom the government had sent to Southern Command as Gonen�s de facto replacement. Once across the canal, it was Adan�s division, not Sharon�s, that did most to bring the conflict to a decisive end. "Apart from the crossing operation," writes Rabinovich, "it was Sharon�s personality, his history, his outspoken criticism of his superiors, and his accessibility to the media that made him the primary focus of attention."
A few parts of Rabinovich�s account could have benefited from more detail. The canal crossing itself is one. Another example is the widely circulated suggestion that a panicked Israel armed its nuclear arsenal early in the war, a report that he mentions only dismissively and in brief, without attempting to confirm or refute it. But on the whole, the author�s reluctance to get bogged down is an advantage, and the narrative careers through the breakneck events of the war while maintaining a remarkable clarity. Rabinovich also offers insight into the machinations, in Washington and Moscow, where a local conflict had morphed into a superpower showdown by war�s end. He sketches a nuanced picture of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his generals. He also deals admirably with the war�s aftermath, both its immediate ramifications and its dramatic, long-term consequences: Sadat�s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the Camp David peace accord. I have found few works of military history so difficult to put down.
But there is an underlying flaw in this book, one that�s common in the
genre, but a real shortcoming nonetheless: It did not make me sick. It did not make me sad. The characters are so abundant, their on-screen time so brief, that ultimately you are not affected by their fate. We get fragments of individual stories, and we get a lot of "holding actions," "flanking maneuvers," "tank formations" and "troop concentrations." The low-res language of the military historian outlines what happened -- which divisions moved where, which commander said what -- but misses the heart of what is, to my mind, the real story: The guy in the tank turret who just saw his friend burn to death in his coveralls, who has been so scared for so long that he can�t feel it anymore, who hasn�t slept for four days, who has no idea if he�s in a divisional feint or a brigade flanking maneuver and who no longer cares.
In "Adjusting Sights," Haim Sabato�s extraordinary account of his experiences as a tank gunner on the Golan during the same war, a soldier writhes on the ground, trying to put out the fire consuming his leg. A tank commander has to pry his blister-covered eyes open with his fingers. A childhood friend climbs in his tank, closes the hatch, and never comes out. The big picture is absent, because it is irrelevant. Sabato�s book leaves you with a palpable sense of confusion, despair and grief. Rabinovich�s book, for all of its strengths, does not. Tanks are "knocked out," men "cut down," but there is no horrible detail in this book that will make you wince, no sense of loss that punches you in the stomach. "The Yom Kippur War" will give you an idea of what happened, but not of what it was like.
This history will likely become the mandatory English-language general source on the war. Were it in my power, however, I would make it mandatory to read "Adjusting Sights" immediately afterwards, lest the reader mistake this excellent, comprehensive history for the whole story. After all, as Rabinovich himself writes, the war�s deciding factor was not the foresight of politicians or the tactical moves of generals. It was the will of soldiers who held on alone and kept shooting when defeat was close enough to smell. Ultimately, the story of the Yom Kippur War is one of leaders who failed, and of anonymous men who did not.
The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East / By Abraham Rabinovich. Pantheon: 560 pp.: &27.50
November 1, 2004
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