Today I'm showcasing one of St. Martin's Press non-fiction, Eighteen Days in October. About the Yom Kippur War, a little known to many Middle Eastern Conflict that was almost single handedly responsible for the modern Middle East.
Enjoy!
ISBN-13: 9781250281890
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: 08-29-2023
Length: 400pp
Buy It: Amazon/ B&N/ IndieBound
ADD TO: GOODREADS
Overview:
October 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conflict that shaped the modern Middle East. The War was a trauma for Israel, a dangerous superpower showdown, and, following the oil embargo, a pivotal reordering of the global economic order. The Jewish State came shockingly close to defeat. A panicky cabinet meeting debated the use of nuclear weapons. After the war, Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in disgrace, and a 9/11-style commission investigated the “debacle.”
But, argues Uri Kaufman, from the perspective of a half century, the War can be seen as a pivotal victory for Israel. After nearly being routed, the Israeli Defense Force clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. In the war’s aftermath both sides had to accept unwelcome truths: Israel could no longer take military superiority for granted—but the Arabs could no longer hope to wipe Israel off the map. A straight line leads from the battlefields of 1973 to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and all the treaties since. Like Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, this is the definitive account of a critical moment in history.
Read an excerpt:
1 A PARADE IN JERUSALEM
The U.N. Security Council deeply deplores the holding by Israel of the military parade in Jerusalem on 2 May, 1968 in disregard of the unanimous decision adopted by the Council on April 27, 1968.
—UN Security Council Resolution 251
In the spring of 1968, the State of Israel announced that it would mark the twentieth anniversary of its founding by holding a military parade in the recently reunited city of Jerusalem. The governments of the world took great pains to voice their displeasure. And the government of Israel took equally great pains to hold the parade as planned.1
The route was carefully mapped out. Armored and infantry columns would mass in a staging area near Shuafat, a newly captured Arab section in the northern part of the city. From there, the soldiers would march south through the Arab neighborhood of Wadi el-Joz, past the walls of the Old City, then turn right and continue through the Jewish sections of Western Jerusalem. It was a long route—more than five miles—and not just because the Israelis were eager to march in newly acquired warrens of the city. Organizers planned for half a million spectators—as it turned out, even that estimate was surpassed—and it was important to disperse the crowds over as wide an area as possible.2
Counting the Arab residents that completed the shotgun marriage now called Greater Jerusalem, the sleepy hill city numbered only 240,000 souls, and this was to triple in size for one afternoon. In a country with fewer than 54,000 registered vehicles, somehow, impossibly, 45,000 arrived for the festivities.3 A grandstand was built on a mile-long clearing to accommodate 60,000 people, more than double the seating capacity of the nation’s largest stadium.
And, for the first time, Israeli television was there as well. Television came relatively late to the Jewish state, first crackling on the air just two years earlier, in 1966. Executives of state-owned Channel 1—“1” because it was the only station in the country—finally had an excuse to get the Finance Ministry to upgrade their equipment. Show the proceedings live, they argued to jittery officials, and fewer will come to Jerusalem. A used mobile camera was hastily purchased in London and operated under the direction of an Irish technician who did not speak a word of Hebrew. Large crowds indeed gathered in TV-equipped homes, though only in cities far from Jerusalem. One newspaper reported that the streets of Haifa “remained almost deserted, as if an air raid alarm had been sounded.” The previous year, Israelis with televisions could watch the armies of their neighbors mobilizing against them. Now Israel returned the favor. The signal from Jerusalem was strong enough to reach homes in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.4
At 9:40 A.M., the ceremonies began. Amid a sea of waving flags, the Presidential Guard and the army band strode before the reviewing stand. The grandstand area was decorated in colors commemorating the previous campaigns of 1948, 1956, and, of course, 1967.
The aerial show came next. Three hundred planes filled the skies, the largest assemblage of aircraft since the opening hours of the Six-Day War. Five jets led the formations trailing blue and white smoke, the national colors. Then came two additional formations, one forming the number twenty and the other a Star of David.5
Saving the best for last, the air force rolled out its finale. A single, needle-nosed MiG-21, painted red, screamed low over the crowd.6
Until 1966, few people in the West would have recognized a Soviet-made MiG-21. Only the vaguest details were then available on the fighter jet the Russians called the best in the world. On August 15, 1966, all that changed. Mossad, Israel’s fabled intelligence service, scored one of the great intelligence coups of the Cold War by persuading an Iraqi pilot to defect with his aircraft. Had the parade been held in any country besides Israel, no one would have understood the significance of the streaking red plane.
But this was Israel. Where practically every man and woman served in the army. Where ordinary citizens could distinguish calibers of ammunition merely from the sound of gunfire in the distance.
The crowd looked up and erupted in joy.
In the middle of the grandstand sat Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Ever the kibbutznik, even in the last year of his life, Eshkol wore his dark suit open-shirted without a necktie. Sitting next to him were his cabinet ministers, most without suit jackets. As always, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan stood out, this time by ignoring protocol and wearing his old army uniform with the chief of staff insignia embroidered on the shirt. The then-serving chief of staff, Chaim Bar-Lev, sat in his uniform on the other side.7
* * *
The men sitting on the grandstand understood just how far they had come. They remembered what it was like at the military parade the year before when Eshkol’s aide slipped him a handwritten note informing him that Nasser had mobilized his army and sent it marching into the Sinai Peninsula.
The nerve-shattering weeks that ensued even had a name, the Hamtana, or “Waiting.” Weeks of waiting that saw Israel’s worst nightmare realized, the IDF’s Everything Scenario, in which King Hussein of Jordan placed his troops under Egyptian command and the entire Arab world closed ranks to wipe the Jewish state off the map. When they tuned in to their radios, the Israeli public heard Eshkol botch a speech meant to raise public spirits.* At the very moment the nation needed to be rallied for battle, its coalition government collapsed. What the public mercifully did not know, but the men on the grandstand did, was that Chief of Staff Yitzchak Rabin had experienced a mental collapse, the nation’s leaders debated resorting to nuclear weapons, and General Ariel Sharon dropped a suggestion to carry out a military coup.8 †
Those who experienced it could never forget the desperation with which they entered the war. With nothing to lose, they wagered everything on a single, spectacular throw of the dice, doing what no nation has done before or since: use the entire air force on a single tactical mission, a single mission to destroy Arab air forces on the ground. Doing that meant that once the first bombs landed on Arab airfields, the State of Israel would effectively have no air force for two hours, for that was how long it took the pilots to return to base, land, refuel, rearm, and get back up into the sky. In those two hours, the nation stood naked to a counterattack from Arab fighter jets, or even Jordanian artillery fired from the hills of the West Bank.
And that was if everything went perfectly. Another thing Eshkol learned was that—again, if everything went perfectly—the nation did not have enough planes to get the job done in one wave. After returning to the air, the pilots would have to go back for a second trip and then a third. A computer model gave them no more than a 30 percent chance of success.9
And then, as if in a biblical tale, it ended almost as quickly as it began.
At a 1996 symposium, the Israelis revealed that they had hacked into their enemies’ radar systems, permitting them to view what Arab radar operators saw in real time. This allowed them to experiment over a period of months, sending jets along different low-altitude routes to determine what the enemy could see and when. On D-Day, the fighter jets slipped through unhindered, the Arabs were as surprised by the second and third attacks as by the first, and four hundred planes were destroyed on the ground. It was over in a few hours. General Ezer Weizman, former commander of the air force, called his wife and exclaimed, “We won the war!” to which she replied, “But Ezer, it’s only ten in the morning. How could you have won so quickly?”10
From there, everything fell into place as if choreographed by the Almighty himself. Egyptian troops were told to retreat, something Anwar Sadat later called “an order to commit suicide.” * King Hussein believed false Egyptian reports of victory, jumped onto the bandwagon, and before anyone knew it, Jews were praying at the Western Wall. During the 1996 symposium, Jordanian officials were seen off to the side screaming at their Egyptian counterparts, “You lied to us!.”11
By all rights it should have ended there, and the conflict should have been known as the Four-Day War. But then Damascus foolishly turned down a ceasefire offer.12 The Israelis obliged them and took the fight to the Golan Heights. Thirty-six hours later, the Syrian army suffered the same fate as the others, toppling like the biblical walls of Jericho. The Bible records that the ancient Hebrews needed seven days to bring down the walls of Jericho. In 1967, Arab armies collapsed in only six.
The State of Israel was now four times larger. An undivided Jerusalem was under Jewish sovereignty for the first time since 63 BCE. Just a week before, the Israelis were clinging to the shores of the Mediterranean wondering if they would survive, and now … it did not seem possible. Some looked to the Bible and found evidence of divine intervention. The secular year 1948, the year the State of Israel was founded, corresponds to the Jewish calendar year 5708. The 5,708th verse of the Bible reads: “And the Lord shall bring you to the land that your fathers inherited, and you shall inherit it and the Lord shall bless you to prosper far beyond your fathers.” The verses before that, which correspond loosely to the Holocaust years, speak of the “fire and brimstone” the Lord shall rain down upon his people. And what of the 5,727th verse, corresponding to the Jewish year 5727 and the secular year 1967? It reads: “And the Lord shall do to them as he did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites and to their lands, that he destroyed them.”
The men sitting on the grandstand watching the festivities that day in 1968 were less interested in the Bible. They realized what a close shave it had been.
Under conditions of perfect surprise and execution, the Israeli air force lost 10 percent of its fighter jets on the very first day of the war. Though in complete control of the skies after that, the IAF still lost a third of its strength by the time the guns fell silent just five days later. Three hundred planes flew overhead at the parade because the Israelis put every contraption they had into the sky. Those in the know understood that if war broke out tomorrow, the air force had only 130 fighter jets.13
Egyptian resistance on the ground likewise crumbled quickly. But still, 50 percent of the officers in Israel’s elite 84th Armored Division were either killed or wounded. Worse, if the war had lasted just two more weeks, Israeli tanks would have run out of ammunition. In short, Israel won the war. But only because everything went perfectly.14
What might happen if things did not go perfectly was the furthest thing from the minds of the cheering, flag-waving crowds. Instead, in the time since the rapturous summer of 1967, the Israeli public took to the roads and explored the new territories of their accidental empire. Dotting the landscape were numerous signs along the old 1948 line that read: DANGER! BORDER AHEAD. As a joke, someone spray-painted the word No onto one of the signs. And so, until it was pulled down with all the others, it read: DANGER! NO BORDER AHEAD.15
The parade ended and soon things returned to normal, or at least what passed for normal in Israel. Eighteen Palestinian guerillas would be killed over the following weekend, along with four Israelis.16 A submarine was missing. France reneged on the sale of Mirage fighter jets. And in July, Israelis would be introduced to a new tactic: airplane hijackings.
David Ben-Gurion was invited to speak before a special session of the Knesset on June 5, 1968. Twenty years before, the conventional wisdom held that the Jewish state would expire long before Ben-Gurion’s first term in office. Now, at an age when most politicians revel in self-congratulation, Ben-Gurion might have struck the high note of winds blowing and pages turning.
That was not the speech he delivered. The situation in 1968, Ben-Gurion declared, was almost as perilous as the one he confronted twenty years before: “Never since the creation of the Jewish State has our international weakness been so much in evidence as in recent years … even the finest army—and it is doubtful whether an army in the world surpasses the IDF in quality, capability and devotion—cannot fight empty-handed, and we are still far from producing all the equipment we need for our defense …
“We have heard what the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, said on June 9, 1967, after the defeat of the Egyptian Army: No matter what the circumstances, and no matter how long it takes … when imperialism has been liquidated in the Arab world and Israel stands alone, the day of revenge will come.”17
2 “THAT WHICH WAS TAKEN BY FORCE WILL BE RETURNED BY FORCE”
We went looking for donkeys and we found an empire.
—Levi Eshkol, June 11, 1967
When he stood on the dock in 1952, moments before sailing into exile, King Farouk warned Gamal Abdel Nasser and the military leaders who ousted him that they would find out one day just how difficult Egypt was to govern.1
In the days after the 1967 war, that prophecy materialized in its darkest incarnation. Egypt was bankrupt, its army defeated. As the nation deteriorated, Nasser’s health deteriorated with it. One of his aides wrote that Nasser aged ten years in just six days.2 Once, Nasser had prevented the Israelis from using the Suez Canal. Now it was the Israelis that prevented him. In 1948, Farouk’s army had lasted more than six months against the Israelis. Nasser’s was defeated in less than a week.
Egyptian morale rose momentarily on October 21, 1967. Naval command in Alexandria sent a message to its base in Port Sayid not to fire at any target in its jurisdiction. As expected, the false order was intercepted and lured the Israeli ship Eilat closer to Egyptian territorial waters (whether it actually entered Egyptian waters is still the subject of controversy). Just before dusk, two Egyptian boats fired four Soviet-made missiles. Three scored direct hits and the Eilat, a WWII destroyer the Israeli navy bought on the cheap, went to the bottom, killing 47 of its crew of 199.
Crowds cheered the missile boats as they returned to port. October 21 was established as a national holiday honoring the Egyptian navy.* A Lebanese newspaper declared, “The Israeli legend was shattered in those moments and things have begun to return to their normal place.”3
The jubilation was short-lived. The Israelis responded by shelling the canal cities of Suez and Port Ibrahim, igniting more than a hundred fuel tanks and flattening refineries, petrochemical plants, and port facilities. Israeli soldiers reported being able to read books at night by the light of the flames. To the loss of revenue from Sinai oil wells and the closure of the Suez Canal could now be added millions Egypt once earned refining and exporting petroleum. Henceforth, Cairo had to find the foreign exchange to buy those products abroad in order to meet domestic needs.4
The commander of Egypt’s army, Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, attempted a coup and committed suicide after it failed. Dozens of top military and political leaders, including the defense minister, the intelligence chief, and the commander of the air force, were all jailed.5 Refugees streamed out of the Canal Zone and flooded Cairo.
The shelling of the canal cities bought Israel a precious year of quiet. Nasser’s army was in no condition for another round with the Israelis, and Marshal Matvei Zakharov, chief of the general staff of the Soviet Union, was sent to Cairo to squelch any notion to the contrary. Zakharov approached the situation with the tact and charm of a communist apparatchik, telling his Egyptian counterparts that if every Soviet-made tank had merely fired off ten shots instead of being abandoned, they would have won the war. General P. N. Lashenko, the chief Soviet military officer, said of Egyptian Chief of Staff Abdul Munim Riad that “the general impression of him is a good one, although he shows off a bit, like most Arabs.”6
Of course, in the eyes of the Egyptians the Soviets were no bargain, either. It was true that what the Soviets lacked in diplomatic skills they made up for in iron and steel. Weapons poured into the country, supplied at no cost. But much of that equipment was shoddy, a problem compounded by corruption. In the building of the Aswan Dam, observers quipped that the Russians had to supply three of everything. One item arrived broken, one was stolen, and only the last one made it into the field. Of the Egyptians in 1967, a Russian adviser said, “They were stealing like hell.” Worse still, the Soviets estimated that 80 percent of Egyptian soldiers and 60 percent of the officers had no idea how to operate the equipment they were given.7 *
Israel suffered from the opposite problem. It had soldiers of every rank worthy of the title but lacked weapons. The French imposed an embargo on fifty Mirage fighter jets ordered before the war, and fighter jets were what Israel needed most of all. The only other potential source was the United States.
Copyright © 2023 by Uri Kaufman
The U.N. Security Council deeply deplores the holding by Israel of the military parade in Jerusalem on 2 May, 1968 in disregard of the unanimous decision adopted by the Council on April 27, 1968.
—UN Security Council Resolution 251
In the spring of 1968, the State of Israel announced that it would mark the twentieth anniversary of its founding by holding a military parade in the recently reunited city of Jerusalem. The governments of the world took great pains to voice their displeasure. And the government of Israel took equally great pains to hold the parade as planned.1
The route was carefully mapped out. Armored and infantry columns would mass in a staging area near Shuafat, a newly captured Arab section in the northern part of the city. From there, the soldiers would march south through the Arab neighborhood of Wadi el-Joz, past the walls of the Old City, then turn right and continue through the Jewish sections of Western Jerusalem. It was a long route—more than five miles—and not just because the Israelis were eager to march in newly acquired warrens of the city. Organizers planned for half a million spectators—as it turned out, even that estimate was surpassed—and it was important to disperse the crowds over as wide an area as possible.2
Counting the Arab residents that completed the shotgun marriage now called Greater Jerusalem, the sleepy hill city numbered only 240,000 souls, and this was to triple in size for one afternoon. In a country with fewer than 54,000 registered vehicles, somehow, impossibly, 45,000 arrived for the festivities.3 A grandstand was built on a mile-long clearing to accommodate 60,000 people, more than double the seating capacity of the nation’s largest stadium.
And, for the first time, Israeli television was there as well. Television came relatively late to the Jewish state, first crackling on the air just two years earlier, in 1966. Executives of state-owned Channel 1—“1” because it was the only station in the country—finally had an excuse to get the Finance Ministry to upgrade their equipment. Show the proceedings live, they argued to jittery officials, and fewer will come to Jerusalem. A used mobile camera was hastily purchased in London and operated under the direction of an Irish technician who did not speak a word of Hebrew. Large crowds indeed gathered in TV-equipped homes, though only in cities far from Jerusalem. One newspaper reported that the streets of Haifa “remained almost deserted, as if an air raid alarm had been sounded.” The previous year, Israelis with televisions could watch the armies of their neighbors mobilizing against them. Now Israel returned the favor. The signal from Jerusalem was strong enough to reach homes in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.4
At 9:40 A.M., the ceremonies began. Amid a sea of waving flags, the Presidential Guard and the army band strode before the reviewing stand. The grandstand area was decorated in colors commemorating the previous campaigns of 1948, 1956, and, of course, 1967.
The aerial show came next. Three hundred planes filled the skies, the largest assemblage of aircraft since the opening hours of the Six-Day War. Five jets led the formations trailing blue and white smoke, the national colors. Then came two additional formations, one forming the number twenty and the other a Star of David.5
Saving the best for last, the air force rolled out its finale. A single, needle-nosed MiG-21, painted red, screamed low over the crowd.6
Until 1966, few people in the West would have recognized a Soviet-made MiG-21. Only the vaguest details were then available on the fighter jet the Russians called the best in the world. On August 15, 1966, all that changed. Mossad, Israel’s fabled intelligence service, scored one of the great intelligence coups of the Cold War by persuading an Iraqi pilot to defect with his aircraft. Had the parade been held in any country besides Israel, no one would have understood the significance of the streaking red plane.
But this was Israel. Where practically every man and woman served in the army. Where ordinary citizens could distinguish calibers of ammunition merely from the sound of gunfire in the distance.
The crowd looked up and erupted in joy.
In the middle of the grandstand sat Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Ever the kibbutznik, even in the last year of his life, Eshkol wore his dark suit open-shirted without a necktie. Sitting next to him were his cabinet ministers, most without suit jackets. As always, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan stood out, this time by ignoring protocol and wearing his old army uniform with the chief of staff insignia embroidered on the shirt. The then-serving chief of staff, Chaim Bar-Lev, sat in his uniform on the other side.7
* * *
The men sitting on the grandstand understood just how far they had come. They remembered what it was like at the military parade the year before when Eshkol’s aide slipped him a handwritten note informing him that Nasser had mobilized his army and sent it marching into the Sinai Peninsula.
The nerve-shattering weeks that ensued even had a name, the Hamtana, or “Waiting.” Weeks of waiting that saw Israel’s worst nightmare realized, the IDF’s Everything Scenario, in which King Hussein of Jordan placed his troops under Egyptian command and the entire Arab world closed ranks to wipe the Jewish state off the map. When they tuned in to their radios, the Israeli public heard Eshkol botch a speech meant to raise public spirits.* At the very moment the nation needed to be rallied for battle, its coalition government collapsed. What the public mercifully did not know, but the men on the grandstand did, was that Chief of Staff Yitzchak Rabin had experienced a mental collapse, the nation’s leaders debated resorting to nuclear weapons, and General Ariel Sharon dropped a suggestion to carry out a military coup.8 †
Those who experienced it could never forget the desperation with which they entered the war. With nothing to lose, they wagered everything on a single, spectacular throw of the dice, doing what no nation has done before or since: use the entire air force on a single tactical mission, a single mission to destroy Arab air forces on the ground. Doing that meant that once the first bombs landed on Arab airfields, the State of Israel would effectively have no air force for two hours, for that was how long it took the pilots to return to base, land, refuel, rearm, and get back up into the sky. In those two hours, the nation stood naked to a counterattack from Arab fighter jets, or even Jordanian artillery fired from the hills of the West Bank.
And that was if everything went perfectly. Another thing Eshkol learned was that—again, if everything went perfectly—the nation did not have enough planes to get the job done in one wave. After returning to the air, the pilots would have to go back for a second trip and then a third. A computer model gave them no more than a 30 percent chance of success.9
And then, as if in a biblical tale, it ended almost as quickly as it began.
At a 1996 symposium, the Israelis revealed that they had hacked into their enemies’ radar systems, permitting them to view what Arab radar operators saw in real time. This allowed them to experiment over a period of months, sending jets along different low-altitude routes to determine what the enemy could see and when. On D-Day, the fighter jets slipped through unhindered, the Arabs were as surprised by the second and third attacks as by the first, and four hundred planes were destroyed on the ground. It was over in a few hours. General Ezer Weizman, former commander of the air force, called his wife and exclaimed, “We won the war!” to which she replied, “But Ezer, it’s only ten in the morning. How could you have won so quickly?”10
From there, everything fell into place as if choreographed by the Almighty himself. Egyptian troops were told to retreat, something Anwar Sadat later called “an order to commit suicide.” * King Hussein believed false Egyptian reports of victory, jumped onto the bandwagon, and before anyone knew it, Jews were praying at the Western Wall. During the 1996 symposium, Jordanian officials were seen off to the side screaming at their Egyptian counterparts, “You lied to us!.”11
By all rights it should have ended there, and the conflict should have been known as the Four-Day War. But then Damascus foolishly turned down a ceasefire offer.12 The Israelis obliged them and took the fight to the Golan Heights. Thirty-six hours later, the Syrian army suffered the same fate as the others, toppling like the biblical walls of Jericho. The Bible records that the ancient Hebrews needed seven days to bring down the walls of Jericho. In 1967, Arab armies collapsed in only six.
The State of Israel was now four times larger. An undivided Jerusalem was under Jewish sovereignty for the first time since 63 BCE. Just a week before, the Israelis were clinging to the shores of the Mediterranean wondering if they would survive, and now … it did not seem possible. Some looked to the Bible and found evidence of divine intervention. The secular year 1948, the year the State of Israel was founded, corresponds to the Jewish calendar year 5708. The 5,708th verse of the Bible reads: “And the Lord shall bring you to the land that your fathers inherited, and you shall inherit it and the Lord shall bless you to prosper far beyond your fathers.” The verses before that, which correspond loosely to the Holocaust years, speak of the “fire and brimstone” the Lord shall rain down upon his people. And what of the 5,727th verse, corresponding to the Jewish year 5727 and the secular year 1967? It reads: “And the Lord shall do to them as he did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites and to their lands, that he destroyed them.”
The men sitting on the grandstand watching the festivities that day in 1968 were less interested in the Bible. They realized what a close shave it had been.
Under conditions of perfect surprise and execution, the Israeli air force lost 10 percent of its fighter jets on the very first day of the war. Though in complete control of the skies after that, the IAF still lost a third of its strength by the time the guns fell silent just five days later. Three hundred planes flew overhead at the parade because the Israelis put every contraption they had into the sky. Those in the know understood that if war broke out tomorrow, the air force had only 130 fighter jets.13
Egyptian resistance on the ground likewise crumbled quickly. But still, 50 percent of the officers in Israel’s elite 84th Armored Division were either killed or wounded. Worse, if the war had lasted just two more weeks, Israeli tanks would have run out of ammunition. In short, Israel won the war. But only because everything went perfectly.14
What might happen if things did not go perfectly was the furthest thing from the minds of the cheering, flag-waving crowds. Instead, in the time since the rapturous summer of 1967, the Israeli public took to the roads and explored the new territories of their accidental empire. Dotting the landscape were numerous signs along the old 1948 line that read: DANGER! BORDER AHEAD. As a joke, someone spray-painted the word No onto one of the signs. And so, until it was pulled down with all the others, it read: DANGER! NO BORDER AHEAD.15
The parade ended and soon things returned to normal, or at least what passed for normal in Israel. Eighteen Palestinian guerillas would be killed over the following weekend, along with four Israelis.16 A submarine was missing. France reneged on the sale of Mirage fighter jets. And in July, Israelis would be introduced to a new tactic: airplane hijackings.
David Ben-Gurion was invited to speak before a special session of the Knesset on June 5, 1968. Twenty years before, the conventional wisdom held that the Jewish state would expire long before Ben-Gurion’s first term in office. Now, at an age when most politicians revel in self-congratulation, Ben-Gurion might have struck the high note of winds blowing and pages turning.
That was not the speech he delivered. The situation in 1968, Ben-Gurion declared, was almost as perilous as the one he confronted twenty years before: “Never since the creation of the Jewish State has our international weakness been so much in evidence as in recent years … even the finest army—and it is doubtful whether an army in the world surpasses the IDF in quality, capability and devotion—cannot fight empty-handed, and we are still far from producing all the equipment we need for our defense …
“We have heard what the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, said on June 9, 1967, after the defeat of the Egyptian Army: No matter what the circumstances, and no matter how long it takes … when imperialism has been liquidated in the Arab world and Israel stands alone, the day of revenge will come.”17
2 “THAT WHICH WAS TAKEN BY FORCE WILL BE RETURNED BY FORCE”
We went looking for donkeys and we found an empire.
—Levi Eshkol, June 11, 1967
When he stood on the dock in 1952, moments before sailing into exile, King Farouk warned Gamal Abdel Nasser and the military leaders who ousted him that they would find out one day just how difficult Egypt was to govern.1
In the days after the 1967 war, that prophecy materialized in its darkest incarnation. Egypt was bankrupt, its army defeated. As the nation deteriorated, Nasser’s health deteriorated with it. One of his aides wrote that Nasser aged ten years in just six days.2 Once, Nasser had prevented the Israelis from using the Suez Canal. Now it was the Israelis that prevented him. In 1948, Farouk’s army had lasted more than six months against the Israelis. Nasser’s was defeated in less than a week.
Egyptian morale rose momentarily on October 21, 1967. Naval command in Alexandria sent a message to its base in Port Sayid not to fire at any target in its jurisdiction. As expected, the false order was intercepted and lured the Israeli ship Eilat closer to Egyptian territorial waters (whether it actually entered Egyptian waters is still the subject of controversy). Just before dusk, two Egyptian boats fired four Soviet-made missiles. Three scored direct hits and the Eilat, a WWII destroyer the Israeli navy bought on the cheap, went to the bottom, killing 47 of its crew of 199.
Crowds cheered the missile boats as they returned to port. October 21 was established as a national holiday honoring the Egyptian navy.* A Lebanese newspaper declared, “The Israeli legend was shattered in those moments and things have begun to return to their normal place.”3
The jubilation was short-lived. The Israelis responded by shelling the canal cities of Suez and Port Ibrahim, igniting more than a hundred fuel tanks and flattening refineries, petrochemical plants, and port facilities. Israeli soldiers reported being able to read books at night by the light of the flames. To the loss of revenue from Sinai oil wells and the closure of the Suez Canal could now be added millions Egypt once earned refining and exporting petroleum. Henceforth, Cairo had to find the foreign exchange to buy those products abroad in order to meet domestic needs.4
The commander of Egypt’s army, Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, attempted a coup and committed suicide after it failed. Dozens of top military and political leaders, including the defense minister, the intelligence chief, and the commander of the air force, were all jailed.5 Refugees streamed out of the Canal Zone and flooded Cairo.
The shelling of the canal cities bought Israel a precious year of quiet. Nasser’s army was in no condition for another round with the Israelis, and Marshal Matvei Zakharov, chief of the general staff of the Soviet Union, was sent to Cairo to squelch any notion to the contrary. Zakharov approached the situation with the tact and charm of a communist apparatchik, telling his Egyptian counterparts that if every Soviet-made tank had merely fired off ten shots instead of being abandoned, they would have won the war. General P. N. Lashenko, the chief Soviet military officer, said of Egyptian Chief of Staff Abdul Munim Riad that “the general impression of him is a good one, although he shows off a bit, like most Arabs.”6
Of course, in the eyes of the Egyptians the Soviets were no bargain, either. It was true that what the Soviets lacked in diplomatic skills they made up for in iron and steel. Weapons poured into the country, supplied at no cost. But much of that equipment was shoddy, a problem compounded by corruption. In the building of the Aswan Dam, observers quipped that the Russians had to supply three of everything. One item arrived broken, one was stolen, and only the last one made it into the field. Of the Egyptians in 1967, a Russian adviser said, “They were stealing like hell.” Worse still, the Soviets estimated that 80 percent of Egyptian soldiers and 60 percent of the officers had no idea how to operate the equipment they were given.7 *
Israel suffered from the opposite problem. It had soldiers of every rank worthy of the title but lacked weapons. The French imposed an embargo on fifty Mirage fighter jets ordered before the war, and fighter jets were what Israel needed most of all. The only other potential source was the United States.
Copyright © 2023 by Uri Kaufman
Praise:
"A valuable addition to the literature. … Engaging, evenhanded account of a major Middle East conflict that still resonates today.”—Kirkus Reviews
"A lucid recounting of military engagements... a well-paced and informative account of a consequential conflict."
—Publisher's Weekly
"[Kaufman] tells the story brilliantly. Anyone interested in the Middle East or military history will appreciate Kaufman’s work."
—Senator Joseph I. Lieberman
"Stimulating and insightful...will no doubt find a permanent place on the Arab-Israeli bookshelf."
—Michael Oren, New York Times bestselling author of Six Days of War
"A valuable and essential read."
—Ambassador Danny Danon, Israel's 17th Permanent Representative to the United Nations
"To understand modern Israel, this is a book worth reading."
—Yaakov Katz, editor of The Jerusalem Post and author of Shadow Strike
"The Yom Kippur War was the event that made the modern Middle East. At last, a book has been written that tells this fascinating story in a way that reveals the decision making, strategy and heroism of those that fought it."
—Yaakov "Ketzaleh" Katz, wounded officer and veteran of the Yom Kippur War, former Member of Knesset and top aide to Ariel Sharon
About the author:
A fascinating time in Israeli history.
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