CHAPTER EIGHT: THE YOM KIPPUR WAR
I am a Jew, born five years after the Holocaust ended. Growing up I encountered moderate anti-Semitism—name-calling, schoolyard fights, occasional social exclusion. It was not enough to scar, quite the opposite, it was one more way that my identity as a Jew was reinforced.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that being Jewish doesn’t affect my sleep. I have friends who occasionally have nightmares about being on a train to Auschwitz. I’ve only ever had that kind of dream once and I would probably keep it to myself except that it is intimately bound up with my thesis that October 1973 was the key month in America’s sad progress to Donald Trump and its current state of cold civil war.
I was living in Hollywood, on a side street in the flatlands below Sunset Boulevard, at 1323 North Mansfield Avenue. Less than three weeks earlier I had been living in London, my money running out, a return ticket to the US weighing heavily in my pocket. Now after a couple of weeks re-writing medical articles into something like English, I had earned enough to make it to LA and move in with my college girl friend who I thought had dumped me but apparently had not, and quickly found work in the film business. Actually, it was work in a film lab where prints of old television series were sent for reconditioning and really had nothing to do with making movies but it was a business related to film—or so I told myself. My plan was to work for a while, save as much as I could, and convince my girlfriend to move back to London with me.
The ease with which I crossed an ocean and a continent is a comment not just on youthful rootlessness but on the particular economics of the time. Gas was 36 cents a gallon. Unemployment was low and obeyed the law of supply and demand. With workers in short supply employers had to pay good wages. In fact wages were running ahead of inflation. A few weeks of work was a grub stake to the next city and the next relationship, if you were 23 and didn’t require palatial digs and what was not yet called a “lifestyle.”
My girlfriend was not Jewish. She was of Teutonic stock and looked it: blonde, with sharp cheekbones and a very straight nose. In 1973 it was only just becoming common for people from our very different backgrounds to have serious relationships.
We even joked about the incongruity of her extreme Aryan appearance coupled to my undisguised Jewish sensibility, particularly my sense of humor: irony and absurdity used to express moral outrage. Although I was more Woody Allen than Philip Roth in my use of wit.
Besides humor, another way my Jewish sensibility manifests itself is around Yom Kippur. I’m not observant but the Day of Atonement is a day I pay attention to. I fast and even say remembered prayers to a God I am certain does not exist. “Our Father, our King, For all these sins: pardon, forgive, forget.”
I don’t make a big deal about it. It’s a matter of private contemplation as I go about other tasks, so on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1973, I’m sure it was in my mind. That is the only way to explain my dream.
That year Yom Kippur fell on Shabbat, the Sabbath. It was Friday night, the holiday had begun. My girlfriend and I made love—we were young and always made love—and passed out. Then came the dream.
Israel was under attack and Jews were being rounded up in America and my girlfriend was dressed in a Nazi uniform and ordering me into a wooden-sided boxcar heading for a death camp. It sounds like a bad taste comic dream in a Woody Allen film but it was a genuine nightmare. I tossed and shook my way out of it and as I returned to wakefulness, immediately started to minimize the images to get control of the fear, and told myself it was just a really weird dream and to calm down.
But here is the genuinely weird thing—around the time I was having that dream Israel was indeed under attack. The country was invaded by Syria in the north and Egypt in the west. The Yom Kippur War was underway.
The surprise of the dream is underscored by the surprise of the attack. In the news saturated environment of today it is easy to to imagine people dreaming about an event they might only have glimpsed as a headline while surfing online one last time before going to bed.
In 1973 there was no cyber-flotsam, no 24-hour television news channels. There was nothing floating in the ether that might seed the sub-conscious. And even if there had been, it’s possible nothing would have been out there because the war came as a surprise to the Israelis, as well. Although, when five divisions of the Egyptian army are massed in battle formation on the west bank of the Suez Canal, and three divisions of the Syrian army have moved close to the Golan Heights, it begs the question: what were Prime Minister Golda Meir and her military advisers thinking?
The facts, as they have been established by historians and various Israeli commissions of inquiry, say this is what happened:
On October 6, at 2 p.m. local time in Tel Aviv, dream time in LA, the Egyptian air force launched attacks on Israeli positions in the Sinai. Shortly after the aerial attacks, 32,000 Egyptian troops crossed the Suez canal which had not been in use since the previous war in 1967. On the Israeli side of the waterway, 450 Israeli soldiers in a string of fortified positions tried to hold them off.
At the same time, Syria launched air strikes and an artillery barrage, the preliminary softening up attack, before sending its three divisions into battle to reclaim the Golan Heights. Again, the Israeli forces were woefully undermanned.
It was the one day of the year when Israel’s famous capability of mobillizing its citizen army in a heartbeat was most difficult.
In 1973, most Israelis relationship to religious ritual was similar to mine: secular and cultural, not an act of belief. Yom Kippur would have been the day of the year they became observant, and so from synagogues and places of contemplation, two-thirds of the way through twenty-four hours of fasting, the citizen army rushed to their units.
The fear in the population was real.
Annihilation is an extraordinary word. The sound of it, the way its five syllables run together. For most people the word annihilation is used primarily as a rhetorical enhancement, mostly to describe lop-sided sporting victories. “We didn’t just beat the other team, we annihilated them.”
But for Jews it is a word that conveys its original meaning from the mid-16th century when it first came into use: to obliterate, reduce to nothing.
In 1933, precisely 40 years earlier, there was no Israel and most of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. That year Hitler used constitutional means to suspend Germany’s constitution and extend indefinitely the state of emergency under which he had been given complete control of the country. Jews were immediately dismissed from the civil service and forbidden to practice law or sit as judges. The first steps towards “annihilation” had been taken.
So now it is 1973 and there are virtually no Jews left in central and eastern Europe, the life and culture of the people have been obliterated. But Israel exists, and from the north and from the west the country is hemorraghing casualties. 656 dead and 2,000 wounded in the first week of fighting. In 1973 Israel had a population of just three million, extrapolate those casualty figures to the population of America that year and it is the equivalent of more than 200,000 casualties.
That’s a bad week in anybody’s book but in Israel’s circumstances it is terrifying because Israeli’s understand the original meaning of the word annihilation.
It is terrifying because after the ease of victory in the 1967 war, many Israelis had begun to feel secure. Security is not an active, conscious state of mind. Security is an absence of fear and concern, a sub-sonscious expectation that every day will be as calm and stable as the previous one. For Jews anywhere, security is a very rare feeling.
But in Israel that disappeared. The fighting was intense, news from the front was patchy. A man might have raced from his home in Jerusalem to join his unit on the Golan Heights just an hour’s drive away and his family might not have heard from him for days. The information vacuum was unprecedented.
If war is politics by other means, and if all politics are local than the reason for this war can be found in the domestic politics of Egypt. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had taken office in 1970 following the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He inherited two main problems from Nasser’s regime.
First, the Egyptian economy was awful. Nasser had aligned Egypt with the Soviet bloc and that included organizing the economy in a similar way to the Soviets: a centralized command economy that was already rife with corruption.
Second, in 1967, Egyptian forces had been routed from the Sinai peninsula during the Six-Day War and Israel still occupied the area. The blow to Egyptian national pride was a political issue that the Egyptian president needed to resolve.
Sadat wanted to re-orient Egypt away from the Soviets towards the US to improve the economy and he wanted to negotiate the return of the Sinai. No one in Washington or Jerusalem paid much attention to his overtures. The status quo of “Neither war, nor peace” worked for Golda Meir, as well as for the Nixon administration which was occupied by bigger concerns in international affairs: opening China, establishing detente with Russia, the ongoing wars in Southeast Asia, removing Salvador Allende in Chile.
But the status quo was a danger to Sadat’s rule and Egyptian stability.
He decided initiating a war might well make the US and the Soviet Union sit-up and take notice. All politics may be local, but local when it comes to the Middle East is the whole world because of oil. Sadat thought an invasion of Sinai would force the superpowers to intervene and make Israel negotiate the return of Sinai.
At least one person in Washington saw what was likely to happen. Roger Merrick, a security analyst at the INR, the State Department’s in-house intelligence service. He wrote a memo in May 1973 outlining the likelihood of war within six months.
No one paid attention.
Syria, now led by Hafez al-Assad, also wanted to reclaim territory lost in 1967, the Golan Heights, and made common cause with Sadat.
Syria was more firmly aligned with the Soviets than Egypt. Several days before the war began, Soviet citizens in Syria were ordered home. The exodus was noted by US intelligence services but again, no one in the US or Israel reached the obvious conclusion: war must be imminent.
In Israel a deadly combination of cockiness and complacency had taken hold of the upper echelons of politics and the military after 1967.
“They brainwashed themselves and they brainwashed us.” Ray Cline, Director INR, State Department.
That cockiness was transmitted to the diplomatic corps in Washington who very easily convinced the Nixon administration that everything was under control.
Until the invasion happened and suddenly it wasn’t.
European leaders were shocked by the early successes of the combined Arab armies. British Prime Minister Edward Heath tried desperately to get a hold of Nixon on the phone to find out what was going on.
Day by day, the US watched and waited for Israel to show the lightning fighting capability it had shown in 1967. But it became clear that the initial assault had badly depleted Israeli supplies. Now the US had to re-supply its ally but do it in such a way as not to anger the other Arab countries or put the Soviet Union in the position of having to publicly re-supply Syria.
Eventually that delicate problem was solved and an inevitability took hold about the war’s outcome. Watching the Israeli Defense Force go to work was like watching a skilled woodsman taking on a thick-trunked, old growth tree. You know the tree will come down, it’s strictly a question of technique, application and time.
And so it turned out. The war would drag on until the end of October. After the initial rout, the Israeli Defense Force counterattacked. Then the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, said enough, and forced the combatants to accept a cease fire.
By then, the IDF had pushed the Syrians off the Golan. Instead of fighting an hour from Jerusalem they were now fighting less than an hour from Damascus. Israeli forces had re-crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army on Egyptian soil.
For the superpowers this created a terrible problem. Israel might keep the war going to a point that negotiations would be impossible.
My nightmare is victory for either side, Henry Kissinger to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, October 18, 1973.
The superpowers forced an Israeli withdrawal. The status quo ante had been Kissinger’s goal - at least as far as territorial boundaries were concerned and that is exactly what happened. So nothing changed, except for the families of the dead, right?
Yet, this major event of October 1973 is still remembered in Israel as the moment when everything changed. Because for one week at least, it seemed possible that the country would lose and defeat in a war, Israeli’s know, leads to annihilation.
The feeling that everything was different took hold immediately. Amnon Rubinstein, an Israeli lawyer and peace activist, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times published on October 21st.
“There are no more doves left in Israel. Historians will refer to this war as a turning point in the Middle East, if only because of this definitive change of mood.”
Very few pieces of analysis published in the New York Times have ever been so accurate. Israel’s right-wing politics had always been fragmented but within weeks of the war’s end, five of the country’s right-wing parties coalesced into a single group, the Likud—it means consolidation in Hebrew—under the leadership of Menahem Begin.
Elections in December gave the new bloc 30 percent of the vote. By Israeli standards, this made them a formidable opposition party. In 1977 the party would be elected to government and its expansionist ideology—building settlements in “Samaria”, the West Bank Palestinian land captured in 1967—would come to redefine Israel.
The Likud has governed Israel for most of the last half-century, alone or sharing power in governments of national unity. The one time in all those years the Likud was completely out of power, the Oslo Peace Accords were negotiated and signed.
The war in October 1973 would be the last time the massed armies of the Arab Middle East would take on Israel in a war. Sadat’s geo-political strategy paid off. Israeli leaders, at the insistence of the US, began direct negotiations with the Egyptian president about the return of the Sinai.
Egypt would re-orient itself into the US sphere and be rewarded with American money and military materiel. Lots of it. According to State Department figures published in January, 2021, since 1978, the US has given Egypt $50 billion in military aid and $30 billion in economic assistance.
The only thing that wouldn’t change was the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza and its relentless policy of settlement building, “creating facts on the ground.”
Ariel Sharon was the hero of the Yom Kippur War. He had commanded the IDF forces that had pushed the Egyptian Army out of Sinai and back to their side of the canal. He joined the Likud and became a political general.
In 2000, the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinian authority, were still in force, and negotiations on the final status of Jerusalem—which were mandated by Oslo—were under way. At the same time, Israel’s government, led by the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak, was teetering. Sharon, decided to give the political situation a shove. Accompanied by 1,000 security personnel he walked across the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. The area is nominally under the control of the Waqf, the Palestinian’s religious managers of the site.
The Temple Mount sits on top of the Western Wall. It is arguably the single most fraught piece of real estate in the world. Sharon’s walk was a political stunt. He knew that elections would be coming soon and was demonstrating to Israeli voters that he would never give up Israeli control over the whole of Jerusalem.
The provocation ignited riots and resentment that would lead to the Second Intifada, but it also solidified Sharon’s political credentials and in March 2001 he became Israel’s Prime Minister.
A month later I was in Jerusalem to make an hour long radio program about the final status negotiations for WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate.
The suicide bombings and rocket attacks that would lead to the construction of the separation wall and ultimately the frozen never-world of today’s peace process had not happened yet. But tourism was already collapsing.
Al-Wad street is the main pedestrian route from the Damascus Gate to the Kotel, or Western Wall. It runs through the Old City’s Arab Quarter. The Palestinian souvenir shop owners were suffering badly from the sudden tourist decline. A man about my age saw me recording some street sounds and beckoned me over to his empty shop. His English was good and we started chatting about business, which was terrible, and the iniquity of the Israeli’s, which was never-ending. But he also spoke of his disappointment in his brother Arabs.
“Where is the Arab nation? Where are the Arab armies?” he demanded.
“When will they come?”
How could I explain to him that the answer was: never. That since October 1973, when he and I were just taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, the Arab leaders had made their own separate accommodations with Israel.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid with his life for openly making peace. The others were more circumspect. To preserve stability and their own rule they had to maintain good relations with the US and the West and that meant privately reconciling themselves to Israel’s existence. No Arab armies would be coming to the Palestinian shopkeeper’s rescue.
Ever.
The Yom Kippur War, October War, whatever you want to call it, permanently changed life for not just the combatants, the conflict changed it for all of us. Because as a result of the war the price of oil would rise dramatically and inflation metastasize across the West. That was another prediction of Roger Merrick’s memo IRN memo of May 1973 that Nixon and his advisers did not pay attention to. But they had other things on their mind. Besides the big geo-political moves they were making, the Watergate scandal was coming to a head.
(Read on to Chapter Nine)
And if you need to catch up on earlier chapters, Part 1 of the book , Bliss Was It In That Dawn, begins here:
Notes:
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v25/d156
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB415/
https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-egypt/
http://archives.wbur.org/insideout/documentaries/jerusalem/documentary/part1.html