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'Spirit of solidarity' saved Israel during Yom Kippur War, says Ehud Barak

The former Israeli PM recalls his experiences as a tank commander on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 conflict

October 6, 2023 12:35
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8 min read

Ehud Barak was a 31-year-old graduate student at the School of Engineering at Stanford, California, in early October 1973 when he was woken at 4am by a call from the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Picking up the phone, he heard the voice of Motta Gur, the embassy’s military attaché. “Ehud, there is a war at home. But I don’t think we’re missing a serious one,” he said.

Barak would go on to become prime minister in 1999, but back then he was a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli special forces, having just ended his term as commander of Sayeret Matkal, the equivalent of the British SAS.

“What do you mean by we?” Barak responded. “You’re here in a formal role, you have a job to do. I’m a young career officer in the chain of command, I cannot afford to miss even a non-serious war.

"So I’m flying back and I’ll call you from New York.”

By the time he got to New York, Barak saw around a thousand other young Israelis who had, like him, rushed there to try to get a seat on the only El Al 707 set to depart for Israel.

He called Gur back as promised, who told him: “You’re right, we’re missing a very serious war. The Syrians are already at the gates of Nafach.”

Barak understood well the severity of the situation: Nafach was the Syrian village where Israel’s central command post for the Golan Heights was located.

Knowing that their flight could only accommodate 170 people at most, the El Al station chief asked him to advise them on who should fly. “I had to choose from the thousand people,” he said.

“I chose the pilots and the commanders who had just left the army. And unlike me — I was called formally by the embassy — they just heard about it and immediately left whatever they’d been doing: studying at universities, visiting family, working as firefighters in the forests of Canada, whatever. This spirit of solidarity is what saved Israel in this war.

“It caught me half a year later, when I flew back to my family after the war, that many of them, probably several dozen, did not come back, or came back in coffins, and some of them were missing in action.