Minutes before midnight (Israel time) on October 5, 1973, Ashraf Marwan met Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad whom Marwan had urgently summoned to London, and told him that Egypt and Syria planned to attack Israel the following day.
Months earlier, Marwan had supplied the Mossad with the Egyptian army’s masterplan for crossing the Suez Canal, but without a date.
Marwan, the son-in-law of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and a close adviser to Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, was Israel’s most important agent — possibly ever — in the Arab world.
Hours earlier on October 5, Marwan had accidentally learnt that Egypt’s aviation minister had abruptly ordered EgyptAir’s fleet of carriers to fly to Libya or other countries, out of reach of possible Israeli air attack.
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Anwar Sadat (Photo: Getty Images)
Marwan deduced that Sadat was at last launching the war that the Egyptian president had long mulled over.
Just after midnight, Zamir telephoned Marwan’s warning to Israel and the country began gearing up for war.
But it was too late. Calling up and equipping hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers, the mainstay of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), readying their tanks, armoured personnel carriers, guns and ammunition trains, and advancing them to distant front lines, while preparing the home front for war, normally takes weeks (as it had done in May-June 1967, before the Six Day War). At a pinch, days were needed. But on October 6, 1973, Israel had barely a few hours.
For weeks, Israel’s intelligence services had been picking up signals that Egypt and Syria were readying their armies.
But the Egyptians had camouflaged their preparations under the cloak of an annual military exercise (just as the Soviets had done five years earlier when preparing their invasion of Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia) and the Syrians, IDF intelligence argued, were simply upping their war-footing for fear of Israeli attack.
At the same time, both countries publicised misleading hints that nothing was afoot. Eli Ze’ira, director of IDF Intelligence Branch, Israel’s senior intelligence organisation, was completely bamboozled and down to October 5 held fast to his assessment that the prospect of war was “low” or “very low,” despite the hasty evacuation by air and sea of thousands of Soviet military advisers and their families from Syria and Egypt the previous afternoon. Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan accepted Ze’ira’s assessment.
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Victorious Israeli troops with prisoners (Photo: Getty Images)
They should have known better. Since Israel occupied Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights in June 1967, the two countries repeatedly declared that “what had been taken by force would be restored by force”, if diplomacy proved unavailing.
Nasser, Sadat and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad defined the issue as one of national honour and self-respect. But neither Egypt’s “War of Attrition”, involving periodic shelling and commando raids against the IDF’s Bar-Lev Line along the Suez Canal during 1969-1970, nor American and United Nations diplomatic efforts succeeded in dislodging the Israelis.
Soon after Nasser’s death in 1970, Sadat indicated that he was open to a non-belligerency agreement in exchange for an IDF pullback from the canal; he even hinted at a willingness to exchange full peace for the whole of Sinai.
But he always added that Egypt would go to war if the peninsula was not returned.
Prime Minister Meir was unmoved. It was partly due to a basic mistrust of “the Arabs”. Territory — Sinai — afforded Israel strategic depth, more reliable than a “piece of paper” that could be torn up at will.
As Dayan, the hero of the 1956 and 1967 wars, once put it, “(holding on to) Sharm el-Sheikh was preferable to peace.” Besides, Sadat was written off as a “buffoon”. And, anyway, what could the Arabs do? The Six Day War had demonstrated Arab impotence and Israeli prowess; Israel’s generals, tankmen, and pilots were infinitely better than their Arab counterparts.
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Israeli troops taking cover from Syrian warplanes (Photo: Getty Images)
But Israel was misreading the map; 1973 was not 1967. This time, the Arabs were highly motivated and held the initiative and surprise. Following the Zamir-Marwan alert, on the morning of October 6, Meir and Dayan nixed the idea of a pre-emptive air strike so that there would be no confusion about who had started the war.
And at 13.55 thousands of Egyptian and Syrian artillery pieces opened up against the canal-side and Golan fortifications while hundreds of fighter-bombers swooped down on IDF bases to the rear. Egyptian bombers even launched a brace of Kelt cruise missiles at the IDF General Staff building in Tel Aviv (they were downed by Israeli fire).
The barrages were swiftly followed by infantry and tanks. Five Egyptian divisions swept across the canal, by evening penetrating five kilometres into Sinai, overwhelming the dozen manned forts of the Bar-Lev Line.
Behind them, dozens of surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries provided protection against Israel Air Force (IAF) attack. On the Golan, Syrian armoured and infantry brigades, outnumbering the Israeli forces by a factor of five and even ten to one, broke through into the southern Golan.
But in the northern Golan, Israel’s veteran 7th Armoured Brigade held off the Syrians for three days, leaving hundreds of charred Syrian tanks and armoured personnel carriers strewn across the basalt-covered plain.
Both Egypt and Syria banked on swiftly achieving their military objectives, the initial conquests to be followed by international intervention that would halt the fighting before Israel could mobilise and launch counter-offensives. But the two armies had asymmetrical agendas. The Syrians hoped simply to conquer, within 24 to 48 hours, the 20 to 30 kilometre-deep Golan Heights down to the old Syrian-Israeli border along the Jordan River.
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Israeli troops on a tank (Photo: Alamy)
The Egyptians, fearing to advance their armies beyond the SAM umbrella, aimed to take only the western edge of the Sinai, to a depth of ten kilometres.
They believed that this would shatter the military-political status quo and the way would open to a UN- or US-Soviet-brokered settlement in which the whole of the peninsula would revert to Egyptian sovereignty.
But, despite the surprise, the IDF proved resilient; its conscript battalions, manning the front lines, did not cut and run. The Syrians failed to reach the Jordan River and by day five, October 10, after mobilising its reserves, the IDF had cleared the Golan of Syrians.
The following day two Israeli divisions crossed the old Purple Line and pushed northeastward, toward Damascus. The Israeli advance was blunted by unexpectedly resolute Syrian resistance and by the arrival of Iraqi and Jordanian expeditionary forces. Nonetheless, by war’s end IDF units were some 40 kilometres from the Syrian capital, its suburbs within range of their 175mm howitzers. In the south, the Egyptians beat off an initial IDF counter-attack on October 8 and dug in. But they failed to push further eastward.
The initial Arab successes were largely due to the massive deployment of infantry-held anti-tank missiles (Nato codename “Saggers”), which ravaged Israel’s armour, and the effectiveness and depth of the mutually protective SAM batteries, which, as one Israeli put it, “bent the wings” of the IAF. Israeli intelligence, though aware of these weapons, had failed to fathom their potential when massively deployed.
The weapons were supplied by the Soviet Union, Egypt’s and Syria’s political and military big brother since the mid-1950s. In 1972 Sadat expelled some Soviet military advisers, indicating that he wished to align with Washington, partly in the belief that only the United States could deliver Israeli concessions.
But Egypt’s army, like Syria’s, in 1973 was still wholly Russian-equipped. Hence, after the Arabs’ expenditure in the war’s first days of vast amounts of weaponry and ammunition, especially SAMs and anti-tank missiles, on October 9 to 10 the Soviets launched a massive air- and sea-lift to Egypt and Syria.
The Soviets feared that Arab defeat would undermine their prestige and position in the Middle East. In turn, after a week-long delay, on October 13, Washington launched an air- and sea-lift of its own, resupplying Israel with jets, anti-tank missiles and artillery munitions.
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The battlefield in Sinai (Photo: Getty Images)
The US and the Soviet Union were not the only outside players involved. The Arab states, including Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait and Sudan, sent tank and infantry battalions and air force squadrons to Syria and Egypt, and on October 19, the Arabs deployed the “oil weapon” against the US and other Israel supporters. They cut oil production, vastly increased oil prices, and halted sales to countries such as Holland.
On the southern front, matters hung fire until October 13. That day, Sadat, under pressure from Assad and over-ruling his own generals, ordered his two reserve armoured divisions to cross the canal and push inland, toward the Gidi and Mitle passes. This time the IDF was ready. On October 14, in the largest tank battle since the Second World War, the Israelis trounced the Egyptians, destroying some 250 tanks (for a loss of 25 of their own).
The following day, with the west bank of the canal now denuded of Egyptian armour, the IDF launched its own offensive, punching through the seam between the Egyptian Second and Third armies on the east side of the canal. Under cover of darkness, the 55th (reserve) Paratroop Brigade, reinforced by a battalion of tanks, crossed the waterway and established a beachhead on the west bank.
The Egyptians dismissed what had happened as a “raid”. But by October 18, the IDF had laid a bridge across. Two armoured divisions trundled over it and fanned out, destroying SAM sites along the way.
The Egyptians and Soviets panicked and demanded a cessation of hostilities; the Soviets even threatened to send in their airborne divisions (and the CIA reported that a Soviet ship with atomic weapons had set sail for Egypt).
The US countered by putting its troops, including strategic bombers, on high alert. But by October 24 the IDF had completed the encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army, the Soviets backed off, and Israel and Egypt agreed to call it quits. Syria reluctantly joined in.
Israel had lost more than 2,656 dead — half of them tankmen — with almost 300 taken prisoner, and 6,000 wounded, and the Egyptians and Syrians together lost close to 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded (and more than 8,000 taken prisoner). The Israelis lost 102 aircraft and 400 tanks and the Arab states some 370 aircraft and more than 2,000 tanks.
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Golda Meir (Photo: Getty Images)
The war had ended in a geopolitically awkward situation for all concerned. The Syrians had Israeli troops close to their capital; the Egyptians had their main combat formations stranded on the east bank of the canal, half of them surrounded and at the mercy of the IDF; and the Israelis had two divisions west of the canal, deep inside Egypt, and two others deep in Syria, under continuous harassment by Egyptian and Syrian artillery.
The situation was ripe for compromises. In November, Israeli and Egyptian generals, with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger active behind the scenes, agreed to a ceasefire, allowing for an exchange of prisoners and the resupply of the surrounded Third Army with water and food.
Kissinger then shuttled between Cairo and Jerusalem and hammered out a Disengagement of Forces agreement, signed on January 18, 1974: Israel agreed to withdraw from the west bank of the canal to a line some 15 kilometres east of the Canal; Egypt agreed to substantially reduce its forces on the east bank; and both agreed to a UN-manned buffer zone.
Kissinger then shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem to achieve a similar agreement on the Syrian front, where exchanges of fire between the sides had intensified. An agreement was signed on May 31, 1974. Israel agreed to withdraw from a narrow strip of territory, including Kuneitra, along the eastern edge of the Golan Heights and the installation in it of a UN peace-keeping force. Both sides agreed to limiting their forces on either side of the UN strip, thus preventing a future surprise attack by either side.
In a last bout of shuttle diplomacy, ending in the interim agreement of September 1, 1975, Kissinger engineered a further Israeli troop withdrawal eastward, to the Mitle-Gidi passes, and a withdrawal from the Abu Rodeis oil fields in southwestern Sinai, Egyptian limitation of forces in western Sinai, and a widening of the UN buffer zone separating the two armies.
The two Egyptian-Israeli agreements, which involved some direct talks between Israeli and Egyptian generals, proved to be stepping stones to the full scale Israeli-Egyptian peace talks that began in 1977 and ended in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979, substantially brokered by US President Jimmy Carter. (On October 6, 1981 fundamentalist Egyptian Muslims assassinated Sadat, in part because of his deal with Israel.)
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Israeli troops at the Suez Canal (Photo: Getty Images)
From Sadat’s viewpoint, the initial Egyptian successes, by wiping out the “shame” of 1967, had restored Egyptian pride, making possible the peace treaty between equals. And the war and America’s subsequent diplomacy had paved the way for Sadat’s complete abandonment of Moscow and the pivot to Washington. (Egypt’s army today is largely armed by America.)
The war had additional consequences. Israel’s intelligence failures resulted in structural changes in its intelligence agencies.The research divisions of the Foreign Ministry and the Mossad were vastly expanded and a new unit — commonly called “the devil’s advocate” — was added to IDF Intelligence Branch.
It was devoted to continuously challenging the organisation’s assumptions and assessments. The war also led to an expansion of Israel’s arms industries. More significantly, the war had a deep, revolutionary effect on Israeli politics. The IDF’s and cabinet’s mistakes and the large Israeli death toll triggered mass anti-government protests.
Distrust of government, all government, replaced decades-long public trust and complacency. The government’s quick appointment of a commission of inquiry (the Agranat Commission) only marginally reduced popular anger.
The commission’s findings, limited to the pre-war intelligence failure and the army’s performance during the war’s first days, forced the resignations of IDF chief of general staff David Elazar and the director of military intelligence, Ze’ira, and, in a knock-on effect, the resignations of Dayan and Golda Meir. She was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin, the victor of 1967.
But the major political after-effect of 1973 was evidenced in May 1977. The disaffected electorate voted out of office the Labour Party and its allies, who had led Israel since 1948, and voted in Menachem Begin and his Herut Party, today called the Likud — and Israel has been ruled ever since, almost continuously, by the Likud and its religious allies.
The war left in its wake one abiding mystery, to which I have no answer: why did Dayan and other Israeli military leaders, on the second and third days of the war (when the situation on the ground was, indeed, bleak), speak to colleagues of the possible/imminent fall of the "Third Temple", i.e., the destruction of Israel, when Israel, according to all the world's intelligence services, possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could have been brandished, or even, in extremis, activated, to halt the Egyptian and Syrian armies in their tracks? Surely the nuclear option in 1973 made the possible destruction of Israel completely unrealistic. So why was Dayan depressed to the point of existential brooding and fear?
Benny Morris is professor emeritus of history at Ben-Gurion University
