This is a lecture series from Tikva Ideas commemorating the Yom Kippur War on its 50th anniversary. Together, over the course of six lectures, we're going to explore what we know now about the war and what went on behind the scenes. The war began on October 6th, 1973 on Yom Kippur, of course, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
At that time, I was 11 years old, and the war constitutes my first memory of an international event. I remember sitting on the orange and yellow shag carpet in my home in Indiana. It wasn't my home, it was my parents'home, watching reruns of Gilligan's Island.
The show was interrupted with a news broadcast that showed tanks rolling through the sand of the Sinai Peninsula. Of course, I had no understanding then of what was happening. At 2 p.m. in the afternoon on October 6, on a day when most Israelis were in the synagogue, the Egyptians and the Syrians simultaneously invaded Israel.
The attack caught the Israelis entirely by surprise. Well, not entirely by surprise, they had a little bit of warning. We'll get to that later.
Giving them very little time to mobilize their reserves. The Egyptians were able to keep the Israeli Air Force completely out of the picture with advanced Soviet anti-aircraft weapons. The Soviets had also given them state-of-the-art anti-tank missiles that the Israeli tank commanders did not know how to fight against.
Those missiles made mincemeat of the armored divisions that were the backbone of the IDF. In the first few days of the war, the Israeli Army army suffered great losses and the Egyptians and the Syrians made significant advances on the ground. In the north, the Syrian army came close to seizing the entire Golan Heights. Syrian commandos stood overlooking the Israeli settlements below.
In the south, the Egyptians successfully crossed the Suez Canal and managed to hold territory in the Sinai. On the third day, October 8th, Israel counterattacked on the southern front. but the effort failed miserably. In fact, October 8 is the worst day in the entire history of the Israel Defense Forces.
In the first three days of the Yom Kippur War, more soldiers died than in the entire Six-Day War. The setbacks brought brought Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the eye-patched hero of the Six-Day War and an icon of Israeli resilience under fire, to the verge of a mental breakdown. He lamented to colleagues that the destruction of the Third temple was a real possibility, meaning that he feared that Israel itself might be destroyed.
Dayan even contemplated exploding a nuclear weapon to deter the Egyptians and the Syrians from pressing home their advantage. In hindsight, we can see that Dayan overreacted, but the fact is that he had realized something very important. The war was going to be a long one.
We prepare for five days of war, not war that lasts months, he worried to his military commanders. It was already clear to the Israeli leadership that resupply from the U.S. would be vital, and it might mean the difference between victory and defeat. In the event, Prime Minister Golda Meir steered a steadier course. She overruled Dayan on the question of exploding a nuclear weapon, but she herself was very alarmed at the danger of running out of weapons and ammo. She proposed flying to Washington secretly to explain the situation to President Nixon in person.
The Americans in the person of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, flatly rejected her request. At the time, average Israelis knew nothing of Dayan's near breakdown and Golda Meir's desperate pleas for American help. But it was not long before they realized that the country's position was much more precarious than they had ever understood. Ariel Sharon, the future Prime Minister of Israel, was a division commander in the war.
He describes in his memoirs the shock that he felt as he watched soldiers coming back from the failed counterattack. I saw something strange in their faces, not fear but bewilderment. Something suddenly was happening to them that had never happened before. These were soldiers who had been brought up on victories, not easy victories maybe, but victories nevertheless. Now they were in a state of shock.
How could it be? be that the Egyptians were crossing the canal right in our faces? How was it that they were moving forward and we were defeated? "In a talk with newspaper editors a week later, when the tide of war had turned and American weapons were flowing into the country, Golda Meir discussed her previous desperation openly with newspaper editors. There was a particularly difficult moment on the issue of military equipment, she told them. Out of desperation, I decided that I had to try somehow to get to America, incognito and without any publicity, by hook or by crook, whatever it took to to get one meeting with the president and to ask him what will become of us. As news from the front filtered out to the public, Israelis were shocked. They had expected another six-day war, a complete and speedy rout of the Arab armies. Instead, they learned that the fighting had been harder than at any time since 1948. The losses were great, and the country was more dependent on the United States than anyone had ever understood. As I'll explain in the following lectures, the Israelis managed to turn the situation around. About ten days after the war started, the IDF went on the offensive. In the south, it advanced into enemy territory, encircling one of the Egyptian armies and leaving another one cut off and battered in the Sinai Desert. In the north, the IDF advanced within artillery range of Damascus. At the insistence of both the United States and the Soviet Union, a ceasefire was declared on October 22nd. If the superpowers had not intervened, Israel would have destroyed most of the Egyptian army. Major combat operations came to a decisive end, however, on October 25th. I'll have a lot to say about how all of this happened and about how the war has changed the Middle East. But right now I want to look at something else. I want to look at how the war has been remembered, especially in Israel. Although five decades have passed, in Israel emotions about the war still run very high. The biggest questions about the war remain locked in controversy. Pick a random sampling of Israelis who were young adults in 1973 and ask them about their feelings. about say Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, or Henry Kissinger, you'll quickly discover that the trauma is fresh, the wounds have not healed. As for professional historians, they can't come to any agreement on the most fundamental questions about the war either. What was it fought over? Was it preventable? Could Israel have made different decisions and gotten a radically different outcome? Even on the simplest and most fundamental question of all, who won, there is no consensus. Some Israelis say it was a victory, others a defeat, still others a stalemate. The very shape of the conflict lends itself to radically different answers. In the opening days, the Egyptians and the Syrians overran Israeli positions. But in the last stage of the war, Israel turned the tables and held a decisive advantage. Only American and Soviet diplomacy stopped Israel from routing the Egyptians and the Syrians completely. The dramatic reversals in the war provide rich material for mythology. The Egyptians, for example, tell a tale of great victory. They focus on the opening days of the war, the successful deception and the surprise attack, the crossing of the Suez Canal under withering fire, and the military successes that allowed the Egyptian Third Army to retain its beachhead on the eastern side of the canal. Anwar Sadat and the Egyptian military are the, quote-unquote, heroes of the crossing. One might expect the Israelis to behave similarly. And to focus on the last week of the war when they held the decisive advantage. To be sure, the Israelis could tell a story of triumph over tragedy similar to the story that we Americans tell about World War II, if they wanted to. They would, a sneak attack, so the story would go, caught the Israeli defense forces by surprise, but it also stirred a lion from its slumber. After a few missteps, the lion recovered and then triumphed over its enemies. After the war, Israeli leaders tried to tell precisely this tale. And some scholars insist to this day that it is true. In fact, I would say it's true, really. But Israeli collective memory has rejected it. Popular Israeli consciousness can seize the war as neither a victory nor a defeat, but as a colossal blunder. In Hebrew, the word for blunder is mechdal. It's a very distinctive word with no direct English equivalent. A survey of books and articles in English reveals that Mechdal has been translated over the years variously as screw-up, catastrophe, defeat, fault, mistake, the breakdown, fiasco, and oversight. None of these translations however captures the essence of the word. I went to chat GPT, the new AI software, and I asked it to define Mechdal in the context of the Yom Kippur War. Shame or stigma is what the machine told me. There are even, those translations are even more misleading. Most commonly, maqdal is translated as omission or negligence. Now these get us a little closer. A maqdal is an irresponsible omission that causes harm. That's the key point. It's an act of negligence with an adverse consequence. If you fail to take the frying pan off of the stove before you leave the house for your yoga class, You have certainly committed an act of omission and negligence. But if it results in nothing more than burned eggs and a ruined frying pan, then you have not committed a Mechdal. When your house burns down to the ground, then you have. Israelis don't just remember the Yom Kippur War as a Mechdal, they remember it as THE Mechdal, as in the mother of all Mechdals. So deeply associated is the Yom Kippur War with the word Mechdal. that the phrase Yom Kippur has itself become a synonym for Mechdal. I typed into Google the Hebrew phrase, this is the Yom Kippur of. In the Israeli press over the last year, that sentence has been completed variously as, this is the Yom Kippur of the law enforcement system. This is the Yom Kippur of APAC. This is the Yom Kippur of the city of Ra'anana. This is the Yom Kippur of UNESCO. And my very favorite, this is the Yom Kippur of Yom Kippur. In October 1973, Israelis characterized the Yom Kippur War as a machdal instantly. A picture of a crying Golda Meir adorns the country. cover of the first book on the war written by Yeshayahu Ben Porat. Its title? Mechdal. Even while the fighting still raged, opposition leader and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin stated that for now we must remain united, but when the guns fall silent, there must be an investigation of the Mechdals. The reckoning began on November 21, 1973. The government, in response to such calls, set up the Agronaut Commission. which investigated the faulty decision-making of the IDF at the beginning of the war. Shimon Agronat, president of the Supreme Court, chaired the commission. With forensic precision, the commission produced the first and the single most influential analysis of the Mechdal. To explain its findings, it coined a term Which has become a permanent element of Israel's political lexicon, namely, ha-concepcia, the conception. The term refers to the intelligence conception that led senior Israeli leaders to miss all of the obvious signs that Egypt and Syria were about. to attack and there were many many such signs. The commission probably coined the term ha-concepcia based on what it heard from the head of military intelligence during the war, that's a Major General Elie Zahira. His testimony often referred to the reigning intelligence theory regarding Egyptian intentions as a conception. Haconsepsia rested on two fundamental assumptions. First, that Egypt would not go to war against Israel until it had acquired the military capabilities necessary to paralyze Israel's air force. These capabilities included, among other systems, long-range bombers that could attack Israel in depth. Second, that Syria would not launch a major attack except in coordination with the United with Egypt. In the weeks and months leading up to the Yom Kippur War, as IDF intelligence received reports indicating that Syria and Egypt were on the verge of launching a major war, the top intelligence officers, led by Major General Zahira, continually screened the information through the assumptions of HaKoncepsia. They knew with certainty that Egypt had not yet acquired the long-range bombers needed to neuter the Israeli Air Force, so they concluded that Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, was bluffing. Their certainty that the Egyptian military was not going to attack led them, in turn, to conclude that Syria was not going on the offensive either, and so they screened all of the information about Syria out. As late as the morning of October 6th, when the attack was just hours away, Zahira continued to assert with high confidence that the probability of the war was very low. Early warning is a cornerstone of Israel's security. The Israeli war plan required several days of advanced notice. notice to allow the mobilization of the reserves, whose numbers and capabilities were crucial to the country's defense. By blinding Israel to the preparations of the enemy, Hakan Tsepsia delayed the mobilization of the reserves, leaving the IDF unprepared to meet the attack. The interim report of the Agronaut Commission, published on April 1, 1974, hit Israel like an earthquake. It called for replacing several officials, including Major General Zahira. but it also led indirectly to the eventual resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir. She was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin. As Minister of Labor during the war, Rabin emerged from the conflict with his reputation intact. The Agronaut Commission investigated a highly specific intelligence failure. But its explanation of an elite that was out of touch with reality resonated much more broadly. Wasn't the whole of Israeli society, not just its elite, out of touch? Hadn't the Six-Day War created an unrealistic expectation of security? Where was the security? Weren't all Israelis, not just the elite, entertaining the illusion of invincibility? The Six-Day War seemed to fulfill the dream that began in 1882 when a Russian Jew named Leon Pinsker wrote Auto-Emancipation, which is the foundational document of political Zionism. Pinsker argued, among other things, that the only way for the Jews of Europe to achieve physical security was to come together, create a nation, and then create a state so that they could become self-reliant and not dependent on others for their security. The early reversals of the Yom Kippur War called that dream into question. The most trenchant critique of political Zionism came from Asher Ginzburg, known by his pen name Ahad Ha'am. Ginzburg was a Russian Jew and a Zionist, but a less optimistic one. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, he wrote a series of articles branding Pinsker's dream as delusional. A Jewish state, he argued, would always be a small country. It would never contain all of the Jews. It would never be big enough to bend the world to its will. It would be a plaything of the great powers. The physical insecurity of the Jews would follow them from Europe to the Middle East. As Ginsburg wrote after a visit to Palestine, the Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land. But they keep quiet and they pretend not to notice anything. But if our people's life in Eretz Yisrael ever develops to the point where we can where we are taking their place, the natives are not going to step aside so easily. If Israel's wars are a series of bouts between Leon Pinsker and Ahad Ha'am, then in the Six-Day War, Pinsker won with a knockout blow. In the rematch of the Yom Kippur War, however, Ahad Ha'am came back with a vengeance. Israelis have embraced the Mechdal mythology of the war because it allows their society to live simultaneously with the voices Pinsker and Ginsburg ringing in their ears. By defining the cause of the near defeat in the Yom Kippur War as a Mechdal, the Agronaut Commission emphasized that it was an error, not a fundamental defect. A change in ha-Konsepsia could have brought about a much better outcome. The path to security, in other words, is still available to the Israelis if they remain alert and if they avoid hubris. In sum, The Mechdal mythology keeps the flame of Pinsker's auto-emancipation alive while tipping a hat in respect to a Hada'am. The Agronaut Commission worked with the HaKoncepsia Mechdal framework to explain a very specific intelligence problem, a forensic problem, the blunder of intelligence analysis at the beginning of the war. Let's call that intelligence blunder the Lesser Mechdal. But the Concepcion Mechdal frame of the Agronaut Commission can be used to explain a much broader failure, a kind of societal collective failure. Let's call this larger mistake the Greater Mechdal. The heart of the historical debate among Israelis about the Yom Kippur War is over this, the Greater Mechdal. What exactly were the key acts of negligence and what caused them? That debate is multi-sided and nuanced and often highly detailed. But let's not let complexity, nuance, and detail get in the way of a crude but important distinction. For the sake of discussion, let's divide the participants in the debate into two schools advocates of the Iron Wall approach to Israeli security and the advocates of an accommodation with the Arabs. The idea of the Iron Wall, as I'm sure you know, takes its name from the famous essay by the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was the mentor of Menachem Begin, among others. and he's the godfather of the Israeli right. In Jabotinsky's view, which was tacitly adopted by many left-wing Israeli leaders, including, I would argue, by David Ben-Gurion, his arch-nemesis, the Jewish state could win acceptance from the Arabs only by demonstrating its strength and showing that it could not be defeated by a force of arms. The accommodationists, by contrast, felt that Israel could win the acceptance of the Arab neighbors only by compromising and making concessions. Let me be clear. We're talking here about two schools of historical analysis. It was the Six-Day War that began to bring out the division between them. Between 1949 and 1967, the question of territorial expansion of Israel was purely theoretical. But Israel's victory over Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967 posed new and thorny questions. Questions to which, even among labor Zionists, there was no clear answer. Should Israel withdraw from the newly acquired territories? If so, how far? Under what conditions? And based on what principles? The Israeli government only began to find clear answers to these questions during the Nixon administration. Those answers have deeply influenced Israeli policies ever since. One cannot understand the Israeli historical debate about the Yom Kippur War without reference to them. Put crudely, the accommodationists favored evacuation of the territories, under appropriate circumstances, while the advocates of the Iron Wall favored their retention. Menachem Begin and others on the right, as well as religious nationalists, all belonged to the Iron Wall school. But, as I mentioned, many labor Zionists also appreciated the new strategic lines and the perceived leverage over the Arab states that the territories acquired in 1967 gave Israel. Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Rabin did not share any of Begin's deep ideological attachment to the territories. But when it came to contending with the external pressures on Israel to withdraw from the territories they often found themselves to be his de facto ally. In the works of historians from the accommodation of school therefore Meir, Dayan and Rabin appear as stiff necked and recalcitrant hard liners as advocates of the of the Iron Wall. The controversy over territorial expansion shapes the debate about the greater Mehdal of the Yom Kippur War. There are four things that the accommodationists and the proponents of the Iron Wall disagree about. First, what were the Arabs fighting for? The accommodationists tend to depict the goals of the Arab coalition as purely territorial in nature. In this view, the Arabs only wanted to regain territory lost in 1967. not to reverse the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. By contrast, the Iron Wall believes that Sadat and the entire Arab world were in a war to weaken and destroy Israel. Second, the two camps disagree about whether the war was preventable. Sadat launched a peace initiative in 1971, a set of proposals that we will examine in more detail later on. For our purposes now, the question is this. Was this initiative a missed opportunity by Israel to make peace? The accommodationists answer with an emphatic yes. The post-war diplomacy, including the Sinai disengagement agreements of 1974 and 1975, Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977, and the peace accords of 1979, all of these, according to the accommodationists, were already available to the Israeli government in 1971. If only Israeli leaders had pursued a territorial compromise more zealously, then they could have avoided the war entirely. As you might expect, advocates of the Iron Wall respond that the war itself, that is the Israeli military victory in the war, is what made peace possible. Third, they disagree about the centrality of military deterrence in Israel's security concept. According to the accommodationist school of thought, inflexibility regarding territorial withdrawals fits hand in glove with a glorification of military power and a pathological reliance on it as the sole guarantor of Israel's security. In the view of the accommodationists, the Yom Kippur War proves that the Six-Day War fostered delusions of military invincibility. It demonstrates that Israel's quest for security must include a greater reliance on diplomacy, a more persistent search for Arab partners, and a rejection of a Spartan ethos. Fourth and finally, the two camps of historical interpretation disagree about Israel's relations with the superpowers. Both understand that Israel needs the U.S. and should accommodate its wishes, but the accommodationists, naturally, are far more inclined to do whatever they can to accommodate America. The proponents of the Iron Wall also want to keep America happy, but they believe that that from time to time it's the job of the Jews to be a stiff-necked people. During the Yom Kippur War, Israelis'desperate need for equipment, which only the United States could supply, created a profound dependency. The restricted freedom and material dependency call into question Pinsker's promise that sovereignty would bring the Jews security and independence. Was it a false promise? Was the notion of a strong, self-confident, and self-reliant Israel just a dream? Will the whims of non-Jews determine the fate of the Jewish state, just as they determine the fate of Jewish communities in Europe? The accommodation of school and the advocates of the Iron Wall actually agree that Jewish survival is precarious and that dependence on the United States is a reality. However, they disagree about the proper tactics for managing these unpleasant facts. Now this is all rather abstract, so let's make it a little bit more concrete by discussing a specific historical episode, namely the partnership that Prime Minister Golda Meir established with the White House in 1969 and 1970. Richard Nixon and Golda Meir opened a direct channel of communication with each other through then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Itzhak Rabin. In theory, Rabin, as ambassador, worked for Foreign Minister Abba Ibn. In practice, he was Golda Meir's man in Washington. The styles of the two were very compatible. Rabin was a gruff and blunt sabra. Golda Meir chain-smoked Chesterfields. She had the aspect of a frumpy grandmother. She made a point of serving guests cakes and coffee prepared by her own hand. With a knack for plain speaking, she deployed her homespun image to very good effect. both in the United States, where she lived in her youth, and in Israel. She expressed the fears and the aspirations of voters in Israel and of diaspora Jews in straightforward language. The direct styles of Meir and Rabin stood in sharp contrast to that of Israel's foreign minister, the courtly, portly, Cambridge-educated Abba Eban, a man nobody ever called plain speaking. Meir inherited Eban from her predecessor as prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Because Meir had served as Foreign Minister in the past under Ben-Gurion, she felt that she understood the portfolio of Foreign Minister every bit as well as Ibn. Plus, having grown up in Milwaukee, she had confidence in her ability to manage relations with Israel's most important ally, the United States. As Prime Minister, the last thing she needed was a Foreign Minister who might upstage her on the American scene. Her ambassador in Washington had similar feelings about Ibn. and he also had the connections and the clout necessary to sideline him. Rabin first met Nixon in 1966. The future president had come to Israel while he was in the political wilderness. He had lost the presidential election in 1960, and no one in Israel had an inkling that three years later he would be the one sitting in the Oval Office. He received little attention during his visit from his senior Israeli officials, except for Rabin, who at the time was the IDF chief of staff. The two men struck up a rapport immediately, and it paid great dividends for Israel three years later. Rabin also quickly developed a special relationship with Henry Kissinger, who, in Nixon's first term, was the National Security Advisor. As a former IDF commander, Rabin saw military affairs as the driver of international politics. Foreign ministries in general, but especially Israel's, were a necessary irritant in the conduct of foreign relations. But they were not a core component. Nixon and Kissinger, who harbored a legendary distrust of the State Department, had very similar views. They liked the idea of working executive to executive through Rabin. A partnership was born. This partnership crystallized just as Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt, launched the War of Attrition in March 1969. I wish I had more time to talk to you about the War of Attrition. When I started doing the research for this lecture series, I wasn't even thinking about the War of Attrition. I usually just would talk when I give lectures about the 67 War and the 73 War, and I would wave at the War of Attrition as we went by. I realize now that it was a much more important event. Unfortunately, I'm not going to have the time here to talk to you too much about it, but keep in mind, this was a Soviet-backed Egyptian military campaign sought to wear Israel down with commando raids. This was in many ways a Soviet-Israeli war. The Egyptians launched not just commando raids but also bombing sorties and heavy artillery attacks across the Suez Canal. With the encouragement of Nixon and Kissinger, Rabin lobbied the government to escalate the conflict, that's the Israeli government, to escalate the conflict by conducting raids deep into Egypt, into the Nile Delta. Golda Meir and her defense minister Moshe Dayan supported Rabin's recommendations. The escalation did not lead to Nasser's submission. Instead, the Soviet Union became more directly involved in the conflict. In response to a January 1970 request from Nasser, Moscow established an air defense system that covered the urban centers of Egypt and extended into the area between the Suez Canal and the Nile Delta. With remarkable speed, it introduced some of the most advanced surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles in the world. It also provided the technicians to man them. not to mention training staff and operational planners. At its peak, the Soviet Expeditionary Force amounted to approximately 15,000 thousand men. Moscow also placed combat planes on Egyptian air bases as well as the pilots to fly them. In response to the build-up, the Nixon administration, which was preoccupied with the war in Vietnam, opted not to match the Soviets move for move but instead to de-escalate. It advanced a ceasefire proposal through William Rogers, the Secretary of State. The Egyptians and the Israelis both accepted the proposal which went into effect on August 7th, 1970. At midnight that very night, the Egyptians, in contravention of the agreement, moved their anti-aircraft batteries eastward, right up to the Suez Canal. In the opening days of the Yom Kippur War, this extended missile defense system created considerable difficulties for the Israelis. It gave the Egyptian army cover from the Israeli Air Force as it crossed the canal in force. In return for Israel's acceptance of the ceasefire, The Nixon administration provided assurances to Israel that, in my estimation, vindicate Meir, Dayan, and Rabin for their decision to escalate the war of attrition. In a later episode, I'll discuss these assurances at greater length. For the moment, however, let's simply note that distinguished members of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and authors who were close to the ministry have provided accounts that do not agree with my interpretation of these events. In fact, their accounts bolster the accommodationist school of historiography by implicating Meir, Dayan, and Rabin in the Greater Mechdal of 1973. The story that the accommodationists tell goes something like this. A small group of military and ex-military men, led by Rabin and Dayan, foisted on Golda Meir an unsound policy based on an overconfidence in the ability of military force to solve thorny strategic problems. problems. From Washington, Rabin acted as a loose cannon, ignoring the advice of seasoned foreign policy professionals like Abba Eban. By cutting out the State Department, Rabin also needlessly antagonized a branch of the American government, and he placed far too much faith in two highly dubious personalities, namely Nixon and Kissinger. To be sure, these men were running American foreign policy. But, so the argument goes, They nevertheless represented only one element of the larger American system, and their tenure in it would be limited. In this view of things, the unwise counsel that Rabin gave to the prime minister drove the Israeli government into a very ill-considered military escalation in 1969 and 1970, the net result of which was a dramatic change in the balance of power, a change that would give Egypt a major advantage when it did launch the surprise attack in October 1973. For an alternative take on these events, one that supports the Iron Wall School of Analysis, you'll have to wait till later in this series. But this specific example gives us a sense, I hope, both of how the debate over the Greater Meqdal has shaped the views of historians and how that debate also resonates in the present. The Accommodationist School of Analysis argues that the Meir government blundered into war by remaining too eager to hold on to territory, too reliant on military power, and too dismissive of diplomacy, and too insensitive, of course, to global opinion. By contrast, the Iron Wall School argues that there was no partner for peace on the other side and that between 1967 and 1973, the Israelis became less reliant on their own resourcefulness. And as a result, the United States was the only country in the world that had a strong they became vulnerable. Now, the basic intellectual and political assumptions of the Iron Wall and accommodationist schools can never be reconciled. But that doesn't mean that one or the other of them has a monopoly on the correct interpretation of history. The Yom Kippur War remains controversial to this day, in part because it is an objectively complex event. Unlike the Six-Day War, which almost gives one the sense biblical prophecy was manifested before our eyes, the underlying facts of the Yom Kippur War offer up a challenge to both schools of Zionist historiography. This war simply does not lend itself to being easily mythologized or used as propaganda. The Egyptian case is instructive. Yes, the Egyptians managed to construct a simple myth of victory, but to propagate that myth they must erase from memory the war's final stage. when the Israelis were routing their forces. The accommodationist and iron wall schools, like Jacob and Esau in Rebecca's womb, are twins locked in combat, incapable of separating but also incapable of uniting. They will forever contradict one another. Perhaps this explains why the Yom Kippur War lives in the Israeli collective consciousness as the mother of all Mechdals, instead of as a victory or a defeat. Israelis can all agree That misconceptions led to major blunders. They can also agree that euphoria and feelings of invincibility that followed the Six-Day War generated hubris, which led to serious lapses. But they cannot agree upon a clear definition of the danger, let alone what to do about it. Nor can they agree about the role of friends, of Richard Nixon and especially his very talented National Security Advisor, later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. As we just saw, in 1970 Kissinger was working hand-in-glove with the advocates of the Iron Wall. But at other moments, he appears to be on no Zionist team whatsoever. Israelis cannot comfortably place him in their cosmology. Was he an ally or was he a villain? Consider the events of October 10, 1973, the fourth day of the Yom Kippur War. On that day, Kissinger assumed powers that were unprecedented for a Secretary of State. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned the same day in response to evidence that he had engaged in corrupt practices. Two days later, a federal appeals court upheld a subpoena issued to Nixon by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. demanding copies of tapes of Oval Office meetings related to the Watergate scandal. On October 20th, Nixon carried out the Saturday Night Massacre. He insisted that Cox be fired. That act, seen as an obstruction of justice, is now considered the lowest point yet in Nixon's presidency and the beginning of the end of his career. Consumed by domestic politics, he had little time for the crisis in the Middle East. As virtually all responsibility fell on Kissinger's shoulders, Golda Meir was making a passion plea to Washington for planes, tanks, and ammunition. Nixon approved the resupply, but the initial shipments were small and their delivery was unreliable. To say that these delays distressed the Israelis greatly is an understatement. Visions of Israel's destruction haunted Moshe Dayan, who, as I mentioned, was near a mental breakdown. He and his colleagues watched as massive Soviet cargo planes reinforced the Syrian and Egyptian forces. Golda Meir complained to Washington about the delays, but the president was inaccessible. Kissinger, for his part, either chose not to sort out the delays or he failed in his efforts. Finally, on October 12, Nixon ordered a major airlift, one of the biggest in history, putting an end to all obstacles. Controversy surrounds this issue to this day. Did administrative inefficiencies and logistical difficulties cause the delays? Or did someone actively scuttle the resupply? If someone did, was that someone the Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger? Or was it Kissinger? Or was it both of them? In 1976, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of U.S. naval operations at the time of the Yom Kippur War, published a memoir which claimed that Kissinger sought, quote-unquote, to bleed Israel. in order to make it more compliant. For Israelis of a certain age, memories of this accusation evoke very strong emotions. Zumwalt, by the way, was running for Senate when he wrote those words. Should we believe his accusation? There are two separate complaints about Kissinger, and sometimes they get confused. First, that he was less than zealous than the Israelis would have liked about the need for resupply. Second, that he scuttled the delivery of the resupply that was actually agreed upon. The first accusation is absolutely true, and Kissinger's memoirs themselves make no attempt to hide it. As for the second accusation, that he actively scuttled what was agreed upon, Kissinger denies that with heat and force. My best assessment is that he's telling the truth. I can't claim to be the final word on the subject, but I have examined primary sources related to the debate as well as the main arguments of many of the primary participants. I see no evidence that Kissinger actively scuttled the resupply, a process that, in any case, was under the control of the Department of Defense. Moreover, making Israel bleed served none of Kissinger's goals between October 10th and October 12th. In his mind, the question of resupply was bound up with the problem of preventing a major escalation between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the chaos of war, Kissinger assumed that Israel was going to win, whether resupplied by the Americans or not. What he feared most was a Soviet escalation that would force the hand of the United States. The scenario that he had in mind was the one that he had already experienced in 1970 when the Israeli escalation against Egypt led not to a capitulation by Nasser but to a Soviet counter escalation. On October 10, the superpower competition concerned Kissinger more than the impact that the resupply would have on Israelis. To this day, some Jews and some Israelis still consider Kissinger to be a demon. But am I wrong in seeing in this demonization a projection onto Kissinger of the deepest fear of all, namely, the fear that Pinsker's Zionism failed to deliver on its promise, that the Jewish state failed to liberate the Jews from the physical insecurities of the diaspora? The Six-Day War gave the Israelis a short, happy balloon ride away from the insecurity that historically characterized Jewish life in the diaspora. The Yom Kippur War brought them crashing back to Earth. As they picked themselves up from the wreckage, a messenger appeared in the guise of a German-born Harvard professor to instruct them on the power of gravity. Kissinger delivered the harsh news with forensic precision. Israel remained subject to the whims of the Gentile powers. The creator of the universe has a great sense of irony. To apprise the Israelis that they have yet to escape the laws governing Jewish life in the Diaspora. he dispatched a diaspora Jew. The venom directed at Henry Kissinger reflects a sublimated longing to escape from the dilemmas of Jewish powerlessness. In the remainder of this course we'll delve into all of these events and try to form a better picture of how they played out, looking at the Israeli, Egyptian, and American perspectives in turn. We will focus on the military dimension of the conflict and on problems of Haka-Koncepsia. We will look at the mind of Sadat and the Egyptian view of the world. We'll look at Washington and Nixon's attitude toward the Jews. Then we'll also examine the ceasefire negotiations and the post-war diplomacy. In the final lecture, I'll explain what lessons we can take away from all of this. Until recently, I always thought that, after the War of Independence, the Six-Day War was the most important event in Israeli history. Now I'm not so sure. Once I started preparing this course, as I immersed myself in the events of 1973, I came to the conclusion that the Yom Kippur War might be the most transformative moment in the history of Israel, modern Egypt, and American Middle East policy. I'm excited that you'll be joining me on this journey. To this day, most Israelis believe that the Yom Kippur War went poorly because their enemies caught them unprepared. Just like the IDF's success in 1967, came from catching the Egyptians and the Syrians unprepared. But as we analyze the event from the distance of half a century later, we can see that the element of surprise did less to shape the outcome you might at first think.