The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of the Yom Kippur War and Its Sources (review)

The great nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay once commented that the English Civil War had been “more discussed and less understood” than any event in history.

One wonders what he would have made of the debate over responsibility for the Israeli failure to predict, and prepare for, the Egyptian and Syrian invasion of October 1973, which three and a half decades later is still a highly contentious matter.

In this excellent book that focuses on Israel’s intelligence failure in 1973 and its causes, Uri Bar-Joseph has gone some way to ending the confusion (at least for English language readers, who cannot draw on the vast literature available in Hebrew on the subject). The title is adapted from the words of the prophet Ezekiel, which include the line “if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trump to warn the people . . . I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.” These words, according to the author, hang on the wall of the offices of a number of senior officials of AMAN, Israeli Military Intelligence, the organization that had primary responsibility for assessing the threat of invasion and warning the military and political leadership in good time.

But alas, as the author shows in relentless and lucid fashion, over the whole year prior to the outbreak of war on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, “the watchman saw the sword and did not blow the trumpet. And the sword took many lives. The watchman did not blow the trumpet since for almost a year by then, he was asleep” (p. 1).

The author argues that in the two years prior to the war there was a belief across the highest ranks of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that a number of factors including Israeli air superiority and President Sadat’s political weakness meant that any military engagement with Egypt would end in a speedy and decisive Israeli victory. This belief led to an institutionalized arrogance that would ultimately have devastating consequences when coupled to “The Conception,” a thinking framework which in this case proved wholly wrong. At its heart was the belief that Egypt, the key to any future Arab attack, would avoid a large-scale crossing of the Suez Canal, unless the Egyptian Air Force could upgrade its capabilities to hit Israeli Air Force (IAF) bases deep inside Israel. As this was not possible in the short to medium term, there would be no major military attack by Egypt or Syria (which would only join a war led by Egypt).

Nowhere was this view more deeply held than in the senior ranks of AMAN. Major General Eli Zeira, who had been appointed Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) in October 1972, was not only convinced that a major Egyptian offensive was unlikely and that other factors such as Egyptian frustration over the status quo and a desire to regain land lost in 1967 were irrelevant, but he also believed that his role was to communicate this certainty to his military and political masters at every opportunity. What compounded this problem was that two other key AMAN officials, Yona Bandman, head of the Egypt branch, and Brigadier General Arie Shalev, head of the Research department, shared their boss’s outlook.

As Bar-Joseph points out, there were a number of senior AMAN officers who by the beginning of October 1973, at the very latest, believed that Egypt and Syria were getting ready to invade. But what the author terms the “Weltanschauung of intellectual megalomania and hubris” (p. 172) of Zeira and his followers won the day, and in order to prove this Bar-Joseph puts forward case after case where AMAN chose to explain incoming war signals in “every possible form but for war” (p. 194). Nothing could shake such assessments. Not the constant stream of intelligence that pointed towards war...