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5 The Yom Kippur War The War That Shouldn’t Have Been 1. introduction At 2:00 p.m. on October 6, 1973, a massive artillery barrage coming from the Egyptian side hit Israeli soldiers stationed along the Suez Canal. At precisely the same time, an all-out barrage from the Syrian side hit Israeli targets on the Golan Height. Egyptian and Syrian units moved across the cease-‹re lines in a coordinated attack on Israeli positions. This action started what came to be known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War. This war was the costliest and most dif‹cult war since the 1948 War of Independence. Israel’s fatalities in that war amounted to nearly three thousand soldiers in seventeen days of ‹ghting. The war ended in an Israeli victory, but this victory was not translated into political achievement . Israel had to concede its control over the Suez Canal. It also was forced, in contrast to its prewar position, to concede territory it had captured in 1967 in the Golan Height, including the city of Kunaytra. Domestically, the Yom Kippur War sparked a major political crisis. The Labor Party lost 5 percent of its seats in the Knesset in the December 1973 elections. Public opinion eventually forced the Meir government to resign. In the longer run, the war contributed to Labor’s fall from power in the 1977 elections. The Yom Kippur War is depicted as a war of self-defense. Israel was attacked simultaneously by two Arab states, without any provocation on its part. There is no debate regarding the defensive nature of the Yom 140 Kippur War. There is, however, a growing debate on other issues. First, was it really a war of no choice? Was there something Israel could have done to prevent it? The conventional wisdom and the institutional position is that Israel did all in its power to prevent the war; there simply was no viable diplomatic way to prevent the war. A growing body of scholarship suggests, however, that the war could have been averted by diplomacy and that Israel bears the major burden of this diplomatic failure. The second debate concerns the sources of the strategic surprise under which the war started. Was it merely a failure to anticipate the actual outbreak of the war or its precise timing, or was there a more profound surprise that entailed a failure to understand Egyptian and Syrian strategy? Who is to blame for failing to provide the political leadership with early warning? What were the implications of the strategic surprise for the conduct of the war? Most Israeli studies of the surprise attack implicitly or explicitly assume that, had Israel not been caught unprepared, it could have either prevented or delayed the war or that it would have won a decisive victory at a considerably lower cost. However, is it possible that the problem was in the failure to understand how rather than when Israel’s adversaries would attack? Did Israeli intelligence fail to understand the political purpose of the attack, not only its military characteristics? A third debate concerns the lessons of the war. What can be learned from the war regarding Israel’s security predicament? Are there any lessons to be learned regarding the contribution of the occupied territories to Israel’s security? One argument, advanced by many on the Israeli right, is that this war demonstrated the signi‹cance of strategic depth. What would have happened had Israel been caught by surprise on its 1967 borders? Had the Egyptians and Syrians succeeded to attack Israel within its 1967 borders, they could have split Israel into several parts in a matter of hours. The counterargument is that it was precisely the Israeli insistence on holding onto the territories that formed the motivation for a high-risk attack. Moreover, the only thing that the war demonstrated is that Israel requires signi‹cant DMZs around it so as to reduce the prospects of surprise attack. Fourth, the war demonstrated a major deterrence failure. But what exactly were the sources of this failure? Was it the failure of Israeli decision makers to respond by force to the Egyptian violation of the 1970 cease-‹re agreement by moving its SAM batteries to the Suez Canal Zone? Was the deterrence failure tied directly to the intelligence failure? Alternatively, was it a more fundamental failure, one inherent in the exclusive reliance on strategic deterrence as the sole instrument of policy? The Yom Kippur War 141 [3.17...

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