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(Avec l’aimable autorisation du Jerusalem Report)
It was the Yom Kippur War that set in motion the events that have brought the Middle East to the brink of a new era of peace and stability.
It takes a war to make peace. That unfortunately seems to be the nature of man.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War took Israel by surprise. It cost this country more than 2200 dead and another 5600 maimed or wounded. Only God knows what it cost in Arab lives.
That war, however, is what made this peace possible. Without Egypt being removed from the cycle of enmity, what we are witnessing today would never be happening. In 1973, president Anwar al-Sadat thought he had won the war. That a dashing soldier-genius, Ariel Sharon, managed to cross to the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal; that the Third Army was encircled on the canal’s eastern bank and captive to the Israel Defense Forces; that Israeli soldiers were duck hunting on the outskirts of Ismailiya, was irrelevant to Sadat. He had taken Israel by surprise; he had engineered a stunning first strike together with the Syrians on two critical fronts and won back enough pride to negociate peace. The humiliating defeat of the combined Arab armies in 1967 had been redressed.
Since coming to power in September 1970, Sadat had tried to achieve peace by diplomatic means. Not that he was a Zionist, but he understood that without peace Egypt would slip into economic chaos with horrendous consequences, not to mention the probable demise of his regime. Given the bashing Egypt had taken in the 1967 Six-Day War and the subsequent War of Attrition, the country’s population growth, that 97 per cent of the people were living on three per cent of the land and that the government was importing 60 per cent of their food, he understood that it was impossible for Egypt to continue arming for the next war and feeding its people at the same time.
Sadat’s diplomatic overtures to Israel fell on deaf ears. Golda Meir was the prime minister, Moshe Dayan the defense minister. Both were legends in their own time and totally enraptured by what the press wrote about them — two leaders convinced that they were infallible, convinced that Israel was invincible. How wrong they were.
First came the Rogers plan — an attempt by the then-secretary of state to translate the return of the Sinai peninsula conquered in 1967 into bilateral peace. The Rogers initiative got nowhere. Then Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Jewish Congress, came from Sadat with the same message. He was branded a traitor. Finally, in a historic speech in the Egyptian parliament, a frustrated and enraged Sadat said he would sacrifice a million men to cross the Suez Canal in order to regain Sinai. Golda Meir responded by calling him a buffoon; Dayan responded that Sadat did not have the military means to stand up to Israel. Both were slaves to what became known in Hebrew as the “conceptzia” — the “concept” — whereby war was not a real option for the Arabs. Again, how wrong they were.
I remember well that day in the Knesset, Golda on the podium, the plenum and press gallery filled to capacity, I remember the arrogance of her reply to Sadat’s threat. In a speech void of emotion, her voice husky with cigarette smoke, she unabashedly mocked Sadat, making light of both his overtures for peace and his threat of war. I remember well the dismissive wave of her hand as she called Sadat’s threat to sacrifice a million men a hoax and her expression as she called him a clown.
That wave of the hand was interpreted in Egypt as a slap in the face, the comment that Sadat was a clown, a blow to his pride. War became inevitable.
How ironic that the arrogance of Golda and Dayan should have set into motion a series of events that have led up to the almost unimaginable scenario of potential peace between Israel, its neighbors and the Palestinians. How historically propitious that the blindness of Israel’s leaders in 1973 sparked off a chain of developments that has allowed Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to work out an agreement that could begin to unravel the Gordian knot that has tied this region in conflict for so many years, to begin developing the victory of 1967 and the perceived defeat of 1973 into a workable settlement between the parties concerned. Once Egypt, the most populous, most powerful and most serious of Israel’s enemies, had removed itself from an Arab coalition against Israel, resolving the Middle East conflict by military means became an impossibility for the Arabs.
The first step was the signing of disengagement agreements brokered by then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1974. These agreements with Egypt were to be translated in 1979 into what seems to be permanent peace; with Syria they resulted in a border with Israel that has been quiescent to this day.
It has taken 20 years, the demise of the former Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq, six years of fruitless Intifada and the ascendancy of a Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin over Mr. “Nyet” Shamir, for that realization to be, hopefully, converted into reality.
Israel’s right wing is, naturally, opposed to the proposed settlement. Worse, the incumbent chief of staff, Ehud Barak, and his deputy, Amnon Shahak, have expressed grave doubts about the process we are about to embark on. The question now is whether the caution of Israel’s military men regarding the future agreement is to be taken seriously. Judging by past experience, they have never been right. On the eve of the Sadat visit, for example, Mordechai Gur, now deputy defense minister, then chief of staff, gave a newspaper interview in which he said that the visit was part of a massive deception. And what better example than then-chief of military intelligence, Eli Zeira, sitting in his office at IDF headquarters on Friday afternoon, October 5, 1973, telling military correspondents, including myself, that the war they were predicting was not about to happen.
It was during that meeting that the general received a phone call that stopped his incessant peeling of almonds from a tiny, water-filled dish on the table, and caused him to turn white. Intelligence had been received that the next day, Saturday, October 6 — Yom Kippur — the Egyptians and Syrians would attack Israel simultaneously. The widely circulated rumors of previous days had been confirmed.
Yet still, like his political bosses, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, Zeira refused to read the writing on the wall. And like his bosses, he was a slave to the “conceptzia” that the Arabs would not attack. Unlike his bosses he paid a heavy price. A commission of inquiry under Supreme Court chief justice Shimon Agranat in 1974 found Zeira and then-chief of staff David Elazar guilty of failing to predict the war. Dayan went on to be foreign minister in Menahem Begin’s government and a key figure in negotiating peace with Egypt. Golda Meir died in 1978, 15 years before being able to see the fruits of her own folly; before understanding that Sadat was serious enough about peace to go to war.
The Yom Kippur War laid the foundations for the peace now emerging. Despite taking Israel by surprise on two fronts, the joint Arab coalition failed to defeat Israel. For a decade and more, from the mid-70s until recently, President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria tried to gain strategic parity with Israel, bankrupting his own country in the process. For the same reasons that Gorbachev came to the conclusion that glasnost — not a continuation of the Cold War — was the answer to American technological superiority and not the Cold War, so Asad was forced to abandon the idea of being able to take on Israel one-to-one. That conclusion was reached long before the former Soviet Union disappeared or the Gulf War occurred. With Egypt out of the game the war option no longer existed.
And as for the Palestinians, a six-year struggle against Israeli occupation, the Intifada, got them great international public relations but little else. Without the Arab states behind them they had no real military option.
Ironically, Egypt’s perceived victory was its undoing. Sticks and stones and a sympathetic media could not take the place of strong Arab neighbors posing an existential threat to Israel. Without an Arab partner willing to go to war on their behalf, it was only a matter of time before they were forced to negotiate peace.
Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres are two men at the right place at the right time. They have not only witnessed the passage of history but have actively played a part in molding it.
Rabin was the chief of staff who conquered the territories in 1967. He now believes that it is his historic mission to translate that victory into peace. Shimon Peres masterminded this country’s move into becoming a regional nuclear superpower. Both over 70, they have finally set aside their personal rivalries in the national interest. And finally, after 20 more years of terrorism and war, hatred and mindless killing, the Palestinians and Arabs seem to have come to the same conclusion.
From war to peace, 1973 to 1993, 20 years of mutual misery before Sadat’s message could be finally understood: Israel is a reality. The challenge facing the Arabs is not whether to live with Israel, but how to live with Israel. And the challenge facing Israel is to believe that though Sadat may have pretended that he won the war, in the long run the war was actually won by us. The task ahead is to consummate that victory by making permanent peace, and Rabin and Peres seem to be very close to meeting the test.