The moment Israel was shocked to learn that Arabs can fight too
Israel Air Force recruits arming a plane during the Yom Kippur War
Michael Milshtein writes in Haaretz on 30 September 2023:
Every year increasing numbers of documents are made public which shed new, and sometimes different, light on the collective insights that have taken root over the years about the Yom Kippur War. As such, the basic concepts we have about that formative national trauma – above all, “the surprise” – are infused with new content.
Minutes of cabinet discussions from the days preceding the war’s outbreak in October 1973, and during its course – which were declassified three weeks ago – make manifest that the main surprise confronting the Israeli leadership was not that a war had erupted, but rather the way the Arab side was handling itself. Israel’s top ranks were astonished that the Arab armies, principally those of Egypt and Syria, were fighting with boldness and determination, scoring successes, displaying sophistication and deciphering the Israeli mode of thought, and were themselves employing complex strategies that Israel was having a hard time understanding.
The roots of the surprise lie in the deep contempt for the Arabs that had prevailed among Israel’s political and military leadership since the Six-Day War of 1967, and had also taken root among the public. That was the background for the assessment that although the possibility of an Arab offensive existed, it would inflict on the Arabs a blow “that would make the memory of 1967 seem pleasant,” as Ezer Weizman, the Israel Defense Forces’ deputy chief of staff, put it in an interview earlier that year. Golda Meir, the prime minister, maintained that a confrontation would be an illogical move by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, because its results were clear. Ariel Sharon, who was head of Southern Command until July 1973, promised that in the next clash, “the line of withdrawal will be Cairo.” And the popular comedy troupe Hagashash Hahiver wondered “whether the Egyptians will implement their idiotic plan to cross the [Suez] Canal.”
Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, the director of Military Intelligence, who clung to “the conception” about the low probability of an Arab offensive almost until the offensive was launched, gave expression to an extreme version of that analysis just a few hours before the war erupted. He admitted that the Egyptians were ripe for a war but emphasized that they knew they would be defeated. Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories at the time, attested during the war that on the morning of October 6, 1973, Israel’s top ranks were unified in their view that “we will break their bones” and that the only concern was “that we won’t have time to smash them completely.”
Remarks by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan at a government meeting, documented in minutes recently made public, show vividly how the war totally shattered the image that Israelis harbored of the Arabs. Just hours after war had broken out, on October 6, Dayan was still captive to the assessment that the IDF would “smite the Arabs hip on thigh” and make manifest the scale of their error. But at the end of a night of bitter, failure-ridden battles, he admitted to being surprised by the Arabs’ combat ability and by the faulty preparedness of the IDF. He fell into a depressed state of mind in which he conjectured that the Arabs were aiming to conquer the Land of Israel in order “to finish off the Jews.”
In the half-century since 1973, mountains of studies have been published in which the roots of the blunder have been analyzed and lessons of special relevance to the intelligence communities have been gleaned. Special emphasis has been placed on pluralism in the intelligence analysis bodies, on caution against “herd thinking” and the need to question conventional thinking and avoid arrogance and categorical thought. The absence of these notions has become entrenched in the Israeli consciousness as a central reason for the failure in 1973, and generations of Israelis educated on the basis of those lessons.
Contempt for the other and ignorance of their culture and language were indeed cited over the years as having contributed to the blunder, but were accorded a relatively minor place. It was simpler to categorize the 1973 failures as stemming from conceptual biases, faulty organizational and managerial models, or defective psychological modes of thought among leaders and commanders, and to frame all these as symptoms of the past, rather than digging into basic problems that arise from the Israeli collective’s limited understanding of and acquaintance with the region. These were prevalent then, and they are still rampant today.
Yoel Ben-Porat, who commanded signals intelligence Unit 848 (forerunner of today’s Unit 8200) in the war, was particularly unsparing in talking, afterwards, about the part played by contempt and ignorance in generating the failure of 1973. He complained about the paucity of Arabic speakers in the intelligence bodies and wondered where personnel got the nerve to analyze foreign societies without the slightest knowledge of their history, culture and language.
As an example of the lapse that stemmed from a cultural misunderstanding, he noted the fact that little attention was paid to a report that was picked up two days before the war, to the effect that in a very exceptional move, the Egyptian army had ordered soldiers to break the holy fast of Ramadan. In the same context the poet Haim Gouri described a meeting he held in Cairo, in 1977, with Hussein Fawzi, a leading Egyptian intellectual, who told him, “If Israeli intelligence had read the Egyptian poetry that was written after 1967, they would have known that October 1973 was inevitable. An intelligence officer needs to read poetry.”
Half a century after that war, the knowledge Israeli society possesses about its regional environment, and its attitude toward its neighbors, remain unchanged or perhaps even regressed. This is reflected in the diminishing numbers of high school students who study Arabic, of students in higher education who take courses on the Middle East, and of Jews who are capable of conducting a conversation in Arabic. For most Israelis, these are inferior skills compared to the allure of high tech.
The reflections that arise on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War should be leveraged to bring home the forgotten lesson of that campaign. Israelis as a whole need to internalize – and even to enshrine in legislation – the idea that learning the language and culture of the other is no less important than sophisticated logic, which is usually based on Western mindsets, or on technological supremacy centering on artificial intelligence and Big Data, which may supply the intelligence analysts with more information than was available in the past, but don’t necessarily enable it to be better understood.
Beyond knowing the Other, it is vital for the discourse about the Yom Kippur War to include an analysis of the collapse of the basic strategic assumptions on which Israel drew on the eve of the war, and which prevail once more today in the leadership and among the public – above all the sanctification of the status quo and the belief that time is on Israel’s side. Such thinking is common today in the Israeli discourse about the Palestinians, accompanied by the claim that the present reality in Judea and Samaria can be maintained indefinitely without encountering threats and without being called on to make critical decisions.
The 1973 war, like the first intifada, which began in 1987, proved that relying on those basic assumptions tends to end in a traumatic surprise that requires a hasty response, inevitably from an inferior strategic position.
Dr. Michael Milshtein heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, and is a senior analyst at Reichman University’s Institute for Policy and Strategy.
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