40.

`War Of Atonement'
Shaped The Present

Among Israelis, the 1973 trauma
wrought a sea change in the attitude
of the rank and file towards their com-
manders. Israelis had never blindly
obeyed orders, but now the celebrated
cry of "After me!" was not enough.
Especially after the politicized
Lebanon war of 1982, soldiers (and
increasingly their parents) asked,
"Where to and why?"

The Yom Kippur
War was a
watershed
between
statehood and
Israel's 50th
anniversary.

On Yom Kippur 25 years ago, the path was prepared
for peace with Egypt, the intifada and the Oslo Accords.

EgyptiarChelling and when the first
Syrian tanks rumbled towards the Sea
of Galilee. The late Chaim Herzog
rightly dubbed it the War of
Jerusalem
Atonement.
he Yom Kippur War, which
The Egyptian and Syrian high
yanked thousands of Israeli
commands laid to rest the ghosts of
soldiers out of the syna-
1967, for themS'elves and for Israelis.
gogue and on to
They planned the attacks,
the battlefield just 25 years
they concealed their inten-
ago, was a watershed halfway
tions,
and they almost suc-
Israeli
between the establishment of
ceeded.
In combat, their sol-
prisoners of war
the State of Israel in 1948 and
diers demonstrated courage
supportedeach
its 50th anniversary this year.
and aggression. Men scorned
other as their
Israel and its Arab neigh-
as peasants in uniform
Egyptian
bors are still feeling the
captors led them destroyed Israeli warplanes
effects, militarily, politically
away from the
and tanks with shoulder-
and psychologically, of the
battlefield 25
fired missiles.
coordinated Egyptian-Syrian
years ago.
Egyptian President Anwar
surprise attacks and of the
Sadat claimed afterwards
desperate Israeli struggle to
that he had never expected
drive the invading forces back across
to win. His objective was to restore
the Suez Canal and the Golan
Arab self-respect, to make it possible
Heights.
to negotiate a peace agreement from
The intoxicating myth of Israel's
parity.
invincibility, sown by the triumph of
Without that there would have
the Six-Day War only six years earlier,
been no Camp David breakthrough
died when the first fortress of the Bar-
and Israel would not have withdrawn
Lev Line, the chain of bunkers dug
from the whole of Sinai.
along the canal's Asian bank, fell to
Israeli security chiefs were burned

ERIC SILVER
Israel Correspondent

T

10/2

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40 Detroit Jewish News

by their complacency. They spotted
signs of military preparations in the
weeks before Yom Kippur, but they
had assured each other so often that
an attack was out of the question that
they couldn't believe what they saw.
Today, to make sure they don't suf-
fer the fate of their disgraced 1973
predecessors, the army, the Mossad
and the Shin Bet almost invariably
take the pessimistic view of any poten-
tial threat.
In 1977, when Sadat announced
his intention to fly to Jerusalem and
address the Knesset, then-Chief of
Staff Mordechai Gur publicly warned
Prime Minister Begin that it might be
a trap. To this day, his-successors go
for the worst-case scenario..It is pru-
dent, but it leaves a question mark:
Are they just covering their backs, or
is there genuine cause for anxiety?
It is arguable that without the
humiliation of the war's opening days
there would have been no Palestinian
Intifada. Even to schoolkids in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli sol-
diers were no longer supermen. And
without the intifada, there would have
been no Oslo Accords.

Yom Kippur also demolished any
pretense that Jewish settlements can
play the same strategic role in modern
warfare as they did in 1948. The kib-
butzim and moshavim of the Golan
did not withstand an epic siege in
1973. They did as they were told and
evacuated as soon as the Syrian tanks
rolled, leaving the fighting to the mili-
tary.
Political leaders were damaged, too.
Israelis felt let down by "giants," such
as Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.
Although an investigating commission
absolved the prime minister and
defense minister after the war, the
people were not cbnvinced. The Labor
Zionists, who had ruled uninterrupt-
edly since 1948, scraped home in the
first post-war elections (on the wry
slogan "Despite everything, Labor").
Four years later Menachem Begin
reaped the harvest of discontent. The
1950s Sephardi immigrants, smolder-
ing under the condescension of their
Ashkenazi masters, were emboldened
to vote for a more congenial (if Polish-
born) alternative.
It was no accident that Begin was
helped to office by a new party, Yigael
Yadin's Democratic Movement for
Change, which won 15 seats in its first
election. The DMC grew out of the
protest movement spawned by the
Yom Kippur disenchantment.
For good or ill, the Labor hegemo-
ny was over forever, and Israel would
never be the same.

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