The idea that Egypt and Syria would be easily defeated in a war with Israel was
so deeply ingrained in Military Intelligence, and the likelihood of this
happening deemed so small, that an intelligence officer who warned just before
the Yom Kippur War that Syria would attack was reprimanded for his assessment,
according to declassified protocols of the Agranat Commission that were released
on Sunday.
The Agranat Commission was the government commission of
inquiry that investigated the failures of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It held IDF
chief of staff David Elazar responsible for the “assessment of the situation and
the preparedness of the IDF” and called for his removal. It also called for the
dismissal of the chief of military intelligence Eliyahu Zeira and his deputy,
Aryeh Shalev. The report also led to the eventual resignation of prime minister
Golda Meir.
The report did not render an opinion regarding the
responsibility of defense minister Moshe Dayan, saying that was beyond its
scope.
In one of the hearings whose protocols were made public Sunday,
Elazar recalled a conversation he had with Dayan during the war, saying the
defense minister told him he was “afraid that Israel would be left without
weapons, tanks, airplanes or people. It is important to defend the State of
Israel.”
Elazar informed the commission that he told Dayan his impression
was that the Syrians were not having as much success as Dayan
believed.
Aviezer Ya’ari, the head of the Syrian division inside Military
Intelligence, told the commission, headed by then-Supreme Court chief justice
Shimon Agranat, that shortly before the war he broke the accepted norms of
procedure and passed to the northern command his assessment that a war was
likely in October.
Ya’ari said that Shalev called him in and reprimanded
him, saying that he should not have gone beyond the regular chain of command,
and that he was not in Military Intelligence to pass on his own personal reports
and assessments.
“I asked what I should have passed on to the northern
command,” Ya’ari said, saying that he was told that the assessment was that
“nothing is happening.”
Ya’ari said this reprimand impacted on the
reports he wrote during the first days of October.
On October 3, three
days before the Egyptians and Syrians invaded, he said his daily report didn’t
mention anything of what he wrote previously.
“My responsibility is
great,” he said. “I need to blame myself for not screaming to the heavens. I see
my part in the IDF’s lack of warning. I feel guilty.”