A tale of two wars

Both were victories, but one is remembered as a disaster – an error that warps policy to this day.

By EVELYN GORDON
IDF soldiers celebrate at the Western Wall in 1967_370 (photo credit: Courtesy Werner Braun/Jerusalem Post Archives)
IDF soldiers celebrate at the Western Wall in 1967_370
(photo credit: Courtesy Werner Braun/Jerusalem Post Archives)
Last week’s anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War recalled a question that has long puzzled me, and whose implications go far beyond mere historical interest: Why is that war considered a miraculous victory while the 1973 Yom Kippur War is remembered as a terrible disaster? After all, both ended with the enemy resoundingly defeated and the Israel Defense Forces threatening Cairo and Damascus.
Certainly, the 1973 war produced ample reasons for dismay: It killed 3.5 times as many Israelis as 1967 did, took Israel by surprise due to severe intelligence blunders and revealed serious dysfunction in the IDF. Nevertheless, the end result of both wars was identical – and 1973 was arguably a far more miraculous victory.
In 1967, Israel enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise (via a preemptive strike), a creative battle plan and a well-trained army that executed it superbly. And at no point after the fighting began was it seriously threatened with defeat.
In 1973, the enemy enjoyed the benefit of complete surprise, while Israel had a dysfunctional military leadership, a lousy battle plan (the Bar-Lev line of outposts in Sinai proved as useless as France’s Maginot Line did in 1940), and a poorly trained and maintained army. In his semi-autobiographical novel Adjusting Sights, author Haim Sabato, who served in a tank during the Yom Kippur War, described an exercise not long beforehand in which the tanks repeatedly broke down, and soldiers joked about what would happen if that occurred during a real war. It was no laughing matter when it actually occurred in 1973.
In this war, Israel faced a real threat of destruction. At one point, a tiny force led by Avigdor Kahalani held off a far superior Syrian force on the Golan Heights just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Had the Syrians broken through, they would have had a clear path to Israel’s heartland.
The same was true in the south. In his autobiography, the IDF’s first chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, recalled visiting Sinai early in the war, before the reserves arrived. The defensive line was stretched paper-thin, he wrote, and there was nothing behind them; had the Egyptians broken through, the path to Israel’s heartland lay wide open.
Yet despite this dismal start, Israel proceeded to win a stunning victory. The war ended with the IDF shelling the outskirts of Damascus in the north and poised to destroy the Egyptian Third Army on Egypt’s side of the Suez Canal in the south.
In Israel’s collective memory, however, this victory is recalled as an unmitigated disaster. And that distorted memory has shaped Israeli policy ever since.
First, it became the emotional cornerstone of the land-for-peace paradigm. The war proved that territory offers no protection, the argument went: Just six years after acquiring a huge territorial buffer in 1967, Israel was once again attacked, came within a hair’s-breadth of defeat and suffered heavy casualties. Therefore, only trading land for peace could ensure the country’s survival.
In reality, however, 1973 proved the vital importance of territory: that territorial buffer is what gave Israel time to mobilize its reserves and counterattack. Had Egypt and Syria achieved similar early gains starting from the 1967 lines, Israel would have been destroyed. And territory is no less important today.
Second, 1973 was a formative experience for most recent Israeli leaders. Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Binyamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni ranged in age from 31 to 15 during that war, and it’s no accident that all repeatedly voice existential fears for Israel’s future of a kind never publicly heard from the previous generation of leaders: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses … the State of Israel is finished” (Olmert); “it's impossible to survive in the long run without a political settlement” (Netanyahu); without a Palestinian state, “Israel will not be the Jewish nation-state” (Livni). In short, Israel’s very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to make peace.
This existential terror can’t be explained by facts alone, because the threat these leaders cite – Israel’s demographic situation – has, just like its military situation, actually improved substantially since 1948. Then, Jews comprised just 33% of the total population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (and 58% in the area the UN allotted for a Jewish state). Today, depending on whose calculations you believe, Jews comprise somewhere between 50% and 58%, including Gaza, and up to 66% excluding it.
Yet this fear has several pernicious consequences: it undermines Israel’s morale, creates pressure for dangerous territorial concessions, and sabotages the very two-state solution these leaders claim to want. After all, if Israel itself says the Palestinians can destroy it just by refusing to sign an agreement, why should they save it by signing? And indeed, they haven’t: after rejecting three Israeli offers of statehood (in 2000, 2001 and 2008), they now refuse to negotiate at all.
Israel’s traumatized reaction to 1973 wasn’t inevitable. Just consider another country’s very different response to a genuine military defeat: in 1940, the German army trounced French and British forces and trapped them against the sea at Dunkirk. The one bright spot was the ensuing rescue, in which hundreds of ordinary Englishmen, often using their own boats, evacuated over 330,000 soldiers.
But Winston Churchill focused on the success rather than the failure: He used that heroic rescue to rally his people to fight on alone against the Nazis. And ultimately, the Nazis were defeated.
The Yom Kippur War could have inspired a similar lesson: that despite serious problems, Israel had the strength and resilience to overcome immensely difficult opening conditions. Instead, the lesson derived was that Israel is so fragile its very survival depends on its enemies’ willingness to rescue it by making peace.
In reality, Israel has survived and thrived without peace for 65 years now, and if necessary, it can continue doing so. But no less important, as the Palestinian example shows, is that our enemies won’t make peace until they are convinced they can’t destroy us. And we will never convince them of that unless we first convince ourselves.