The Yom Kippur War 50 years ago was the fiercest Israel ever fought against the Arabs but the only one that ended with combatants embracing each other and exchanging home addresses.
After 18 days of unremitting combat, a ceasefire had kicked in overnight on the Egyptian front in October 1973. Capt. Gideon Shamir, commanding a reservist paratroop reconnaissance company, awoke at dawn to see Egyptian troops camped in an orchard 100 yards away. He presumed they were part of the commando force that had ambushed him and his men the night before when Gen. Ariel Sharon’s division pushed north towards Ismailia on the western bank of the Suez Canal.
The sound of distant firing meant that the ceasefire was already being violated. Shamir, from a religious kibbutz in the Beit She’an Valley, was determined to head off unnecessary shooting in his sector by making contact with the adjacent Egyptian force.
Ordering his men to cover him, he descended into a dry irrigation ditch leading towards the orchard, accompanied by one of his men who spoke Arabic. Shamir shouted “peace, ceasefire” as he approached the orchard. The startled Egyptians held their fire as the two unarmed Israelis presented themselves and summoned their commander, Maj. Ali. Shamir said to him that it would be foolish at this point for anyone on either side to get hurt. The major agreed and surprised Shamir by saying that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat wanted not just a ceasefire but peace with Israel.
In the coming days, soldiers from both sides ventured into the clearing between them and began to fraternize. When shooting broke out in adjacent sectors they hurried back to their positions. Initially, when shooting was heard at night the Egyptians in the orchard fired as well, although not by day.
The paratroopers held their fire and after a few nights the Egyptians did too. Before long the two sides were meeting daily to brew up coffee and play backgammon. Soccer games followed. The men came to know each other’s first names and showed off pictures of girlfriends and wives.
As time passed, there was a kumzits, with the Egyptians slaughtering a sheep and Shamir’s men contributing food parcels that had begun to arrive from home. Some of the Israelis and Egyptians even exchanged home addresses and telephone numbers. (It is not known if any actually tried to make contact after the war.)
Word of the local truce spread and similar arrangements began to be forged in other sectors. Even Sharon came by for a discrete look at what was going on. When the Egyptians spotted an Israeli television cameraman, however, they broke off relations for several days.
At one point, Ali told Shamir that he had permission from his superiors to take him to Cairo for a visit. Shamir was game but Israeli intelligence officers ruled it out, fearful that the Egyptians intended to get information from him. The Israelis, for their part, tried to get information from Ali about the fate of Israeli pilots shot down in the area, but without success.
In a discussion between Shamir and Ali that the former transcribed immediately afterwards, he asked Ali about an editorial in a Cairo newspaper asserting that Egypt would never recognize Israel. The editorial had been reported on the radio.
“That’s just propaganda,” said Ali. “The truth is that we want peace and that we’re moving towards it.” “Why doesn’t Sadat say so?” asked Shamir “Sadat can’t say so explicitly,” said Ali. “Although some of the intelligentsia support him, his problem is to win the support of the common people, who are still hypnotized by the figure of [former president Gamal Abdel] Nasser.”
A year before, said Ali, he had attended a meeting of officers addressed by Sadat. Ali said he was then a captain and the lowest-ranking officer invited.
“Sadat said that we have to concern ourselves with Egypt’s internal development and that if Israel would show serious intentions of withdrawing from Sinai he would talk with it.”
Matters had to progress in stages, said Ali.
“First the war has to stop. After a year or two we will travel to Tel Aviv and you to Cairo.”
According to what Ali’s soldiers were telling their Israeli counterparts, Ali’s uncle was a very senior officer. Some said it was the Egyptian chief of staff, Gen. Saad el-Shazly, himself.
Other instances of fraternization emerged along the suddenly quiet battlefront. An Israeli company commander whose men were guarding the exit from Suez City radioed his battalion commander that several dozen Egyptian soldiers had laid down their weapons and begun to enter his company’s lines.
“Take them prisoner,” said the battalion commander. “They haven’t come to surrender,” said the company commander. “They want to shake hands. Some are kissing our guys.”
Shouts from Egyptian officers brought their men back.
An Israeli entertainment group was rebuked by frontline soldiers when they sang a song from the Six Day War about Egyptian soldiers leaving their boots in the sand when they fled. After three weeks of grueling battles, the Yom Kippur soldiers were jarred by such easy derision of the enemy. They called on the entertainment group to drop the song from the repertoire.
The day after an agreement was signed between the two countries calling for an Israeli pullback across the Suez Canal – a first withdrawal stage – Ali brought his battalion commander to meet Shamir along with a colonel whose military branch was not made clear.
The visitors wanted to hear from the Israeli captain what he thought about the agreement, evidently to probe at field level Israel’s seriousness about withdrawal. They seemed satisfied with Shamir’s assurances that Israel really intended to pull back.
Before departing, the two Egyptian visitors said they hoped that relations between the two countries would in time come to emulate the relations between Shamir and Ali and their men.
The Egyptian commandos and the Israeli paratroopers on the road to Ismailia were at the spearheads of their respective armies. That these motivated fighters, left to themselves, chose at first opportunity to break bread together on the battlefield said something about what this war had wrought.
After the Six Day War in 1967, Sadat understood that Egypt’s battered honor could be retrieved only in a renewed war with a revitalized army while Israel was not overly intimidated by that possibility.
In 1973, both sides were emerging from the Yom Kippur confrontation with honor intact and a desire not to taste of war again. (Israel suffered 2,600 dead – three times more fatalities per capita in 18 days than the US suffered in Vietnam in a decade.) The Arabs had gained self-respect and the respect of their enemies.
From the darkness comes the light
The Yom Kippur War had begun with a devastating (for Israel) surprise attack, but history, that master of paradox, provided an even more surprising ending, one that left behind on the tank-furrowed battlefield the seeds of peace.Not even Sadat, dreaming his dreams under a tree in his village of Mit Abu El Kom, had likely conjured up a vision as surrealistic as what was happening on the ceasefire lines. Or what would await him on the road to Jerusalem.
For Egypt, the war was a towering accomplishment. For Israel, it was an existential earthquake but one whose repercussions were ultimately healthier than those of the Six Day War. The trauma of the war’s opening was not a trauma suppressed but a national memory perpetuated, a standing reminder of the consequences of shallow thinking and arrogance.
Israel’s sensational battlefield recovery was produced by a society with a will to live and a capacity to improvise amid chaos. Israel would be sustained by the memory of how, in its darkest hour, its young men had mounted the nation’s crumbling ramparts and held unwavering.
The writer is author of The Yom Kippur War, The Boats of Cherbourg, and The Battle for Jerusalem.