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Between October 6 and October 14,
the war cost Israel 2,225 deaths. (Photo: IDF Archive) |
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1973: From left, Haim Bar-Lev,
Yigal Yadin, Ephraim Katzir, Avner Shalev (the head of the
chief of staff's bureau) and David Elazar. (Photo: IDF Spokesman) |
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The sticker on the inside cover
of "The History of the Yom Kippur War," published by the History
Department of the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) General Staff, will
bring tears to your eyes - it's that funny; the truth is that it's
not so much a publication as it is a public execution.
"History," the sticker preaches. "If you don't read, you
won't know! If you don't know, you won't learn! If you don't learn,
you will make mistakes! Make mistakes!" -and here the exclamation
marks trail off into an ellipsis. Paste in the sticker and then lock
the book in the cabinet, lest someone read, know, learn and, heaven
forbid, make no mistakes.
The History Department is part of
the doctrine and guidance division, which is subordinate to the
chief of the General Staff's Operations Branch. The chief, Major
General Dan Harel, last week took pride in declaring that he is the
one who is bodily blocking the dissemination of the book about the
Yom Kippur War. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, who has been in
office for two months without showing a sign of change from the path
followed by his predecessor, Shaul Mofaz, did not intervene.
Ya'alon is a prominent member of the group of combat
soldiers, or noncoms, or junior officers who were so rattled by the
Yom Kippur War of 1973 that they decided to join the career army and
help prevent a recurrence of such disasters; a personal decision,
but cumulatively that of a generation, that is shared by Ya'alon's
deputy and the commanders of the Navy and the Air Force, the head of
Central Command and the directors of the Planning Branch and
Military Intelligence.
One might have expected that Ya'alon
would do what he could to inculcate knowledge of the past as one of
the elements for understanding the military, political, public and
technological framework in which the IDF must perform its tasks now
and in the future.
Military history is too important to be
left in the hands of the military's historians, but in Israel they
get preference, and in many ways even exclusivity, because they are
the ones with access to the material - documents, transcripts,
recordings, photographs and, if the government agrees, minutes of
the discussions held by the political level. The army writes but the
army also shelves, and no defense minister, government or Knesset
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is about to issue an order to
give the public access to its rightful property: historical
research.
The majority of Israel's citizens were born, grew
up or immigrated here after the Yom Kippur War, which is now in time
closer to the Second World than it is to the present. What people
know about it is what those who were involved or their
representatives have said, and they are committed to partial and
private truth. Twenty-nine years have passed, years in which a new
generation has emerged in the political and defense leadership, but
there is as yet no authorized history of the war. Actually, there
is, but it is missing in action or imprisoned without trial and
without commutation of sentence in a military dungeon, hidden from
the public eye.
Top secret
"The History of
the Yom Kippur War, by a researcher of the IDF's History Department,
Lieutenant Colonel Elhanan Oren, was printed in September 1992 and
classified "secret." Six years later, the classification was lowered
by one notch, to "confidential," and it would be no problem to
declassify it altogether, as it is or at most with the deletion of a
few words. The classification is not sacred. It lies in the eye of
the beholder, and the beholder has vested interests. This is well
exemplified in a new volume of documents, which are no longer
secret, from the period of the Johnson administration in the United
States, relating to data about the American nuclear disposition: the
defense secretary at the time, Robert McNamara, agreed to make the
data public, convened the Atomic Energy Commission as required to
get official permission to lift the secrecy and reported to the
president. Johnson, in the midst of his presidential campaign
against the militant Barry Goldwater, was furious and revoked
McNamara's decision. The defense minister, part of the political
level but also an authoritative defense personage, thought as he
did; the president, a politician but also the commander-in-chief,
thought otherwise. It was possible to put forward arguments either
way without those supporting publication being considered
anti-American. That is the small but critical difference between
state secrets and statesmen's secrets.
If Israel had special
armament in 1973, there is barely any mention of it in the
"History," though years ago Prof. Yuval Ne'eman related, in a public
lecture delivered in New York, that Ivri surface-to-surface missiles
were deployed as a threat to Syria. Other secrets also remain
outside the two-volume work of slightly more than 700 pages that
Elhanan Oren wrote; much remains in the dozen volumes compiled by
another researcher, Shimon Golan, about the High Command post in the
war - then prime minister Golda Meir, defense minister Moshe Dayan,
cabinet ministers Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, chief of staff
David Elazar and his deputy Israel Tal, director of Military
Intelligence Eli Zeira, Air Force commander Benny Peled and their
colleagues - in its most difficult moments.
After the report
published by the Agranat Commission (the state commission of inquiry
that examined the opening stages of the war, chaired by the
president of the Supreme Court, Moshe Agranat) and its continuations
- the memoirs of Meir and Dayan, the estate of Elazar, the books by
and against Zeira, the works by two divisional commanders in Sinai,
Ariel Sharon and Avraham Adan, along with numberless articles and
interviews - what is there left to relate that is not already known?
Not much, though in one sense very much: to decide between the
conflicting versions of events. A court, too, which makes its
judgment on the basis of the evidence before it, does not usually
provide revelations; its strength lies in clarifying which of the
competing truths is more convincing. The History Department, which
is not a side to the dispute, is armed only with the pretension to
know and the authority to decide, poses a threat to those involved
in the blood battle over the facts and their meaning - and it is
they, and above all one of them, who are putting the fear of God
into the successive chiefs of staff of the IDF and the generals, and
those who want to achieve those ranks.
The war over the true
version of what happened in October 1973 has been fought on several
fronts, some contiguous, others separate: the military level against
the political level and both of them against the intelligence
people, the General Staff against the Air Force, the chief of staff
against the head of Southern Command, the Front Command against the
divisions and the divisions among themselves. Military Intelligence
swept the shame under the carpet. It was only after 20 years, at the
initiative of the commander of the School of Intelligence, Ron
Kitri, that they convened for the first time to discuss the events
of 1973 and the insights that can be gleaned from them.
Although the chief of staff in 1973, David Elazar, is
usually portrayed as an unfair victim of the events, which he was
only in comparison to Meir and Dayan (and even that only for a few
weeks, until their coerced resignations), he easily outmaneuvered
Dayan and landed the first blow in the duel between them. Elazar
gave Chaim Herzog (a retired major general who was later president
of Israel), who had a grudge against Dayan, vital assistance, rare
in terms of the access it provided to material and interviewees and
transparent in its purpose, even though the Agranat Commission
report recommended Elazar's ouster as chief of staff before Herzog's
sympathetic book ("The War of Atonement") appeared. Then came
counter-versions and counter-counter-versions.
Following
Elazar's sudden death at the age of 51, in 1976 - Meir died two
years later and Dayan three years after her - the veterans of the
barren political contest (Allon vs. Dayan) mobilized to exalt the
disgraced chief of staff, some in literature, some in the press and
others in the history departments of the universities. The IDF
History Department supports Elazar in his dispute with the head of
Southern Command in October 1973, Shmuel Gonen-Gorodish, but is
unsparing in its criticism of "Dado," the 1978 biography of Elazar
by Hanoch Bartov, which has just been reissued in an expanded
edition. The footnotes in the "History" are trenchant: Bartov is
wrong in his assessment of Elazar's position, claiming that he was
constantly pressing for an offensive in the north, but there is no
doubt that before 9 P.M. he was inclined to remain in a defensive
posture; Bartov's account does not note that the decision took form
in the wake of the change in the chief of staff's evaluation; Bartov
presents Elazar's remarks correctly but we should not accept his
comment about Dayan's earlier reservations; Bartov downplays the
pressure exerted by Elazar on October 12 to obtain a cease-fire
soon.
The History Department avoids handing out grades to
the Agranat Commission report - had it done so, it would have given
it quite a high grade - making do with incidental remarks. "The
Agranat Commission did not believe [one of the brigade commanders in
connection with his advance to battle], did not understand his
reports and drew an inference from this detail about everything he
said. The research made it clear that the commission used a map
coded to 1:50,000, whereas he [the brigade commander] used a map of
1:100,000 and pointed to a green signification of landmines to mark
his position."
Agranat Commission
The Agranat
Commission was asked to deal only with the preparations for the war
and the war's first three days. The IDF History Department painted a
far broader canvass, albeit with certain inhibitions: it did not
survey political documentation, which could shed some light on the
considerations of the leaders of the ruling party to avoid - this on
the eve of the general elections, which were set for October 31 -
moves that entailed tension that would contradict their boasting
about deterring the Arabs; the archives from the 1950s and 1960s of
Mapai and its successor, the Labor Alignment, include party
discussions about the most secret subjects, such as the nuclear
reactor at Dimona, and there is no reason to think that Golda,
Galili, Dayan, Shimon Peres (who was also a cabinet minister in
October 1973, albeit of junior level) and others abstained
completely from analyzing the impact that a call-up of the reserves
would have on the election campaign.
In the Dayan-Elazar
sector, in the narrow sense, or the government versus the army in
the broad sense, the History Department effectively adopts the
wretched remark of the state president, Ephraim Katzir, that "we are
all to blame" - along with the leadership, Katzir implicated the
nation that follows its leaders innocently. No one at the highest
level gets off scot-free, but neither is anyone denounced as being
the chief culprit.
In the introduction to Oren's book, Benny
Michelson, who was the head of the History Department at the time
the study was completed, deals with the deterrence failure: the
power of the Air Force and the maneuvering capability of the armored
forces, which were supposed "to take the war to the enemy's capitals
in every opening situation" quickly and potently, did not dissuade
the Egyptians from creating offensive, though weapons-intensive,
alignments against planes and tanks. The intelligence warning "was
late in coming" and the war opened with a surprise in all its
dimensions - even commanders who were told that it would soon erupt
did not easily internalize the meaning of this and continued to
deploy for a "land grab" or a "day of battle," but not for a
full-scale war.
Faults were found in the IDF's offensive
operation conception, which neglected the defensive side; in relying
on the conscript army; and in the considerations that underlay Golda
Meir's decision not to launch a preemptive air strike.
On
October 12, Michelson writes, "The government, in the wake of the
chief of staff's proposal, considered acceding to the stoppage of
the war, in conditions that were difficult for Israel, before the
goal had been achieved in the Egyptian arena." The reasons for this
were "first of all the data on the erosion of planes, as presented
by the commander of the Air Force. Total reliance on air power is
liable to lead to a reaction so fierce that it will give the
leadership a feeling of helplessness." From the IDF's point of view,
the History Department concludes, the war ended in a narrow victory,
with "only the partial achievement of the war's goals" as they had
been defined; from the point of view of the State of Israel, the
failure lay in the fact that the war was not prevented and in losing
it: the Arab states succeeded in forcing the IDF's withdrawal in the
political settlements that came in the wake of the war and to
achieve more than they would have had they not gone to war.
According to the authoritative data, the Egyptians held a
bridgehead with a total area of some 1,400 square kilometers in the
opening stage of the war. Israel was prepared, in terms of
ammunition and spare parts, for 10 days of warfare (for 90 days in
terms of fuel and food), but after 18 days of fighting the Egyptians
had lost only one-seventh of the territory they had captured and
still held about 1,200 square kilometers; the Israeli wedge inside
Egypt was about 1,600 square kilometers. Between October 6 and
October 14, 2,225 Israelis were killed, including more than 950 in
defense (190 a day in the first five days); another 325 fell in the
next five days, which centered on the offensive against the Golan
Heights; 850 died in the operation to cross the Suez Canal and in
the breakthrough into Egyptian and Syrian territory; and 100 in the
last two days of fighting, between the two cease-fires. The other
IDF casualties were: 405 seriously wounded, 1,430 moderately
wounded, 5,500 lightly wounded: a third from shelling, nearly a
third from antitank weapons, a 10th from air attacks, an eighth from
light weapons fire. Some 300 Israelis were taken prisoner, 230 by
the Egyptians.
Those are stinging statistics, and many
families in Israel have not recovered from them, nor has the state
itself, but the desire to close one's eyes to them cannot explain
the concealment of the historical study. That reason has another
name: Ariel Sharon.
Sharon was the commander of the 143rd
Division. The study documents his violations of orders and his
friction - to the point where fruitless discussions to remove him
took place - with his superior officer and successor as head of
Southern Command, Shmuel Gonen; with the chief of staff, David
Elazar; with the Southern Front commander who was appointed above
the faltering Gonen, Haim Bar-Lev, a cabinet minister who was the
political rival of the progenitor of the Likud, Sharon. All this is
well-known, and it's possible that Sharon is still proud of his
behavior, but the researchers formed the impression that the
glory-hungry commander failed to read the tactical battle correctly,
particularly between October 9th and 12th. His rash demand to cross
the canal, on which his pride as savior is based,
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