By H. Marcos C. Mordeno
Unlike in the Six-Day War of June 1967, where the Israelis walloped the combined military might of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, the 1973 war almost saw the defeat of Israel. Egypt took back the Sinai Peninsula. Syrian forces broke through Israeli positions to reach the Golan Heights.
Israel prevailed in the end by crippling Egypt’s air force but sustained heavy casualties—2,656 dead, 7,251 wounded, 294 captured. (The exact figures vary.) And, if not for the arrival of military hardware and aircraft from the United States, the UN-sponsored state would have become just a footnote in history just 20 years after its creation. It was an embarrassment to the government of Golda Meir and Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence agency.
Hostilities ended with a ceasefire on Oct. 26. Formal truce agreements were signed with Egypt on Nov. 11, and with Syria on May 31, 1974. A UN peacekeeping force established a buffer zone between the Israeli and Egyptian armies.
An inquiry by the Agranat Commission (after Shimon Agranat, Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court at the time) found that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) was unprepared for the coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attacks. Meir, a Zionist since high school, resigned in the aftermath of the inquiry, in 1974, even if she and her Labor Party won the elections in December 1973.
Another significant outcome of the 1973 war was the signing of the historic permanent peace agreement between Egypt and Israel on March 26, 1979, leading to Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and to the normalization of ties between the two countries.
Fifty years later, Israel again would face another serious military challenge, this time coming from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas could not have chosen a more auspicious time for the attacks, the end of the weeklong Sukkot, another Jewish holiday. Surely, the timing brought back painful memories of the Yom Kippur War that nearly erased the infant state.
More importantly, the attack has cast doubts on Israel’s defense capabilities. Did its security sector become self-assured after its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system worked flawlessly against rockets fired by Hamas toward Israeli cities in May 2021? Was the Mossad sleeping on its job?
Media reports and a number of social media posts by some Israelis have pinned the blame on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ignored warnings of the attack from his own defense officials as well as by Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel. Netanyahu, apparently to save face, has ordered the IDF to launch a punitive counter-offensive in Gaza. Perhaps he knows this failure could be the last nail on his political coffin, as he has been facing protests after clamping down on the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court.
True, the Hamas attacks killed hundreds of Israeli civilians. The world, though, expected Israel to behave in a manner that would put it on a higher moral plane given the tragic experience of the Jews under the Nazis during World War II. Thus, its indiscriminate counter-offensive has only generated widespread criticism and condemnation the world over.
For those who are well aware about the historical dynamics of the conflict and have rightly excluded religion as the root cause, Israel’s response can only be interpreted as a continuation of a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. H. Marcos C. Mordeno can be reached at hmcmordeno@gmail.com.)
