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The October War Revisited |
| Reprinted from the Middle East Studies
Association Bulletin, Winter 2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America |
| The October War: A
Retrospective, edited by Richard B. Parker. 396 pages, bibliography, index. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8130-1853-6 Revisiting the Yom Kippur War, edited by P. R. Kumaraswamy. (Israeli History, Politics and Society) 249 pages, index. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001. $57.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8067-2 As one of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War era, the 1973 October War merited a great deal of scholarly work in the fields of diplomacy, strategy, and intelligence. The Arab-Israeli peace process, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the declassification of portions of the findings of the Agranat Commission that inquired into Israel’s intelligence failure, enabled open discourse between former adversaries and allowed access to new information. As a result, many questions that have not yet been completely answered can be revisited: Could the war have been avoided? Was the opportunity created by the war for progress on a peaceful solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict fully exploited? And what were the domestic implications of the war in both Israel and the Arab countries? Two new volumes attempt to address some of these questions. Parker’s The October War―modeled on his earlier work on the Six-Day War―is an edited transcript of the proceedings of a conference held in Washington on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October War. The conference brought together academics and former senior officials from the US, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan to reflect on what really happened in 1973. The book presents the proceedings of panels on the failure of diplomacy and deterrence, the management of the crisis, the attempts to restore peace and convene the Geneva conference, and the lessons learned from the war. One particularly interesting panel on the failure of intelligence brought together Israel's former Deputy Director of Military Intelligence (DMI), an Egyptian and a Jordanian general, and a Syrian political consultant to describe their perceptions of each other's military intentions and capabilities. They all agreed that their decisions were shaped by the deeply-embedded misperceptions of the enemy which dominated their respective political-military establishments. The panel on the management of the crisis, moderated by Bernard Reich, touched some of the most controversial issues of the war, such as the rival airlifts, the use of the oil weapon, the attempt of the superpowers to impose a cease-fire, and the risk of a clash between them when the ceasefire did not hold. The participants delivered thorough, often chilling, accounts of the decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Kremlin. Particularly revealing were the remarks of former Soviet Ambassador Victor Israelyan,[51] about the events leading the US to declare a Grade 3 nuclear alert toward the end of the war. By bringing together former adversaries, Parker facilitated a rare intellectual achievement. He created a suitable setting for elaborate, yet frank and interactive, discussion on all the war's core issues. The book is, therefore, an important contribution to the understanding of the mindset and the action of the various players. Unlike Parker's October War, which stands out in its multinational perspective, Kumaraswamy’s Revisiting the Yom Kippur War focuses mainly on the Israeli dimension of the war. The ten contributors are all Israelis, and most of the essays deal with issues related to Israel's domestic politics, its society, and its civil-military relations. As such, the book contributes to a deeper understanding of the impact of the war and its aftermath on Israel’s society and military. Kumaraswamy’s collection delves into some of the least explored aspects of the October War. For example, Stuart Cohen discusses the use of reserve forces by the Israeli military, Shmuel Gordon analyzes lessons from the use of air power in the war, and Avraham Sela assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Arab coalition. Uri Bar-Joseph, author of a longer study on Israel's intelligence failure,[52] indicts Major General Eli Zeira, the Director of Military Intelligence in 1973, as the man responsible for the debacle. Whereas most works attribute the 1973 intelligence failure to organizational shortcomings, Bar-Joseph presents compelling evidence that Zeira’s dogmatism and untruthfulness denied Golda Meir’s cabinet the information needed to conclude that a war was pending. Israel's former ambassador to the US, Simcha Diniz, provides a gripping account on the diplomacy of the war, describing the tension within the Nixon administration between the State Department and the Pentagon regarding the airlift. Diniz claims that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, fearing strong Arab reaction, deliberately delayed the flow of arms to Israel. Schlesinger’s account in Parker’s book, however, is somewhat different. He plays down the bureaucratic friction and, instead, emphasizes the Pentagon's helpfulness. In face of such contradicting testimonies, even when reading the two books simultaneously, one realizes that almost three decades later, the study of this war has not exhausted itself. |
| [51] Author of Inside the Kremlin during the Yom Kippur War (Pennsylvania, 1995). |
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