The Yom Kippur War and the revelation of Israeli documents after fifty years

On October 6, Egypt celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the October War, and this was the fifth experience in which the Egyptian army fought a regional war.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser was a military commander, he participated in the Battle of Fallujah. He tried to prevent the Nakba against the Palestinians, but without any success, due to the Arab regimes at that time conspiring against the Palestinian people.

After 1952 and Abdel Nasser seized power in Egypt, the Egyptian army was attacked by Israel, France and Britain in 1956 in the Battle of Sinai, where they were all defeated by the Egyptian army.

The Egyptian adventure in Yemen failed in the early sixties, when the Egyptian President sent his forces to Yemen to help his allies in Sanaa at the time.

The Egyptian army suffered its largest historical loss on June 5, 1967, when Israel attacked the Egyptian army in Sinai and forced it to withdraw from there via the Suez Canal, which led to a comprehensive national setback. Egypt lost the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip, and Syria lost. Also the Golan Heights, and the Jordanian army withdrew from the West Bank and Jerusalem, so that Israel took complete control of all the lands of Palestine.

Immediately after the setback in June 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced that he took responsibility for the setback and resigned from the presidency of the republic in Egypt.

But the million-man demonstrations prevented his resignation, which forced him to return and take the reins of the initiative and the presidency of the republic, after which he carried out massive purges that included the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense, led by Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, who committed suicide immediately after the war.

After a short period of setback, in late 1967, Egypt, with the support of the Soviet Union in that period, began a massive modernization process for the Egyptian army, and the war of attrition began between Egypt and Israel, which lasted more than three years.

Israel targeted the Egyptian interior, especially in Port Fouad and Port Said, using modern Phantom aircraft supplied by the United States.

The Egyptian president at the time also supported an Arab resolution held at the Khartoum Conference, which called for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 for withdrawal from all areas occupied in June 1967, but Israel continued to procrastinate and claim that this decision does not include withdrawal from all lands, but rather from concrete lands that can be Negotiated after the Egyptian attack in the war of attrition stops.

At the same time, the government of Golda Meir did not undertake any negotiations with the Egyptian side. After the massive military support it received from the United States at the time, it continued to strike the Egyptian depths, reaching many areas across the Suez Canal, where the Egyptian side suffered heavy losses in lives and equipment. Israel also suffered heavy losses from the Egyptian army.

Internationally, during the Cold War, the Soviet and American camps viewed that war as a testing field for the weapons of both parties.

Israel was unable to resolve the battle, and on July 6, 1970, both sides agreed to accept Rogers’ initiative to stop the war of attrition between Egypt and Israel, after which the state of no war and no peace between the two parties would continue.

On the twenty-eighth of September, that is, two and a half months after accepting the Rogers initiative, the world was shocked when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser passed away, and he died of a sudden heart attack when he was fifty-two years old.

Immediately after the arrival of Sadat, the Egyptian army continued preparations to return the Sinai Desert and the Egyptian lands that were occupied in 1967, and in its speeches it was pleading with Israel and the world to try to reach an agreement that might lead to a comprehensive Israeli withdrawal from all Egyptian regions, but there was no life for whoever it was calling for.

In the revolution’s speeches on July 23, 1971/72/73, Sadat used to say that this year would be the year of decisiveness, but the Israeli government, led by Golda Meir, did not care about these speeches at all, as the Israeli national security theory believed that the Egyptian army was standing He crossed the second bank of the canal, and it was impossible for him to cross the canal, given his inability to do so and the huge military fortifications that were located on the other side of the bank on the Israeli side.

This state of flight and flight continued until October 6, 1973, when the Egyptian army crossed the canal on Yom Kippur, which Israel celebrated a week earlier, when tens of thousands of documents and protocols related to security were leaked from the National Archives. National Government Correspondence Foreign Affairs and Security Committee Command of Staff Military Intelligence and Mossad These documents, which amounted to tens of thousands, shed light on the huge and unexpected intelligence failure of the Israeli security services, especially the Military Intelligence Service, and the error in estimates, ruling out Egypt and Syria launching a surprise war against Israel.

Today, fifty years later, the Israeli media and public opinion are trying to draw lessons from what happened, and why this Egyptian attack was not expected, even though all signs were clear that an Egyptian attack would come soon.

These documents and testimonies of officers and soldiers, fifty years later, unanimously agreed that the Israeli army, at the individual level, was certain that the Egyptian attack was imminent, as the soldiers were looking at the Egyptian bank of the canal and seeing how the Egyptian army was training to cross, but the military leadership did not believe in that. Certificates.

It was later confirmed that the Egyptian army carried out an Egyptian strike similar to what Israel carried out on June 5, 1967, when the Israeli Air Force struck Egyptian airports in Sinai at seven-thirty in the morning, when the pilots were in the dining room eating breakfast. Within this framework, on October 6, specifically on Yom Kippur, which is the official holiday in Israel, the Egyptian Air Force targeted dozens of civilian and military bases in Sinai, with more than four hundred military aircraft at two o’clock in the afternoon, without sustaining any damage. No significant losses.
After a devastating war, Egypt was able to regain part of the Sinai Desert, but Sadat had other goals, goals related to concluding a peace treaty with Israel that was signed later after his visit to Israel and was called the Sadat Initiative.

But the Israelis do not focus on the results of this attack. Rather, they wonder in these documents why they did not expect the Egyptian military attack on Israel from the other bank of the canal. An important word emerged during that period that led to the establishment of an investigation committee called the Agranak Committee, which examined who were responsible for what was called (With indifference), which is neglect and indifference. This expression accompanied Golda Meir for more than a year, until she was forced to resign in May 1974.

As for Moshe Dayan, who served as Minister of Defense during that period, he blamed the army’s military institutions, including intelligence and Mossad, in addition to Golda Meir.

In the end, Eli Zeira is considered the commander of military intelligence, who ignored all the warnings that came to the military intelligence leadership about the Egyptian army’s intentions to attack, as he completely ignored them and did not care about them, and the Mossad leadership, headed by Zvi Zamir, tried to accuse Zeira that the Mossad had information about an Egyptian attack. A surprise came to him a day before the war and during a long period of dealing with the Egyptian double agent Ashraf Marwan, who met a Mossad agent in London the day before the outbreak of the October War, and informed him that Egypt would launch a war at five o’clock in the evening on Yom Kippur.

This is what happened, but the war broke out at two in the afternoon, and these accusations played a role in the documents that were revealed fifty years after the outbreak of the war.