SIEGEL: Each side calls the war by the holiday it fell on in 1973. To Arabs, it was the Ramadan War. To Israelis, it was Yom Kippur War. Both Egypt and Israel suffered heavy casualties and both achieved battlefield victories. And the result was sufficiently ambiguous. Neither side had suffered a humiliating defeat that a few years later, Egypt and Israel could make peace, and Egypt could regain the Sinai Peninsula.15,000 killed - but it was for a good purpose! It was for peace!
With 40 years of hindsight and research, our sense of the October 1973 war continues to evolve. And today, we're going to hear an Israeli perspective. Ehud Yaari is a commentator for Israel's Channel Two television. He's also a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington. And he joins us from Jerusalem. And, first, Ehud Yaari, how do recently declassified documents alter your view of what happened in the Yom Kippur War?
EHUD YAARI: Well, I think we have a series of documents published and some still to be published, especially from Dr. Henry Kissinger's personal archive, which shed light on the fact that the Egyptians were trying to get the Israelis to move toward some sort of an arrangement over the reopening of the Suez Canal. The Israeli government, at the time led by Mrs. Golda Meir, was preoccupied by the coming elections in Israel, and President Sadat of Egypt felt that he couldn't afford to wait and launched the war.
Basically, the situation was that there was an Egyptian offer on the table. There was a recommendation by Dr. Kissinger to go for it. There was an Israeli response that let's wait after - until after the elections, and Sadat felt that he could not afford to wait that long.
SIEGEL: But you're describing a war that seems, with hindsight, more of an avoidable war than it might have seemed at the time.
YAARI: Absolutely. President Sadat launched the war together with Hafez Assad, the president of Syria at the time, in order to break the diplomatic deadlock, not in order to capture the Sinai Peninsula or invade Israel itself. He saw the war as a tool of diplomacy rather than as an ending itself. And indeed, it took four years between the launching of the October war '73 and Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem in November '77. That was his intention from the start. I'm telling you this as the proud man who had the privilege of being the first Israeli passport allowed into Egypt. That was the story. He launched the war in order to get a peace process going.
...SIEGEL: Of course, one observation that's been made over the years is that President Sadat's motives, Egypt's motives in going to war in 1973 were sufficiently nuanced or sophisticated that they weren't understood well by Israeli intelligence.
Those Israelis were too stupid to recognize the "nuance" of their sons were being killed by the hundreds.
And this was the "Israeli" perspective. Today, NPR will bring us Egypt's perspective!
(I'm sure that Yaari said more than just the two minutes heard here, but NPR cherry picked his comments to make Egypt as blameless as possible for starting a war.)
One set of documents that has received next to no attention from these self-styled "experts" were recently released by Israel's National Archives. As Times of Israel described it:
At NPR, Israeli diplomatic efforts for peace are ignored but a sneak attack that killed thousands is praised - as being necessary for "peace."Several months before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir used West German diplomatic channels to offer Egypt most of the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace, according to documents released Sunday by the state archives.
During a series of meetings with West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who was making a historic visit to Israel in early June 1973, Meir offered ”to meet with them (the Egyptians) for the first personal contact, anywhere, any time and at any level” and asked Brandt to convey to the Egyptians her desire to meet as well as Israel’s willingness to cede most of the Sinai in a peace treaty with Egypt.
Israel captured the peninsula from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War. According to the records, Meir was not willing to return completely to the 1967 lines in the event of a handover.
“He can tell Sadat that he, Brandt, is convinced that we truly want peace. That we don’t want all of Sinai, or half of Sinai, or the major part of Sinai. Brandt can make it clear to Sadat that we do not request that he begin negotiations in public, and that we are prepared to begin secret negotiations, etc.,” Meir said in a later meeting.
West German diplomatic personnel later met in Cairo with Hafiz Ismail, a close adviser to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and relayed the Israeli proposal, which Ismail reportedly rejected bluntly.
As long as Israel was not willing to return completely to the 1967 lines, there was no point in negotiations, he reportedly said, adding that there would be no “talks about talks.” Ismail, during the meeting, held forth about world indifference to the situation in the Arab world and said that ”from now on, the Arabs’ fate is in their own hands.”
And to push this decidedly illiberal narrative, NPR just uses the oldest trick in the book - to find an Israeli that seems to blame Israel for Egypt's decision to start a war.
In retrospect, it is obvious that Egypt would not have accepted any peace offer from Israel, because the point of the war wasn't "peace." As with so much else in the Arab world, the driving motivation was honor. Egypt needed to feel like a victor before it could discuss any negotiations. This is clear from the statement made by Egypt's president Adly Mansour on the anniversary:
I talk to you today on the occasion marking the 40th anniversary of the great victory. That day has been and will remain a landmark sign for the dignity of Egypt and the whole Arab nation. It is the day of October 6th, 1973.You don't need to be an "expert" to understand this. You don't need secret archives or records to figure it out. Egypt says it explicitly.
These great days come to remind us that October 6th was not only a watershed day in the Egyptian and Arab modern history but also a crowning for the path of struggle and a pride for our achievement together people and State on which the great Egyptian people rejected to bargain over their homeland or dignity even if they would sacrifice their own daily source of living or their blood.
The values of October 6th remind us of the march of struggle through which we restored our usurped soil when we devoted all ourselves to the nation and shouldered our responsibility at a time when all personal aspirations were melted down into one aspiration and one dream for one homeland.
...The October victory has created a new reality and opened the road to peace after it managed to turn over the pages of defeat and setback and after it restored to Egypt its dignity and to the Egyptian military institution its pride.
(h/t Irene)