The words had come on Friday morning, directly from the Angel, the top-secret Israeli source at the core of Egypt’s establishment. “The Egyptian army and the Syrian army are about to launch an attack on Israel on Saturday, October 6, 1973, towards evening,” Israeli intelligence officer Freddy Einy telegraphed to Prime Minister Golda Meir’s military secretary, Yisrael Lior. “Egyptian troops would push across the Suez Canal into the Sinai, to a depth of 10 kilometres, and then hold their line.”
Fifty years since then, Hamas assault units have struck across the Israel-Gaza border under cover of fire from thousands of low-technology rockets, drawing the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) into murderous skirmishes at up to a dozen small towns and villages. Hamas assault teams have succeeded in killing 250 troops and civilians.
Little doubt exists Israel’s intelligence and defence forces were blind to the looming threat. Earlier this summer, Emmanuel Fabien reported, the Israeli military had deployed some 25 internal security battalions to the West Bank, instead of the usual 13, to police violence between far-Right settler groups and Palestinians.
Hamas, unlike the Egyptian army in 1973, knows it cannot recover territory or defeat the IDF in combat. This might be called a war by politicians, but it more closely resembles traditional insurgent raiding. And, like Egypt, it knows that while it can overwhelm static defence lines, it can’t go much further.
The real objective of the violence is likely political: Hamas is letting Israel and Saudi Arabia know it can sabotage the United States-backed process of diplomatic normalisation on which the geopolitical future of the Middle East is being rebuilt. Hamas wants a place at the table—and it has the support of Palestinians living through the perpetual nightmare in Gaza who are unwilling to end resistance in return for a few more Saudi jobs or some economic aid.
Like the 1973 war, the crisis that has exploded now holds out three important lessons for all nation-states confronted with long insurgencies and terrorism. First, nation-states that sit on their hands and wonder what to do next often discover their adversaries have used the time to sharpen their claws. Second, there is no technology or tactic that guarantees a State perpetual superiority over weaker adversaries; the successful conduct of war demands endless intellectual creativity.
And finally, the use of force, no matter how skilled and well-resourced, is a means, not an end: Lacking the will to resolve underlying political and social problems gives adversaries time and space to perpetuate a conflict.
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The lessons of Yom Kippur
“The Third Temple is in danger,” mumbled the legendary military commander and defence minister Moshe Dayan the morning after Egyptian and Syrian troops stormed Israel’s borders on 6 October 1973. In 1967, Israel had annihilated the flower of Egypt’s military in days; this time, less than 24 hours into the war, it was clear things were different. The war hero seemed incoherent: At one moment, he advocated Israeli withdrawal from part of the Sinai; at others, use of Israel’s nuclear bombs.
From Israeli archives declassified just days ago—little of it so far available in English—it is clear Israel intelligence on the prospect of war was heavily influenced by intellectual filters designed by Major-General Eli Ze’ira, the IDF head of intelligence.
The intelligence konseptzia, or conception, held among other things that Egypt would not go to war until it had the means to paralyse Israel’s Air Force with equipment like long-range bombers capable of targeting airfields deep inside the country.
Former US State Department official Michael Doran writes in a brilliant essay that when the king of Jordan made a secret visit to Israel to warn the Prime Minister of imminent war, Ze’ira proved impossible to persuade. Less than 24 hours before the war began, Mossad recorded that the Soviet Union was evacuating its military advisors. Ze’ira again refused to take the threat seriously.
Looking back, this was not unreasonable. What possible motive might Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat have for starting a war in which thousands of deaths were certain, unless he hoped to be able to seize back the Sinai, lost in 1967? The loss had given Israel access to oil as well as control over the Suez Canal—shocks that Egypt could survive only by becoming a Soviet client State.
The IDF didn’t know that El-Sadat had settled for a much more complex strategy, Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Meek notes, which accepted Israeli dominance of the air. Instead, he hoped only to protect small zones of Egyptian incursion into Sinai with new-generation Soviet air defence missiles like the SAM-6. Egyptian armoured officers had studied Israeli armoured manoeuvre tactics obsessively and concluded that IDF tanks could be defeated by shoulder-fired missiles.
Lulling the IDF deeper into sleep, even as it practised its own revolution in military affairs, Egypt staged mobilisations of troops and military manoeuvres no less than 22 times from 1972 to 1973—on average, once a month. After a while, the Israelis barely noticed.
The words of the Angel—the legendary agent revealed to have been former President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan—finally shook Israeli complacency. The country now ordered a mobilisation. There was no actual response, though, even as Egyptian soldiers began to take the last steps toward attacking the thinly-held fortresses through which Israel protected Suez.
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A victim of self-delusion
Following the 1973 war, the Agranat Commission savaged the key actors responsible for these failures and recommended the sacking of both Ze’ira and Chief of Staff David Elazar. Fifty years of historical study and introspection, though, tells us the problem was deeper than intelligence misjudgements. Prime Minister Meir was doggedly resistant to preemptive strikes after receiving warnings from the US. Even as Russia and Egypt prepared for the strike, the US States was pushing Israel not to act.
Less than a week into the war, declassified documents show, Israel’s cabinet was dangerously worn, fearing the worst: Instead of the quick war it had hoped for, there was a massive conventional conflict that consumed men and materiel on an industrial scale. It was only after a gargantuan United States airlift began that the tide began to reverse.
This time around, too, Israel will be dependent on external military aid—in some cases, the result of the trap of seeing technology as a solution to complex problems of public policy and politics. Israel’s Iron Dome, designed to protect critical strategic installations, was promised by political leaders to guard the public from harm. Each interceptor, though, is estimated to cost over $80,000, while Hamas produces crude rockets for $100 or less.
Former Israeli special forces officer colonel Yossi Langotsky had warned several years ago that the high-technology Gaza wall, in which the IDF and political leadership placed great faith, could—and would—be penetrated. Indeed, mobs stormed parts of the fence in 2018, a warning of the kinds of threats now demonstrated in stark relief.
Worst, the IDF let itself focus on protecting settlements in the West Bank, a key political constituency for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. These commitments deepened extremist Jews escalated tensions with other religious communities in the West Bank.
Like all armies and bureaucracies, the IDF has shown it can be a victim of self-delusion. The Director for the United States Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Ray Cline, noted that they “were brainwashed by the Israelis who brainwashed themselves”.
There’s little doubt the tactically skilled and well-resourced IDF will succeed in crushing Hamas incursions in the next few days. What follows, though, could have enormous consequences. The 2006 and 2014 invasions of Gaza caused enormous civilian hardship and losses to the IDF, but did not end Israel’s terrorism problem. The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu has noted that all 12 military campaigns in Gaza ended in some kind of ugly stalemate.
“Israel has tried everything in Gaza and failed repeatedly,” Filiu notes.
The time has come for Israel to consider if allowing the Palestinian question to fester serves its own interests, including stability at home and a secure place in the wider Middle East geopolitical order.
Praveen Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)