25/9/23

The Yom Kippur War of 1973  cast a shadow over my generation in Israel.  It was a distant and partial shadow, nevertheless, with its darkest parts only visible at certain points.  Mine, after all, was not the generation that fought the war.  Rather, it was the generation whose parents went through that particular fire. Those who returned from it, as is known in such matters, were not the same as when they set out.  And many of them didn’t return at all, leaving babies and toddlers who would grow up to be our contemporaries in Jerusalem and elsewhere twenty and thirty years’ hence. 

The war made its presence felt in various ways.  There is a particular raw vulnerability that leaves itself in children bereaved of parents.  One would pick this up in glances, in withdrawal, shyness, awkwardness. In shadows suddenly and abruptly cast. We are all older now, middle aged and mostly content.  But when we were younger these things were very visible. 

The war was around us, and was still fresh and breathing, in the early 1990s.  in the still vivid photographs of a cousin of mine, who was in Ariel Sharon’s division that crossed the Suez Canal in one of the decisive acts of the war.  And in other ways, too.  I remember one morning when I was a student, stopping at a shop in Jerusalem to visit a friend of mine whose father was killed on the Golan Heights in 1973.  This person has gone on to create a successful career and family life.  But we were just kids then, in our 20s, and she was fragile, troubled and vivid, and broken, a little. We talked a bit that morning, in the shop, in the way that young men and women do.  I was on the way to the national archives, to look into some tedious part of my research of the day.  It involved reading the minutes of Cabinet meetings, from the early ‘70s.  I remember sitting there later that afternoon and reading  Yisrael Galili arguing with Golda and Victor Shem Tov about some obscure, trifling aspect of government policy on the West Bank.  I glanced at the date at the top of the document.  September 25, 1973.  Just ten days to go before the storm hit. And there they were, squabbling querulously like the old apparatchiks that they were. And my friend’s father, in some student bar in west Jerusalem at the time, no doubt.  The storm coming, his death just ahead, and his daughter not yet born. 

I was not born in Israel, of course, and my parents didn’t live here in 1973.  Rather I came here in my very early twenties.  Oddly, the Yom Kippur War was one of the reasons that I arrived here.  As a boy, in school,  in England,  I remember discovering a book about the war in a classroom where old books had been piled up.  What gripped me were the pictures. And above all their vividness and urgency, the deep blue of the sky, and the harsh gold yellow of the desert sands.  The faces of the men.  And the feeling on some level or another that these men were connected to me. I was I suppose 11 or 12 then, so it was seven or eight years after the war. 

In the army, I served in the 188 Brigade, which is one of the two regular armored brigades that the IDF maintains on the Golan Heights.  The other is the 7^th Brigade and both of them are part of the 36^th Armored Division.  The culture of these brigades is steeped in the 1973 war and the enormous sacrifices that both brigades made in order to stop the Syrian advance.  Famously, the 7^th Brigade remained intact throughout the war on the northern Golan.  The 188^th, further south, was destroyed. The brigade commander, Itzik Ben-Shoham was killed along  with 101 other soldiers and officers.  The 188 was destroyed, but it held on long enough for the reservists of the 679^th Brigade to arrive and begin to organize.  This was what prevented the Syrian breakthrough in the southern Golan.  The Golan Heights is the memory scape for all this and today it is peaceful.  Zvika Force, Colonel Yair Nafshi and Battalion 74 and the rest of that stuff is there in the monuments that you find here and there. And in the more verdant landscape further north, the Valley of Tears, Kahalani, Yanosh Ben-Gal.  It seemed already quite  long ago when we were up there in the early ‘90s.  It wasn’t, tho, and it still isn’t. 

I am writing all this as though I am its native son.  But I am not.  I am  an immigrant from Europe, and I don’t really accept the prevailing Israeli narrative of the 1973 war.  It has been committed to memory here as a terrible disaster, full only of trauma and pain and bereavement, and it marked the point at which the desire for peace no matter what the cost was born in the psyche here, with all the dangers attendant on such a desire.  I think the war was something different.  I think it was the conclusive Israeli victory in a battle between two rival developmental projects that had been involved in a frantic race against one another for the 70 or so preceding years.  Those two projects were Zionism and Arab nationalism.  That is to say, the desire of the Jews to re-create sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, and the desire of Arabs to establish a powerful, united state across Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia.  From the point of view of simple geo-politics, as well as for other reasons, these two projects could not co-exist.  One had to be vanquished by the other.   Yom Kippur 1973 was the point at which the climactic battle between these two wills took place, with the Jewish side emerging as the clear victor.  The proof of the victory is that the conventional armies of the Arab states never came back again.  On a more complex level, Arab nationalism entered a phase of terminal decline at this point, to be replaced by a number of other projects – most importantly, local state patriotisms, and movements of Islamic revival. 

It is more customary to date the 1967 War as the ‘Waterloo’ of Arab nationalism.  But this term implies a definite conclusion.  That conclusion came in 1973.  The Six Day War, if one insists on the analogy, sent the enemy to brooding exile in Elba.  1973, however, sent him to St. Helena, never to return. 

I differ, I suppose, with the accepted version of the Yom Kippur War in Israel in another way.  I regard it as the greatest and final victory of Mapai Israel.  The state and the institutions established by Mapai were in an advanced state of decay by 1973.  The great and historic leaders – Ben-Gurion, Ben-Tzvi, Eshkol and so on  – were all gone.  A much less impressive second generation were in power by this time.  Prime Minister Golda Meir, tho iron-willed and sincere, was narrow, unimaginative and un-strategic in her thinking.  Her defense minister Moshe Dayan was an able general and a creative thinker but a  complex, corrupt  and ethically ambiguous man. They were the representatives of a decayed project, about to exit the stage. 

Yet October 1973 showed that the institutions that had been built up during the long years of Mapai rule were still fit for purpose.  The rival developmental project established by the Arab nationalist officers’ regimes in Egypt and Syria could not, at the crunch moment, prevail over the vastly smaller but vastly better organized and motivated Jewish society.  This in spite of the lackluster leadership at its helm by this time.

So ‘they did what they did, and they went on their way.’  And here we are, a half century on.  And what is one to make of all this? What might be learned from that almighty clash which, at least in my reading, begins with young militants practicing pistol shooting in basements in a number of late Ottoman cities somewhere around the turn of the century, and which ends in the mighty armored clashes on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights in October 1973? 

Israel today, of course, is vastly stronger, more developed, more populous and richer than it was at that time. Of the two regimes which launched the war, one is now at peace with the Jewish state, the other is in ruins after a decade of internal uprising and revolution. But since one of the main lessons of Yom Kippur 1973 is the need for constant, vigilant and clear-eyed observation, I find that from the vantage point of our days, and in comparison with that time, there are two processes under way which cause me some disquiet.  Perhaps they are related both to one another and to the war itself. They are growing, respectively, on the landscape of Israel’s historic victory, and on that of the historic defeat of Arab nationalism which were sealed in 1973. 

The first is the fracturing of Israeliness.  The ‘unified’ Israeli Jewish identity of Mapai’s state was achieved and maintained at least partially by coercion.  It undoubtedly involved the deliberate belittling or dismissal and subsequent loss of large and rich parts of the experience of historic Diaspora Jewish communities, in particular from the Middle East but not only from there.  However,  at its core, modern Zionism, in its original inception and in both the Labor and Revisionist forms which competed during its formative phase, represented a stable and viable integration of rival strands and elements of Jewish life – secular and religious, eastern and western, pragmatic and messianic.  Indeed, its ability to maintain precisely this balance and integration might be seen as the formative success of modern Jewish nationalism, on which all its subsequent achievements depend. 

This success is now under challenge.  One may see in the current political turmoil in Israel the clear faultlines emerging to separate along the lines mentioned above – secular from religious, pragmatic from messianic and, yes, western from eastern.  The problem is that if these become separate, then their natural tendency will be to struggle with one another until, potentially, a victory and defeat which will in fact be defeat for both victor and vanquished.   Historically, I think Revisionist Zionism had the more coherent and inclusive version of modern Jewish political identity, and its parties’ long periods in government since the 1970s can largely be traced to this.  But we aren’t in Begin and Shamir’s second Israeli republic anymore, either.  We are in uncharted territory.  And if some newer version of Israeli identity able to once more integrate the disparate elements listed above, in some new way does not emerge, that territory contains dangers ahead. 

The second element relates to the other side.  In the summer of 2019, I spent some time living in Kurdish northern Iraq, in the city of Erbil.  I shared a house with a foreign journalist and with two young Iranian Kurds.  Once, I was discussing the region and its developments with one of these, a young man.  ‘Some nations will kill you with iron,’ he told me.  ‘But Iran, you know, will kill you with cotton.’  I later learned that this is a well known Persian phrase.  The phrase stuck with me and it describes, I think perfectly,  the main external challenge to Israel currently under way.  I have been busy with trying to observe and understand this threat and its dimensions for the last 17 years. 

There is, on Israel’s borders to the north, east and south, and within it, an effort under way to assemble a military and political force connected by myriad threads to the regime in Teheran, the purpose of which is to bring about the slow decline, disassembling and eventual collapse of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  This effort has been ongoing for four decades, but it has advanced very considerably over the last ten years, because of the collapse and fragmentation of the Arab states system in the Levant and Iraq. 

This project is slowly and patiently weaving a web of myriad strands with which it intends eventually to trap and suffocate the revived Jewish state.  Just like a spider’s web, this is intended to render the target helpless, unable to move, stripped of its strength, before the final injection of poison finishes the job. Not the iron of Naser and Sadat and Hafez Assad’s divisions.  And not the old and empty slogans of the Palestinian nationalism that tried to follow them, and that is now divided, broken and mired in corruption and decay.  Rather, myriad strands of  cotton; politics mixed with military organization; slow, infinitely patient erosion, and then at the appropriate moment, sudden violence.  This project comes under the banner of Islamic revival, which remains without rival in the  politics of the Arab Levant at the popular level.  It is serious, it is proceeding and its goals and the depth and breadth of both its ambitions and its methods of organization require more serious attention. 

That, at least, is the best I can offer, by way of some words of remembering and of warning to my fellow citizens, fifty years after the great storm hit.  It is meant as a small offering of gratitude and with love and sorrow to the men who died in the Sinai and the Golan Heights in October, 1973.  It is the kind of offering that I think they would appreciate, as they were not a generation inclined toward sentimentality.  And may we all be sealed in the book of life.