Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East by Uri KaufmanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
An excellent account of how the Yom Kippur War started and unfolded. It is clearly and succinctly written. Dispassionate but still captivating.
The underlying theme of the war (and the book) is captured well by this quote: “Fortunately for the Israelis, the Egyptian leadership would match their dysfunction and overtake it” (255). Israel’s overconfidence after 67 and the infamous ‘Conceptzia' led them to miss the signs of the coming war; and then early on there were many strategic and tactical errors. Nonetheless, the Israelis often got lucky in their mistakes. Though the Egyptians had the element of surprise, fought well, and had the advantage early on; they too seemed to get overconfident and made errors that ended up being more disastrous for them Israel’s errors were for Israel. And after a few days, the Israelis were able to get back the upper hand. By the end of the war, they could have destroyed the Egyptian Army and marched on Damascus. The book focuses much more on the war with Egypt rather than Syria. Kaufman does discuss the war in the north, but its significance was less. Like Egypt, Syria made surprising early gains, only to have these quickly reversed. But the fighting and consequences of the fighting along the Suez is what, as the subtitle of the book says, “created the Modern Middle East.” It is there that Egypt and Israel nearly brought the Soviets and the Americans into war but also to the eventual peace between Egypt and Israel.
The last chapter of the book discusses some of the longer term consequences. It does not go into any great detail about Camp David and the peace talks and treaty. But Kaufman does discuss the Agranat Commission that looked into the government's and army's early failures. Interestingly, Kaufman's view of the commission is that it was more scapegoat that an honest attribution of responsibility. That was new to me -- the commission is now held up as something so important and key for postwar Israel and that Israel needs as similar commission now. But if Kaufman is right, maybe not. Kaufman argues that in the years since the war and the commission, Golda, Dayan, and Elazar all end up with reputations that are unfairly tarnished. He expresses hope that in the future people can see how their contributions during the war, while far from perfect, where central in saving Israel from disaster and turning near defeat into victory.
This was not the resounding victory if 67. 73 was very nearly a total disaster. How close Israel got to actually using nuclear weapons is not clear, though Kaufman does show that there really were discussions. Israel was able to hang on and turn the tables but it really shouldn’t have been in the position it was in. In this way, Kaufman’s account mirrors so much of what happened 50 years later, almost to the day, on October 7, 2023. Israel’s overconfidence, it’s reliance on technology, its unrealistic sense of understanding the motives of its enemies, led it disaster – one in many ways worse than 73. Both were avoidable with leadership that didn't fall into the same traps.
The 73 war is another case study in the adage of armies preparing to fight the last war. Israel was prepared to fight a war like 67; but Sadat and Egypt presented them with different challenges. They had weapons, like the Saggers and SAMs, that they didn’t have or weren’t employed well in 67. And they had the element of surprise. Israel, though, quickly learned lessons on the battlefield as it fought to help it fight better and win the war. And much like the start of the war, we see something similar in Gaza today as the IDF learned how to fight this war as it fought it. The optimist in me hopes that Israel can, like in 73, achieve a victory that brings a peace to the region -- much like the victory of 73 helped to bring peace between Israel and Egypt.
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