DESPITE REPEATED TERRORIST ACTS by Palestinian guerrilla organizations from 1970 to 1973, a general sense of security pervaded Israel, especially among senior IDF staff. The IDF assumed that Egypt would not go to war so long as its air force was unable to launch a massive attack on Israel’s air bases. The IDF also calculated that the Egyptian army could not cross the Suez to endanger Israeli control of Sinai and that the IDF could repel any such attempt within days. If Dayan did not altogether share his colleagues’ assumptions, he did not question them either. But he was well aware that the political stalemate was unacceptable to the Arabs and that another war was unavoidable. He cautioned the public and the officers against complacency, but in all his public appearances, he transmitted a sense of security. His status was at its peak. Dayan was “Mr. Security,” and he imparted the perception of safety to the people.
Meanwhile, Anwar Sadat regularly declared that the Day of Judgment was near and seemed to be backing up his words by stockpiling the generous supply of weapons he received from the Soviets. He ordered canal-side facilities installed. IDF soldiers assumed these were defensive, but they were, in fact, suitable for offense too.
In early summer 1973, Israel received a number of high-level warnings from trusted sources that an Egyptian attack was imminent. The IDF mobilized its reserves and placed its troops on alert. But Egypt did not attack. When similar warnings resurfaced at the end of September, the head of IDF intelligence was convinced that the maneuvers would fizzle out. The common calculations concerning the probability of war breaking out remained low.
Dayan, as usual, read the intelligence reports, preferring the raw to the filtered material. However, as minister of defense, he had no staff or mechanism to offer alternative analyses and had to rely on the opinion of Military Intelligence. He based his warnings on intuition and asked the CGS to re-examine the intelligence assessments and report back to him. The CGS complied and agreed with the Intelligence personnel.1
In late September, Dayan toured the North and backed the O.C.’s demand for additional tanks and artillery. His greatest anxiety focused on the situation on the Golan Heights. Unlike Sinai, where the IDF had room to maneuver, on the Golan the Syrians could easily infiltrate Israel and reach the Jordan River in an initial sortie, endangering not only Israeli communities in the Golan but Israeli cities in pre-1967 areas. In early October, both frontline observations and reliable espionage reported advanced preparations among the Arab countries for war.
On October 5, the situation peaked. At 2:40 A.M., news leaked that the Soviets were evacuating their officers’ families from Damascus and Cairo. Furthermore, a senior Mossad agent requested an urgent meeting about the impending war, and the head of the agency flew off to Europe to meet the agent. To be safe, the IDF placed the standing army on highest alert. Operating on the assumption that there would be a further warning, the reserves were not yet called up. At sundown, Jewish people in Israel and around the world would usher in Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, a twenty-five-hour holiday that even many nonbelievers observe by attending synagogue.
On Saturday, October 6, at 4 A.M., the head of Mossad advised the government and the IDF that, according to his source, Egypt would attack Israel at 6 P.M. Senior government and security personnel, headed by Golda Meir and Dayan, kicked into high gear, a state in which they would remain for the duration of the three weeks of war.
As it turned out, the Mossad chief’s source was Ashraf Marwan, Nasser’s son-in-law. His intelligence tip was slightly off: the Egyptians launched their attack at 2 P.M., taking Israel by surprise. War erupted. David Elazar, the man Dayan had suspected of withholding information during the Six Day War, was serving as CGS. Dayan would have preferred someone else in the position, but Elazar’s appointment had been pushed through by Yigal Allon, who knew him from the Palmach, and Dayan respected Meir’s decision. Over the course of the war, a number of disagreements broke out between the two military icons. Elazar, with free access to the prime minister, often went against Dayan’s judgment. Deputy Prime Minister Allon and acting Minister of Information Galili had great influence with Meir and attended most of her meetings with Dayan; it frequently seemed as though Elazar had discussed matters with them beforehand. Dayan was conscious of his precarious situation and generally left his disagreements with Elazar to be decided by Meir. Though not fond of or close to Dayan, she respected him and appreciated his intelligence and advice, even if she did not always back him.
The first disagreement occurred on October 6, when war was clearly becoming a reality. Elazar wanted to mobilize the entire air force, two armored divisions, and various auxiliary units (roughly two hundred thousand people) immediately and launch a preemptive strike against Egyptian and Syrian forces. Dayan feared that extensive mobilization, and especially a preemptive strike, would make Israel appear to be the aggressor. He considered it vital to retain the trust of Israel’s close ally the United States, which had recently signed a détente agreement with the Soviet Union, an important diplomatic move orchestrated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In this international climate, it would be difficult for the United States to support Israel if it instigated a conflagration that could light the Middle East powder keg. Dayan therefore wanted to mobilize only those units that the CGS deemed critical to shield Israel from the first blow. Short of a preemptive strike, Elazar wanted to mobilize enough troops for a counterattack after the enemy was forced back. Neither Dayan nor Elazar at this stage had any doubt that the IDF would foil the assault easily.
The two mobilization options landed in Meir’s lap at 8:00 that morning in the presence of Allon, Galili, and General Bar-Lev, who was now minister of industry and trade. Meir accepted Elazar’s position on mobilizing the reserves and Dayan’s on ruling out a preemptive strike. Only hours later, Egypt started the war. Once the sirens sounded, the reserves could be fully mobilized by public radio and the controversy lost its significance.
In Israel’s public memory, the Yom Kippur War went down as ha’Mehdal2—The Blunder—primarily because Egypt and Syria’s bold actions in opening the war took the Israeli security establishment by surprise. Although the blunder mostly resulted from poor intelligence assessments, it was not the primary cause of IDF casualties and operational quagmires, both of which were a result of the leaders’ subsequent mishandling of the war. In this regard, the tragedy was less reminiscent of Pearl Harbor than of the defeat of the French knights of Agincourt in 1415, when the hail of longbow arrows shot by British peasants taught the knights that the battlefield had changed beyond recognition. Even if Israel had understood that war was imminent and mobilized all the reserves two or three days beforehand, the IDF would still have faced the problems it confronted in the first days of fighting. Had the IDF been more alert and prepared, it is unlikely that it could have stopped Egypt from crossing the canal and entrenching on its east bank.
Dayan shared the prevalent IDF view that Israel’s aerial superiority, canal fortifications, and permanently stationed tanks near the canal would stop Egypt from making significant advances on the ground. Moreover, the canal crossing could probably be halted at the waterline; if, in the worst-case scenario, Egyptian soldiers managed to take the east bank, fast-mobilizing armored reserves could still oust them. But the synthesis of an entirely new set of circumstances and superior weaponry took the IDF by surprise. This revolutionary combination included effective cover of the battlefield by an array of anti-aircraft missiles, which prevented Israel’s air force from assisting the army in the first three days; more than a thousand field guns launching massive shelling along the entire front; and the slick use of modern, efficient anti-tank weapons. The IDF had known that Egypt possessed these weapons, but no one in Israel had conceived of their lethal effect on Israeli armor. Thousands of Egyptian Sagger and RPG missiles pounded Israeli tank positions. Most devastatingly, IDF planners failed to grasp how the battlefield would look when a hundred thousand Egyptian soldiers crossed the canal simultaneously at some fifteen different points and attacked the IDF on a broad front.
In the first forty-eight hours, Israel’s air force lost close to 10 percent of its aircraft, an armored division on the front line lost more than half of its tanks, and the Bar-Lev Line collapsed. No one had foreseen such a thrashing. For three days the IDF continued to engage the Egyptians on the basis of outdated military conceptions. An attempt to counterattack Egyptian advanced forces failed. Only then did the GHQ pull itself together and start to construct a plan of action to meet the new circumstances.
Dayan, too, had not anticipated the dramatic changes on the battlefield, but he was quicker than others to absorb them, and this perspicacity led to his second disagreement with the chief of staff. By the end of Yom Kippur—the first day of fighting—Dayan apparently realized, after flying to visit the command post on the southern front, that the battlefield was radically different from what Israel had imagined. Elazar remained optimistic, even zealously so. In an interview on Israel Radio on October 8 he promised that “the IDF would soon break Egyptian bones.”3 Dayan, in contrast, spoke pessimistically, articulating anxiety about Israel’s future. Most IDF commanders agreed with the chief of staff’s assessment that as soon as the armored reserves moved into action, the situation would change. Dayan’s Cassandra-like warnings in those hours gave the impression to his officers that he had broken down, and rumors circulated that he was panicking. Dayan’s dark sentiments swiftly spread, filling senior commanders with gloom and near despair.
Dayan was certainly in the grip of anxiety. He later acknowledged in his memoirs that on Sunday morning, October 7, he believed that the existence of the State of Israel was in peril. “I do not remember ever [feeling] such worry and anxiety in the past,” Dayan wrote, aware of his own share in the IDF misjudgments, a responsibility that presumably compounded his dejection. But were his extreme reactions as irrational as many thought?4
That morning, Dayan was particularly concerned about the situation on the Golan Heights, where Syrian tanks had breached the front lines at two points and reached the cliffs above the Sea of Galilee. He set out for the field, and when he got there the O.C. at the command post described a far worse situation than Dayan had feared. One of two armored brigades that had been fighting since the previous afternoon had been crushed. No troops remained on the southern Golan to halt the Syrian advance.
During an early-morning phone call, Dayan ordered General Benny Peled, the air force commander, to call in aircraft to stop the Syrians on the southern Golan. The air force commander later recounted that Dayan had said, “The Third Commonwealth is in danger.”5 (The Third Commonwealth refers to the Jewish peoples’ third sovereign control of the Land of Israel, established with statehood in 1948.) Dayan was undoubtedly dispirited by what he heard at the Northern Command that morning. A few hours later, on his visit to the Southern Command, he reached a professional nadir upon witnessing the collapse of the Bar-Lev Line, the considerable loss of men and equipment, and the incapacity of Israeli tanks to execute the defense plans. He concluded that there was no chance, for the time being, of dislodging the Egyptians from the East Bank of the Suez, and worse still, he feared that Egyptian tanks would break through into Sinai. He recommended consolidating a defense line farther back, perhaps on the mountain passes eighteen miles to the east. Though two reserve tank divisions under two of the IDF’s top commanders, Ariel Sharon and Avraham Adan, were assembling en route to the front, Dayan worried that by the time they arrived and organized, the whole front would already have collapsed. “This is now a war for the Land of Israel,” he told Elazar on his return from the South. “In my heart, what I fear most is that the State of Israel will ultimately survive but without sufficient armament to defend itself. It does not matter where the line will be. We will not have enough tanks and planes or trained people. It will simply be impossible to defend the Land of Israel.”6
At 3 P.M., Dayan met with Golda Meir, as usual along with Allon and Galili, and his assessment diverged from the chief of staff’s. “We have to concede the canal line,” Dayan told the prime minister. “At this moment there is no need for a counter-offensive.”7 Elazar recommended that the IDF attempt to remove the Egyptians with the help of the two fresh tank divisions that had just reached the field. The meeting concluded with the decision that Elazar would go south to consult with the field commander about a possible counteroffensive the following day. Dayan did not oppose the decision and told Elazar, “If you conclude [that an offensive is possible], go for it.” Once again, Dayan switched his stance in the face of internal opposition; he did not fight for his beliefs. Dayan felt that the cabinet and commanders no longer trusted his opinion. “It seemed to me that they were convinced that there was a weakness not in our military capability but in my character, that I had lost my confidence and my evaluation was therefore wrong, too pessimistic.”8
On Tuesday, October 8, the Southern Command tried to follow Elazar’s plan and sent the two tank divisions forward. The attack failed, and the IDF suffered heavy losses in human life, tanks, and aircraft. In the evening, when Elazar reached the command post on the Egyptian front, he observed the carnage and entirely reversed his strategy. There would be no counter-offensive; instead, IDF troops would take defensive positions. Dayan’s early opposition to a counteroffensive was validated, but he had largely lost his authority in the officers’ eyes.
On October 9, the situation in the Golan Heights was also grim, with the IDF suffering heavy loss of life and tanks. Unlike in the South, however, the Armored Corps had managed to crush a fair number of Syrian tanks and at numerous points to repulse the enemy. For the first time in the war, Defense Minister Dayan and Chief of Staff Elazar agreed on a military strategy. They decided to concentrate all efforts on the northern front over the following days. Elazar also backed Dayan’s position on the southern front without reservation, aiming to contain the enemy troops in the Sinai by preparing a line of defense farther back, in the mountain passes to the east.
Dayan believed it was time to inform the Israeli public of the realities on the battlefield. The IDF could not withhold this information, certainly not from frontline soldiers. In the absence of reliable information, exaggerated rumors were spreading, official announcements were terse, and Colonel Pinchas Lahav, the IDF spokesperson, had lost his credibility. “The people should be advised of the true situation on the fronts; [we must] be straight with them, not feed them heroic tales and illusions of a swift, glorious victory,”9 Dayan told his spokesman, Naphtali Lavie.
Dayan convened the daily-press editors on Wednesday, October 10, at 5 P.M. His statements left his audience utterly shocked. Many of them attributed his gloomy portrayal as further proof that his mental state had deteriorated because he was unable to reconcile his pessimistic descriptions with the CGS’s rosy promises of the previous evening. “There is great danger that a small state of less than three million people will be left powerless,” he said plainly. “There should be no insistence on holding or capturing a specific line if it can cause a serious depletion of forces. To hell with the Bitter Lake and the non-Bitter Lake, the State of Israel comes first and foremost. We need tanks, airplanes, and decent lines of defense.”10
His words were apparently too blunt and grave for the journalists to absorb. Davar editor Hannah Zemer burst into tears. Ha’aretz editor Gershom Schocken termed Dayan’s words an “earthquake,” protesting against the gloom that the minister of defense was presenting to the public. That evening, Dayan was supposed to appear on state television, but after several editors intervened, Meir canceled his appearance for fear of “deepening public depression.” Dayan did not insist. He would not appear before the public with glib words that whitewashed the grim situation. The Israeli public, however, already believed that he had lost his nerve, and that image was reinforced as rumors proliferated.11
Dayan’s prophecies of doom did not materialize. Despite the IDF’s decision to abort the counteroffensive, the Egyptians did not broaden their hold east of the canal and in retrospect seemed to have pursued limited gains. If they had been bold enough to continue their momentum and had introduced their armored reserves into the campaign on the first days of the war, Dayan’s dark predictions would have sounded less far-fetched. Dayan, for his read on the situation, was derided for the negative image he had projected at the war’s start.
Every day of the war, Dayan went to a frontline command post. Some said he disturbed the officers at work, others thought he was running away from his job at GHQ, and some even claimed that he was looking to die on the battlefield. There is little doubt that he felt more comfortable with the officers on the front than amid the tension permeating the rooms where cabinet ministers and GHQ senior officers met.
Yet there on the battlefield he felt the constraints of his position as minister of defense. With his military experience, it was only natural that he would express his opinion both about what to do and how to do it, but in doing so he overstepped the political boundary dividing his strategic role and the operational role of the IDF officers; he even offered tactical advice. He could not issue direct orders to the lower ranks when touring the different commands—they repeatedly referred him to the CGS in accordance with protocol. But he continued to state his views on clear military issues, though he learned to qualify them as “ministerial advice,” which they were not obliged to obey. Their orders came only from their superiors within the army hierarchy.
Unable to withhold his tactical input on the battlefield, Dayan was not oblivious off the battlefield to the growing public criticism of his management of the war. On October 12, he told Golda Meir that if she believed someone else could manage the war better, he would “submit [his] resignation at once.” He added that he was not speaking from loss of confidence; on the contrary, he believed that “no one in Israel could do the job better than me, and I am ready and willing to continue in the post. Moreover, I really, really would not like to abandon ship in the middle.” Meir replied that the idea of replacing him had never crossed her mind. “She trusted me completely and regarded herself as sharing the responsibility as far as the war was concerned,” Dayan recounted.12
In the days following the failed counterattack in Sinai, two Egyptian army units controlled a strip of land east of the Suez Canal, and the IDF, anticipating a surge, planned to ambush them with tanks in the hills. Meanwhile, attention focused on the northern front. Within days, three IDF armored divisions penetrated Syria, reaching a position twenty-five miles from Damascus. The western suburbs of the Syrian capital were now in range of Israeli cannons. This forward position foiled Syria’s threat to Israeli territory, and Dayan’s mood changed drastically. Though concerned about the war’s final outcome, he stopped worrying about the IDF’s ability to hold out. He and Elazar hoped to neutralize Syria and force the Syrians from the campaign. But despite the trouncing of its army, Syria did not leave the fight. With the help of Iraqi and Jordanian troops, Syria continued to keep the IDF busy on the northern front, though it no longer posed a serious danger.
With Syria in check, focus returned to the southern front. There were growing signs on the international stage of an impending U.N.-imposed ceasefire. It appeared that the Egyptian hold east of the canal could not be loosened, and Israel’s only option was to capture territory west of the canal as a postwar bargaining chip. Most of the officers, led by Ariel Sharon, suggested crossing the canal on the seam between the two Egyptian units north of Bitter Lake, a saltwater lake near the canal. Dayan approved the plan.
On October 13 and 14, as expected, Egyptian armored troops attempted to push eastward and incurred heavy losses, opening the way for the IDF to cross the canal westward. Sharon led the bold campaign, and Dayan believed that Sharon could accomplish the IDF’s goals. His mission began on the night of October 16–17. A paratroop brigade crossed the canal in rubber boats, capturing a bridgehead on the western side. But Egyptian forces summoned to the area from the north and south blocked the crossing point. Heavy fighting raged for four days. Nevertheless, the IDF managed to transfer three armored divisions across the canal and gain control of a broad strip west of Bitter Lake. During the afternoon of October 22, an advance unit reached the Suez-Cairo highway, where a signpost marked the distance to Egypt’s capital: 101 kilometers (63 miles).
As the IDF continued its multifront battle, Israel’s political leaders were holding intensive talks with the United States in an effort to expedite the delivery of arms promised by President Nixon to replace the equipment lost in combat. Golda Meir managed the contacts through Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Simcha Dinitz, whose contact, Secretary of State Kissinger, was caught in a web of conflicting interests and motives, trying to prevent Israel’s defeat while placating the Arab states, which had imposed a general embargo on oil supplies to the West. Kissinger was playing an intricate game of realpolitik that did not always end in Israel’s favor.13
Dayan followed the political gains and losses from afar. For him, fate was being decided around the temporary bridges across the Suez and the swath of land that was widening as the IDF deployed farther and farther west of the canal. Everything now depended on the soldiers in the line of fire, and that was exactly where he wanted to be.
As the IDF pushed across the canal and talks of a ceasefire grew louder, political considerations took on added weight. The military brass grappled with the problem of deciding where the IDF should stop its advance, knowing full well that the answer depended on the pace of military operations. Dayan increasingly—and embarrassingly—interfered in the officers’ discussions. Both the O.C. Southern Command and the CGS complained that his actions caused confusion on the front lines.
In the afternoon of October 17, Dayan joined Sharon’s command car and crossed the canal westward. The entire area was under fire, and Sharon suggested that Dayan transfer to an armored half-track. Dayan refused, wanting to experience the combat firsthand, and insisted on roving about by jeep or on foot. The farmer from Nahalal admired the diligence of the Egyptian peasants who cultivated that desert area into a verdant oasis. He saw fruits ripening, peanuts spread out to dry on the sand within fenced-off properties, and juice dribbling from red dates. Most of the farmers had fled in fear of the war with only a brave handful still on their farms.
In the evening, Dayan returned to the Pit and participated in Elazar’s discussions with the senior command. It is apparent from the records that his personal sheen had dulled, his “ministerial advice” rendered ineffectual. He may have run about on the battlefields, but it was Elazar who managed the war and ruled the military hierarchy.
On October 19, Kissinger left for Moscow to formulate a framework to end the war. A ceasefire was expected within days, and Dayan convened the senior GHQ to raise the question of where the IDF should stop. This was his turf: an issue made up of both political and strategic elements. The battles west of the canal were not easy but the potential gains were significant. The westward advance toward Cairo posed a severe threat to the Egyptian army. More important still was the opportunity to besiege Egypt’s forces from the rear. Years later, Arie Brown, Dayan’s adjutant, who accompanied him on all his tours, repeatedly mentioned in his account of the war the pressure Dayan exerted on division commanders to extend their control of the territory along the canal. Dayan considered it vital to tighten the siege around the Egyptian Third Army entrenched in the south, east of Bitter Lake.14
When the U.N. Security Council declared a ceasefire to take effect on Monday, October 22, at 7:30 P.M., the Soviet Union and United States jointly insisted that Israel halt hostilities. But the deadline passed and the fighting persisted. On Tuesday, Dayan convened a broad forum of GHQ officers at his office to discuss the implications of the ceasefire. Unlike the previous discussion, this one focused on the future of relations with the Egyptians after the war. Dayan knew that leaving the IDF west of the canal for any length of time would not be an option. He returned to an idea he had previously formulated in 1971: a separation of forces, in which both sides would draw back, and Israeli forces would withdraw completely from the banks of the Suez Canal. This would allow Egypt to reopen the canal to international navigation, breathe new life into canal towns, and create a de facto peace in the region.
At the same time that Dayan and the officers were debating future arrangements, Israeli troops were advancing into Egypt, despite Sadat’s demand that they retreat to the positions held on the evening of October 22. Repeated attempts by Egypt to repulse the IDF gave Israel a chance to surround Egypt’s Third Army over the next forty-eight hours. The ceasefire finally went into effect on October 24 at 7 P.M.
The ceasefire did not end the crisis that had developed between Jerusalem and Washington on the last day of the war. The IDF maintained its siege on the Egyptian Third Army. Backed by both the United States and the Soviet Union, Egypt demanded the right to supply provisions to the troops across the canal and in the town of Suez. Israel had its own demands of Egypt: to release the Israeli prisoners of war and to lift the blockade on Israel-bound ships at the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The United States demanded that Israel immediately open the road from Cairo to a convoy of a hundred food and aid trucks for the Third Army, but Dayan insisted on reciprocity, which led to an international crisis. The Soviets feared the Third Army’s collapse, which, more than anything, would symbolize their protégé’s defeat. They announced their intention of stationing Soviet troops on Egyptian soil. Washington, of course, opposed the appearance of Soviet troops in the Middle East. Nixon placed the U.S. forces stationed in Europe on alert and ordered the Sixth Fleet to sail for the eastern Mediterranean. On a call to the Kremlin on the red phone, he made it clear that Washington would not accept the intervention of Soviet troops in the conflict. Nor did he mince his words to Golda Meir. He demanded that Israel allow the convoy through without delay. On October 26, Israel yielded and allowed the convoy to pass. The siege of the Third Army was lifted, and though the IDF was permitted to check the contents of the supply vehicles, it could not block their passage.
In retrospect, it seems that Kissinger believed that it would be possible to advance a policy of stability and peace in the Middle East only if the war ended in a stalemate. He understood that the war had left an opening for a basic change in Egypt’s international standing and, on a short visit to Cairo, presumably enjoyed the friendly welcome he received in Egypt’s capital as the U.S. secretary of state. The tension between Israel and America gradually subsided, and Kissinger played a key role in the contacts that eventually led to the IDF’s withdrawal from positions west of the Suez Canal.