Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Carter came back to Aspen and went directly to his study. He wanted to work on the latest American draft before Aharon Barak arrived. Rosalynn was headed to Washington again that morning for a luncheon, and before she left she looked in to see what Jimmy’s mood was. When he saw her, he pushed back his chair. “Come here,” he said. Rosalynn sat in his lap. “I think it’s all coming together now,” he said cheerfully.

  FROM THE BEGINNING of the conference, Weizman had been urging Sadat and Dayan to meet. He thought that the two of them could break through the psychological obstacles that blocked a settlement. Carter also thought it was important for Sadat and Dayan to talk, because the Israeli foreign minister was the most creative member of the team and also the one most familiar with the West Bank. And yet both men had resisted. Sadat loathed and feared Dayan because he was the architect of the Six-Day War. No Arab could look at Dayan without experiencing once again the flood of shame that followed that overpowering defeat. Moreover, Dayan’s blunt and unsparing manner grated on Egyptian habits of formality and indirection, in which difficult conversations were buttered over with social pleasantries.

  For his part, Dayan owed the destruction of his legend to Sadat. He had been minister of defense when Sadat sent the Egyptian Army across the Suez Canal in 1973, shattering the sense of invulnerability that Israel had cloaked itself in. It was Israel’s Pearl Harbor. Dayan had been Israel’s greatest hero, but he got the largest dose of the blame. Before the war, he had been a figure on the cover of magazines around the world, adored by women and courted by statesmen, but after 1973 he was shunned even by people he had never respected—all because of Sadat.

  A meeting between the two men was bound to stir up powerful conflicting feelings, even though they were seeking the same goal, perhaps more ardently than anyone else at Camp David. Under pressure, Sadat finally agreed to talk to Dayan, “for Carter’s sake.” That phrase would become an inside joke with the Egyptian delegation, because just when the summit seemed to be on the verge of finding a path to peace, the meeting that neither man wanted would bring everything crashing down.

  THE ILLUSION THAT led to Israel’s greatest military setback, and was the source of Dayan’s disgrace, was the Bar-Lev Line. It was one of the great defensive fortifications in military history. Erected after the 1967 war, and stretching a hundred miles along the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, the line presented a sheer, seventy-foot-high sandy rampart facing the Egyptian troops on the western bank, like a mountainous man-made fault line. Buried inside the cliff face were thirty-six Israeli outposts built of reinforced concrete, meant to withstand direct hits from artillery or bombs of more than a thousand pounds. Each fort was equipped with machine-gun emplacements, anti-aircraft weapons, and mortars. In the basement of the multistory forts, there were large containers of oil that could be spewed onto the surface of the canal in order to set the water ablaze. In the intervals between fortifications there were three hundred firing positions for tanks. A second line of defense ran six to eight kilometers to the rear, which included airfields, underground command centers, long-range artillery positions, and anti-aircraft missile bases. All of these positions were encased in multiple circles of barbed wire and studded with minefields and booby traps. Israelis saw the monumental barricade as their first line of defense, but to the Egyptians, the Bar-Lev Line represented Israel’s attempt to confiscate the entire Sinai.

  In 1973, Dayan, then minister of defense, took an American diplomat, Nicholas Veliotes, on a tour of the fortifications. They stood atop the mountainous rampart and looked across the canal, two hundred yards wide, at the Egyptian encampment. As usual, the Egyptian soldiers were playing soccer, fishing, and swimming in the canal. Veliotes asked what would happen if Egyptian forces attacked without warning. “The Egyptian Army today is like a ship covered with rust while anchored in harbor and unable to move!” Dayan said dismissively. He was reflecting the consensus of the Israeli defense establishment. Peace no longer seemed necessary or even desirable. Dayan was already drawing up plans to enlarge the State of Israel even more, stretching from the Jordan River to the canal and fortified by new Jewish settlements. “There is no more Palestine,” he told Time magazine in July. “Finished.”

  The euphoria of the 1967 victory had blinded Israel to the possibility that Arabs were still capable of inflicting real damage. One after another the Israeli commanders published memoirs and went on television describing their brilliant tactics in the last war and forecasting endless Israeli dominance. An attack by the Arabs was unthinkable, they agreed, suicide.

  But as much as the Six-Day War marked a peak moment in the Israeli experience, it was also a turning point for Egyptian society. The defeat acted as a spur to modernization, especially in the military. Before the war, the Arab world treated Israel as if it didn’t exist. Customs officers ripped out pages in imported books that mentioned Israel, including the Larousse French dictionary and Encyclopaedia Britannica. After the war, the Egyptian leader became obsessed with knowing his enemy. Nasser got tapes of the chest-thumping Israeli generals on television, and he watched them for days on end trying to decipher the secret of their success. Obviously, surprise was key; whoever struck first had a decided advantage. Another reason for the Israeli victory was their superior equipment, and so Nasser persuaded the Soviets to resupply the Egyptian forces with better munitions. But those weren’t the only advantages the Israelis enjoyed; their soldiers were simply more capable and better motivated than the Egyptians. Nasser concluded that there would have to be a transformation of the armed forces. University graduates were recruited into the officer corps and encouraged to study Hebrew. Soviet advisers trained the Egyptian troops. Even with all these changes, Nasser had little hope of achieving victory.

  When Sadat came to power in 1970, he received a tentative overture from Moshe Dayan for an interim solution: both sides would withdraw outside of artillery range and allow the Egyptians to resume operation of the canal. Sadat responded a few months later with a far more ambitious initiative to declare a cease-fire and sign a peace agreement with Israel through the UN. His price was the return of Sinai to Egyptian sovereignty. Israel could maintain a security presence at key points, such as Sharm el-Sheikh. The Palestinians would be assured of either a state of their own or affiliation with the Kingdom of Jordan. In a secret overture to the U.S., Sadat’s envoy confided to Kissinger that there was a deadline for beginning peace negotiations: September 1973, shortly before the Israeli elections. By that time, Israel would have to make a partial withdrawal from Sinai as a good-faith deposit on the future treaty. Prime Minister Golda Meir rejected the deal. She pressured Kissinger to stall Sadat’s peace overture and maintain the political deadlock until after the elections. In return, Kissinger extracted a fateful promise that Israel would not initiate another war.

  With the failure of his initiative, Sadat announced that “the stage of total confrontation” was about to begin. “Everything in this country is now being mobilized in earnest for the resumption of the battle—which is now inevitable,” he told Newsweek in April 1973. “The time has come for a shock.” Nobody believed him. In Egypt, he had become a laughingstock. The complacent Israelis ignored the buildup of troops along the canal that fall, which they accounted as another pointless maneuver by the feckless Egyptian leader. After all, without the Soviets, Egypt would have to fight on its own, or with another weakened Arab state. The assumption was that, because the Arabs would lose, they wouldn’t start a war. This idea was so sensible that the Israelis were deaf to any other argument. Menachem Begin warned of the need to counter the movement of a large number of Egyptian tanks near the canal, but he was a lone voice. The canal itself was the greatest tank trap ever devised, Israeli defense specialists observed, to say nothing of the formidable Bar-Lev Line. Even as the experts told themselves this, however, Israel was gradually scaling down its canal defenses. About a third of the outposts were sealed with sand and left as dummy fortifications, and troop levels were redu
ced in those that remained.

  Dayan had threatened that, in the event of war, “I don’t rule out planning to reach the Nile.” He had always viewed war as an opportunity to expand Israel’s borders, and as the secret September deadline approached, he began boldly speaking of “a new Israel, with wide borders, not like in 1948.” He advocated for more settlements in Sinai and Golan to consolidate Israel’s occupation. He announced the construction of an Israeli port in northern Sinai, in Egyptian territorial waters. All this confirmed in Sadat’s mind that the Israelis were never going to willingly surrender Egyptian territory. War was the only recourse.

  Egyptian military planners spent years studying the challenge before them. First, they had to get their troops across the canal. That objective was broken down into discrete tasks, such as backing trucks up to a water barrier and braking so abruptly that the momentum hurled segments of a pontoon out of the truck bed into the water. Twice a day for four years crews worked to unload the trucks in exactly this manner; meantime, other crews trained to bolt the floating segments together to form a bridge. Once the first wave got across, Israeli tanks would be waiting to greet the infantry; in order to blast through that armored barrier, Egyptian teams that would be operating the new handheld Soviet Sagger anti-tank missiles trained every day in a simulator. Endless repetitions made such actions second nature, even among soldiers who doubted they would ever be put to use.1

  But the biggest challenge facing the attackers was the formidable Bar-Lev Line. The Russians had told them that only an atom bomb could destroy it. Neither conventional bombs nor artillery could blast open passages in the rampart; the sand just collapsed and filled in the hole. Finally, Egyptian engineers came up with an ingenious solution: they discovered that high-pressure fire hoses connected to turbine-driven German pumps, capable of spewing a thousand gallons a minute, could melt the sand away with seawater drawn right from the canal. Replicas of the barricade were built and blasted down day and night, until the teams could punch a twenty-foot-wide corridor through the wall of sand in the space of five hours. After that, the infantry and the tanks would pour through. Sadat labeled the plan Operation Badr, a reference to the siege of Mecca in 624 CE, by the Prophet Muhammad, in which the Quran says he was assisted by three thousand “havoc-making” angels.

  Many considerations went into the timing of the invasion—for instance, the tide should be low and the sun in the eyes of the defenders. Syria planned to attack simultaneously, but there was a possibility of snowfall in the Golan Heights in the late fall. October was the optimum time, with its long nights and moderate weather. As it turned out, the Israelis would also be in the middle of its parliamentary election, and the Americans were hypnotized by the Watergate scandal. October that year was also Ramadan, the fasting month for Muslims, which would make an invasion seem less likely to Israelis but which only enhanced the religious significance of the occasion for the Egyptians. There was one date that leaped out to the military planners: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which fell that year on October 6. Ordinary activity in Israel would come to a near-total halt—no buses, no radio, no television—meaning it would be difficult to call up the reserves. The moon that day would shine from sunset to midnight.

  On October 4, the remaining Soviet families in Egypt and also in Syria were evacuated—another clear signal that war was imminent. The next day, Israeli aerial reconnaissance discovered five Egyptian divisions poised on the western bank of the canal, along with mobile bridge units and an additional fifty-six batteries of artillery; even in the face of all this, the Israeli cabinet still refused to believe that the Arabs would actually attack. Perhaps the memory of the Egyptian soldiers fleeing in their underwear in 1956 still played in Dayan’s mind, blinding him to the blow that was about to fall. But he wasn’t alone. Israeli military leaders largely agreed that the likelihood of war breaking out was “the lowest of the low.”

  The night before the invasion, Egyptian frogmen swam across the canal to sabotage the fuel lines that were meant to incinerate any assault vessels that attempted to cross. Syria had already moved up missile batteries within range of Golan. That same evening, Israel sent a message to Kissinger assuring him that war was unlikely.

  Then, in the very early morning of October 6, Israeli intelligence notified military authorities that they had gotten word from a well-placed and trusted spy—actually, Nasser’s son-in-law and Sadat’s confidant, Ashraf Marwan—that the Egyptian forces were going to invade at six p.m. that evening. A meeting took place in Dayan’s office before dawn. He still opposed a general mobilization or a preemptive air attack. Mindful of Israel’s secret pledge to Kissinger not to start a war, he argued that Israel’s regular army should be able to absorb a first strike and quickly organize a massive retaliation; later that morning, however, Meir overruled him and authorized the mobilization of 100,000 troops. It would still take at least twenty-four hours for them to reach the Egyptian front.

  The Egyptians were puzzled by the lack of response on the Israeli side; their intentions had been obvious since the spring, when Sadat had publicly spelled out exactly what was going to happen. And yet, on the day the war began, on the Bar-Lev Line itself there were only 436 Israeli soldiers, 3 tanks, and 70 artillery pieces, with an additional 8,000 men and 277 tanks in the rear. They were facing 100,000 Egyptian troops and 1,550 tanks on the western shore.

  At 2:05 p.m., the Egyptian artillery—nearly two thousand guns—opened up, raining more than ten thousand shells per minute on Israeli positions. Fifteen minutes later, eight thousand commandos and engineers burst over the western bank and jumped into rubber dinghies. Each of the 750 boats had been numbered and color-coded to avoid confusion. Meantime, low-flying Egyptian jets struck Israeli air bases, anti-aircraft missile batteries, command centers, and radar stations. Simultaneously, from the east, seven hundred Syrian tanks charged toward Israeli positions on the Golan Heights.

  When the Egyptian commandos reached the eastern bank of the canal, they scaled the massive barricade of the Bar-Lev Line on rope ladders and planted Egyptian flags atop the fortifications. Water pumps began blasting through the sand. Within a few hours, sixty passages had been opened in the line. Five infantry divisions crossed in a continuous flood—on bridges, boats, some soldiers even swam. “My God,” an Israeli radioman reported to the rear defenses, “it’s like the Chinese coming across.”

  The Israeli Air Force, slow to get off the ground, arrived two hours later, but they were knocked out of the sky by heat-seeking SA-6 missiles, which took out twelve Phantom jets before the stymied Israelis turned back. Israeli tank squadrons—so devastating in the previous war—rushed from their rear-guard positions toward the canal to relieve the surviving defenders. Egyptian commandos were waiting for them with wire-guided Sagger missiles. The Israeli tanks were wiped out. Eight bridges were in place by ten thirty p.m., and by midnight the first five hundred Egyptian tanks had crossed to the eastern shore. In Cairo, the fundamentalists passed out pamphlets claiming that the angels of havoc were once again fighting with the Muslims. Sadat had to remind his countrymen that the first Egyptian general to cross the canal was not a Muslim but a Copt.

  The Arabs now had better weapons, but the soldiers themselves were also different, Dayan realized: they were well trained and disciplined, and they did not run away. Moreover, they had the crucial advantage of striking first. That evening, however, Dayan went on television to reassure his fellow citizens that he had the situation under control. “In the Golan Heights, perhaps a number of Syrian tanks penetrated across our line,” he conceded, but it was nothing to worry about. As for the canal, Dayan said, the Egyptian attack “will end as a very, very dangerous adventure for them.” The truth, he knew, was that Israel was fighting a war on two fronts and losing both of them. Within twenty-four hours, the Arabs had destroyed two hundred Israeli tanks and thirty-five aircraft, and several hundred troops had been killed.

  Shaken out of his complacency, Dayan underwent a personal tran
sformation. He was forced to acknowledge that the Arabs were his equals; and if that was true, the very existence of Israel was at stake. Israel could not match losses with those of Egypt and Syria, which had combined forces of more than a million troops. The entire population of Israel was only three million.

  The mission of the Arab armies was to recapture the territory lost in 1967. The Syrians sought to take the Golan Heights and hold their positions for four or five days—long enough for the Egyptian forces to capture the mountain passes in Sinai. Sadat hoped that the shock of the attack would then allow for diplomatic flexibility on all sides, which was impossible as long as the Arabs felt immobilized by humiliation and the Israelis comforted by the status quo. But the Israeli leaders did not believe the Arabs would fight a war for limited aims; the rhetoric of Arab leaders in the past still rang too loudly in the Israeli imagination—of being wiped off the map, thrown into the sea—and so they panicked. Once again, it wasn’t war they feared, it was extinction.

  On the morning of the second day, Dayan urged the air force to concentrate on stopping the Syrian advance in the north, where Israel was most vulnerable, but the Israeli planes failed to take out the anti-aircraft missiles, and seven aircraft were shot down. Dayan warned Golda Meir that a catastrophe was unfolding; it was necessary for Israeli forces to withdraw from the Golan Heights and pull back in Sinai to the mountain passes, and then “hold on to the last bullet.” The prime minister and the cabinet were shocked by his forecast, but on the third day, when the Israeli counterattack in Sinai began, Israeli military leaders showed themselves to be disoriented, frightened, and at odds with each other about how to counter the Egyptian thrust. Israeli losses by the end of the day reached forty-nine aircraft and five hundred tanks. The situation seemed even worse than Dayan had described.