At three on that afternoon, something unthinkable happened: the silence of Yom Kippur was shattered by the scream of a jet fighter flying low over the city. Seconds later sirens started howling. We moved to the staircase where, one after another, our neighbors joined us, all of them stunned and trying to make sense of what was going on. Nobody knew. We went back to the apartment and switched on the television: the Syrians had attacked in the north, the Egyptians in the south. The surprise was complete.
Toward evening, upon listening first to Dayan and somewhat later to Golda Meir, the possibility of catastrophe dawned on us: the Syrians controlled part of the Golan Heights and the Egyptians had crossed the Suez Canal and were moving into the Sinai. The defense line along the waterway had simply been overrun. For several days we didn’t know how bad the situation was, how panicky Dayan, still the defense minister, had become, and how disheartening was the impact of his doomsday predictions for members of the government and for some senior officers. Lou Kedar, Golda Meir’s longtime assistant and close friend, mentioned later that at some point during these first days of the war, Golda contemplated suicide.
On the ninth, an Israeli counterattack in the Sinai failed miserably: the tanks were easy targets for the massive numbers of antitank missiles carried by Egyptian infantry and the planes were paralyzed by the equally unexpected number of antiaircraft missiles, both supplied by the Soviet Union. Israel considered asking for a cease-fire; the tentative request was flatly rejected by Egypt.
Although the situation in the north had stabilized within three days, it was only on the night of October 15 that Israeli forces, led by Ariel Sharon, seized the strategic initiative in the south by crossing the canal and encircling the Egyptian Third Army. On both sides, the rate of attrition of equipment and ammunition soon led to a Soviet airlift, particularly to Syria, quickly followed by an American one to Israel.
When you traveled from Jerusalem down to Tel Aviv and reached the plain near Lod Airport, the sight was impressive: while one huge Galaxy military cargo plane descended toward the runway, another one was already approaching (this, incidentally, followed President Nixon’s explicit orders, notwithstanding reluctance from the State Department and the Pentagon). Despite my growing alienation from the policies of Meir’s government, in such a moment of extreme danger, an instinctive identification with the country took over, and together with other colleagues, I signed an appeal for solidarity addressed to universities all over the West.
In mid-October, the Foreign Ministry sent me to France to help get public opinion on the side of Israel. I was asked to meet both with some key journalists and with various intellectuals to explain how Israel viewed the Egyptian-Syrian aggression and the uncompromising attitude of the Arab world. Before beginning my rounds, I needed some sustenance and, albeit feeling slightly guilty about self-indulgence in such hard times, on the second evening of my stay in Paris I went to hear Parsifal at the opera (I should have mentioned previously that I love classical music and am a “selective” Wagner fan, with Parsifal at the top of my list). I don’t remember who sang or who conducted on that evening in Paris, but I clearly recall my elation: the performance was outstanding and I think that this was the best Parsifal I’d ever attended. The slight feeling of guilt may have added something to my enthusiasm.
I did not feel any guilt in seeing, a few days later, Claude Lanzmann’s Pourquoi Israel. It was the right film at the right time. As for my mission, I accomplished it as well as I could: I was cordially received by Jean Daniel, for example, the editor in chief of the weekly Nouvel Observateur; yet, by then, an influential daily such as Le Monde remained firmly critical of Israel, due to its left-leaning tendency and to the hostility of the head of its Middle Eastern desk, Eric Rouleau, an Egyptian Jew, toward the Jewish state. All in all, the results of my efforts were mixed.
1
Militarily, Israel turned the early chaos into a victory of sorts, but the toll in lives was enormous: 2,500 soldiers had been killed and 7,000 badly wounded. Two students of my 1972–73 seminar (attended by some fifteen graduates) had been killed: Shaul Shalev and Avi Shmueli. Shalev was a tank commander killed by a direct hit in the early days of war in the Sinai, whereas Avi, who was also my assistant, died slowly; he had been burned in his jeep in the Sinai and brought back to the Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv. I visited him there and saw only a hugely inflated body covered with bandages. Wherever skin was visible, it was black. It took many days for Avi to die. He was buried in the military part of the vast Givat Shaul cemetery on one of the hills of Jerusalem.
Since my return to Jerusalem in 1969, I had met at times with General Israel Tal (“Talik” to his friends), whom I had first encountered, as usual, at the Teveths’. When he came to Jerusalem, he would occasionally visit me at the university; we talked about his various academic interests and also about current Israeli politics. Tal, who had commanded the armored forces on the Egyptian front during the Six-Day War, would become the “father” of the Israeli tank, the very advanced Merkava, which he designed and the production of which he organized and supervised in later years.
During the Yom Kippur War, Tal was deputy chief of staff and, on the morrow of the war, briefly in charge of the southern front. He had a precise knowledge of the events and considered Dayan eminently responsible for many of the initial mistakes; in fact, he hated him. Could it be that this intense hostility impaired Tal’s objectivity? Be that as it may, he told me that Dayan had become so irrational that he had ordered missiles armed with nuclear warheads to be readied. An article later published in Time magazine confirmed the story but attributed the decision to both Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.
It seems, in fact, from testimonies gathered in 2008 by the historian of the Israeli bomb, Avner Cohen, and published on the fortieth anniversary of the war (October 2013), that Tal’s version was correct. During a cabinet meeting on October 7, Shalheveth Freier — who had been appointed head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1971 — was summoned by Dayan. The defense minister met Shalheveth outside the cabinet room and, giving the impression that Golda Meir had agreed, asked him to order the positioning of missiles with nuclear warheads for a “demonstration option” (a nuclear blast). The same testimony indicates that when, somewhat later on that day, Dayan submitted his plan to the cabinet, he was rebuffed by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon and by Minister Israel Galili. Golda Meir simply told Dayan “to forget it.”*
Quite pessimistic attitudes regarding the future of Israel and the significance of the war surfaced in Europe and in the States. In a letter of November 26, a colleague from the department, the Sovietologist Nissan Oren, who was spending a year in Princeton, sent me some of his observations:
I keep contact with such people as George Kennan (who is no Jew lover), Bill Bundy who is the Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, various Sovietologists and the like … To cheer you up: I have here at the Center two colleagues from Lebanon who tell me every day that we must be strong because Lebanon would not survive more than a week unless Syria is kept down. On the other hand, the Princeton Jewish professors who are of the left remain remote and act like swine. The Arabs here say we have had our political Stalingrad, which … is probably right.
… Our friend Hans Morgenthau [a well-known Jewish professor of international relations at the University of Chicago] was on TV for a full hour last night. What he said was in effect that this is the beginning of the end of the Jewish state. I was quite mad not so much with his analysis as with his attitude. He acted up as a minor prophet. He was sorry for the Jews in Israel but there was little or nothing that could be done …
In France, a few weeks later, Eric Rouleau published an article accusing Israel of perpetrating a “Dreyfus Affair” by having transferred the general initially in command of the southern front, Shmuel Gonen, to a position of lesser responsibility. What should Israel have done? Leave in place an officer manifestly incapable of mastering the situation? You had to send to the s
outh your most experienced commanders, which was done. The din of nasty stupidities such as Rouleau’s relentless criticism was sometimes hard to take.
2
In this postapocalyptic atmosphere I organized a conference to mark the official opening of the Leonard Davis Institute of International Relations at the Hebrew University. As director of the new institute, I chose the theme for the conference: the strategy of small states in an international crisis.
Notwithstanding the circumstances, all the invited foreign scholars agreed to attend: Hans Morgenthau (nonetheless), Thomas Schelling from Harvard, Alastair Buchan from London, Bernard and Fawn Brodie from UCLA, and others. Golda Meir attended the lectures and debates on the first day, Dayan on the following one. While Meir’s interventions were limited to informal remarks here and there, Dayan gave a lecture in which he tried to explain the dilemmas facing Israel on the eve of Yom Kippur. All in all it was a tense and fascinating event, attended by hundreds.
The conference took place in January or February 1974. After it ended we invited the foreign participants for a two-day tour of northern Israel. The institute had rented a minibus and put all our guests aboard. As we drove in the rapidly falling evening darkness along the Sea of Galilee, flashes started illuminating the eastern sky, as if coming from the Golan Heights, followed by powerful rumblings. I sat in a front seat next to Fawn Brodie; we didn’t pay much attention to the outside scene as we shared views on psychohistory. The other guests, though, had noticed everything, and since an “attrition war” between Israel and Syria still raged on, all bets were open as to the significance of the ominous flashes. Some argued for mortar fire while others heard the pounding of heavier guns. In short, what could be more fascinating for specialists in strategic studies than driving near a live gun battle? Alas, it was simply a powerful storm, all thunder and lightning.
3
Years went by, but for me the Yom Kippur events didn’t fade from memory, as was the case for many Israelis. I had my own reasons for that, apart from the sadness of it all. I have mentioned that during my three years in the army, I was posted in Intelligence 2, which had vastly changed and expanded since and ultimately became Unit 8200, the Israeli NSA. In my time, in the early 1950s, one of the young officers in the unit was Lieutenant Joel Ben-Porat. Ben-Porat stayed in the army and made it to colonel, if I am not mistaken; he became the commander of either the whole unit or a crucial part of it. Days or weeks before Yom Kippur, he intercepted information that clearly indicated the Egyptians’ intention to attack.
The general heading military intelligence, Eli Zeira, was certain that the Egyptians were merely getting ready for large-scale maneuvers and nothing else. He convinced Dayan and the entire cabinet that there was no need to mobilize the reserves. Ben-Porat knew that his information conveyed a very different scenario, yet Zeira’s second in command refused time and again to forward his warnings. Finally, Ben-Porat managed to call Zeira’s home on a Shabbat, but the chief dismissed his message.
After the events, Ben-Porat became obsessed with what had happened and could have been avoided if his information had been believed. He became a crusader of sorts, spoke to various people, and on Yom Kippur anniversaries wrote articles in the papers alluding to whatever he was allowed to publish. He came several times to visit me in Jerusalem, as he knew that I had a better understanding than many of what he was saying over and over again. Parts of Ben-Porat’s story were recently (2014) published in Israel, as protocols of the postwar investigation commission were made public. Did it bring him some peace of mind? I can only hope so, but given his frustration and his anger, I doubt it.
While Ben-Porat focused mainly on the deficiencies of the military and political system that became accountable for the initial catastrophe of the war, others, much closer to me, asked far more fundamental questions about Israeli society and the undercurrents that threatened its very texture as a democratic entity. I mainly think of my close friend Uriel Tal, the historian of Jewish thought and Christian-Jewish relations in pre-Nazi Germany.
Uri was unusually sensitive, with a tendency to depression. He was religious but the most open and tolerant religious person I knew. His thorough knowledge of Jewish thought allowed him to be among the first Israelis to perceive and expose the deep religious roots of the political movement that arose on the morrow of Yom Kippur: Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful).
Gush Emunim openly aimed at tightening Israel’s grip over the West Bank, the occupied Palestinian territories west of the Jordan. It became one of the most vocal, active, and dangerous ingredients on the Israeli political scene at that time. The movement’s messianic fervor, its total disregard for the Palestinians, its relentless drive for establishing ever more new settlements in the occupied territories, made of it an example of “authentic Zionism” in the eyes of many and seemed to offer a new credo to the tens of thousands of Israelis dispirited by the war and losing all faith in the traditional political establishment.
Uri had also lost all confidence. He perceived how the crisis of Yom Kippur fostered what he came to consider as some sort of Israeli fascism. We had a heart-to-heart conversation regarding the future of the country during a long taxi drive from Manhattan to JFK Airport after both of us had participated in a conference on the historiography of the Holocaust, in March 1975. Uri had moved from the Hebrew University to Tel Aviv University and I was soon to follow. I entirely agreed with his interpretation of the events, and both of us witnessed, to our dismay, how Mapai, still the leading party in a coalition of the moderate left called Avoda (Labor), was giving in to the demands of Gush Emunim and assorted ultra-right-wing pressure groups.
Although she had won the elections, Golda Meir resigned in early 1974 and Itzhak Rabin became prime minister, with Shimon Peres as defense minister. To my profound disappointment, Shimon was the driving force within the government for cooperating with the fanatics of Gush Emunim in the establishment of new settlements. I had to admit — notwithstanding my previous admiration for him — that, at this juncture, Shimon appeared to me as a sheer political opportunist.
4
I expressed some of my thoughts about possibilities of peace between Israel, the Arab countries, and the Palestinians in a dialogue with two Egyptian Marxists, organized and moderated by the French journalist and author Jean Lacouture. Lacouture told me that my partners to the dialogue were close to the Palestinians and had authored several texts under a common pseudonym: Mahmud Hussein. In the summer of 1974, we met in Paris for a series of conversations in which I expressed my support for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel (i.e., in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), the return of a significant number of refugees and compensation for the others, as well as the division of Jerusalem, the Arab part of which would become the capital of the Palestinian state. The rather conventional views I expressed in Réflexions in 1968 had certainly changed. The book came out later that same year under the title Arabes et Israéliens: un premier dialogue. It was translated into English and Hebrew.
Upon the publication in Israel, the students’ newspaper at the Hebrew University called me a traitor, and one of my colleagues and a longtime friend, Yehoshafat Harkabi (chief of Israeli military intelligence in the early sixties), told Hagith that talking to Mahmud Hussein was akin to talking to Himmler. A few years later, though, Harkabi became an eloquent apostle of negotiations and compromise. I didn’t know (and Lacouture had not told me) that one of the two Egyptians who went under the name of Adel Rifaat was actually a Jew converted to Islam: Eddie Levi. The first to publicize this fact was Egypt’s most important paper, Al Ahram. It didn’t change anything as far as I was concerned but made me look like a fool in the eyes of many.
How, in fact, did I view the chances of peace offered by the evolving situation? The last lines of the afterword that I wrote in 1975 for the American edition of the Dialogue sum it up rather clearly, with a major omission, however:
At the beginning of the dialogue I mention
ed the explosion of collective hatred against Israel that shook the Arab world on the eve of the Six-Day War. Now we are facing a kind of polarization: on the one hand, we notice growing signs of moderation among some Arabs but, on the other, positions of extreme hatred are intensifying and solidifying within an important “rejection front.” No one can tell which of these two currents will prevail, and this is, in the end, the fundamental uncertainty that gnaws at our hope for a settlement. Even within the limited context of this dialogue, this uncertainty casts its shadow on its positive elements.†
I had forgotten to mention one essential element: our own contribution to that situation.
The spring of 1975 was difficult.
My duodenal ulcer bled for the fourth time — and massively so. I underwent surgery at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, and a postsurgery infection kept me there for three weeks or more. When I finally got home and started recuperating, the university served me with an unexpected ultimatum: either Jerusalem full time, or else … I decided to keep Geneva and turned to Tel Aviv University. Would they accept the part-time arrangement?
My friend Uri became my very energetic lobbyist. He convinced the rector, while the head of the School of History, Zwi Yawetz, was all for it in any case. Once back from my sabbatical, in the fall of 1976, I would start teaching in the Department of History in Tel Aviv, and during the last quarter of each year I would move to Geneva. This time there was no limitation to the arrangement.
When Memory Comes Page 14