The Yom Kippur War, 1973: twenty days that shook the Middle East

The road to war

Israel had come out of the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967 with more territory each time, and in the Six-Day War of 1967 it had taken the Sinai from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. William T. Walker, in an EBSCO research article, notes that by the early 1970s new leaders in Cairo and Damascus, Anwar Sadat and Hafez al-Assad, were determined to win back the lost lands, and that the Middle East had become a field of Cold War rivalry between Washington and Moscow.²

Diplomacy went nowhere. The State Department's Office of the Historian records that the American Rogers Plan of 1969, calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines, was rejected by Egypt, Israel and the Soviet Union alike; that in 1971 Sadat offered to reopen the Suez Canal if Israel pulled back from its east bank; and that in July 1972 he expelled the Soviet military advisers from Egypt. In February 1973 his envoy told Henry Kissinger that Egypt would make a separate peace, but only after Israel left all the land taken in 1967.³

The surprise attack

Israel did not believe war was coming. Walker writes that King Hussein of Jordan privately warned Prime Minister Golda Meir, but that Israeli leaders judged an attack unlikely during the holy days. On the morning of 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the chief of staff David Elazar urged a preemptive strike on Syria; Meir and the defense minister Moshe Dayan refused. The same day Egypt and Syria attacked together, Egypt in the Sinai and Syria on the Golan Heights, and for two days the Israelis fell back.⁴

The numbers were large on both sides. Walker gives Egypt 300,000 troops committed out of an army of 800,000, Syria 150,000 and Iraq 60,000, with smaller contingents from Jordan and other states, against about 415,000 Israelis after mobilization. The Arab armies had more tanks and aircraft; Israel, in his judgment, had the better leadership and organization.⁵

At sea the war began with an Israeli success. On the first night, Israeli missile boats struck at the Syrian port of Latakia and sank five Syrian warships without loss, in what JNS describes as the first recorded engagement in which both sides fired surface-to-surface missiles.⁶

Counterattack on two fronts

Then Israel struck back. On the Golan, Walker writes, it had recovered the lost ground by 10 October, and by 14 October its forces were inside Syria and its heavy artillery was shelling Damascus. After a failed counterattack against the Egyptians on 9 October, Israel asked the United States for help. On 15 October its counteroffensive in the Sinai began, and on 16 October Israeli units crossed the Suez Canal, outflanking the Egyptian armies and threatening Egypt itself.⁷

Airlifts and a nuclear alert

The war quickly drew in the superpowers. The Soviet Union resupplied Egypt and Syria, and the United States answered with an airlift to Israel, Operation Nickel Grass, launched on 13 October; the first American planes carrying weapons reached Israel on 14 October. The airlift had a heavy price: Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on the United States and some Western European countries, which shook the world economy.⁸

On 22 October the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 338, calling for a ceasefire and peace talks, but the fighting went on and Israeli forces kept advancing. On 24 October the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proposed, over the hotline, that American and Soviet troops go to Egypt together to enforce the ceasefire, and warned that the Soviets might act alone. On 25 October the United States put its nuclear forces on worldwide alert. The Office of the Historian judges that the crisis brought the two powers closer to nuclear confrontation than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. The same day the Security Council called for a ceasefire with UN observers and peacekeepers, which Israel accepted, and by 26 October the fighting had stopped.⁹

The cost and the consequences

Walker counts more than 2,600 Israelis and about 8,500 Arabs killed, and most of the Arab tanks and aircraft destroyed. Israel had won on the battlefield, but the surprise shook the country. After a postwar inquiry, Golda Meir resigned on 11 April 1974, and Moshe Dayan left the defense ministry.¹⁰

The war also opened the door to peace. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between the capitals, the Office of the Historian notes, led step by step to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. In 1977 Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, and at Camp David in 1978 he and Menachem Begin reached agreement with President Jimmy Carter. Sadat was assassinated by military officers on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the day his army crossed the canal.¹¹