"Israel UnderEstimated Arab Foes"

'Israel Underestimated Arab Foes' Strength In 1973 War

By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Courtesy Of The DailyStar

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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Declassified documents about the October 1973 war highlight just how much Israel had underestimated the strength of its Arab foes amid deep divisions between its military and political establishments. "We didn't properly evaluate the effectiveness of their offensive forces," then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had said, according to the documents quoted by Israeli media on the 35th anniversary of the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war.

"In viewing the nature of the war as too easy, in that we may have sinned," he had told the Agranat Commission which probed the conduct of the military in what is known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War. The probe was conducted in 1974 but some of the transcripts have just been declassified.

Lionized after Israel's victory in the 1967 Middle East war, Dayan was vilified as a "murderer" by parents of Yom Kippur combatants at their funerals.

Some 2,700 Israeli soldiers were killed when Egyptian troops coming onto the occupied Sinai and Syrian soldiers attacking on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights surprised the Israeli Army on October 6, 1973.

Israel won the war after 19 days, but Yom Kippur remains a black day in the history of the Jewish state's military intelligence services, which failed to notice Egypt and Syria had amassed forces on the border.

The then-military chief of staff, General David Elazar, had told the commission that in the hours before the war broke out the military high command became "an insane asylum."

He had said that he had requested a massive mobilization of reserve forces, many of whom were gathered in synagogues for Yom Kippur - Day of Atonement - prayers, but had been turned down by Dayan and then-Premier Golda Meir. The Agranat Commission cleared Meir for direct responsibility of the wartime failures, but she stepped down in June 1974.

"The chain of command was distorted," Ariel Sharon, who was a reserve general at the time and served as divisional commander during the war, had told the commission, according to the declassified testimony.

"What caused the most damage during the war was the absence of senior officers from the field," Sharon had said. - AFP