JERUSALEM: Declassified documents about the October 1973 war highlight just how much Israel had underestimated the strength of its Arab foes amid deep divisions among its military and political establishment.
We didn t properly evaluate the effectiveness of their offensive forces, then Defence Minister Moshe Dayan 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 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.
Lionised after Israel s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Dayan was vilified as a murderer by parents of Yom Kippur soldiers at their funerals.
Some 2,700 Israeli soldiers were killed when Egyptian troops coming north from the Sinai and Syrian soldiers attacking on the Golan Heights surprised the Israeli army on October 6, 1973.
Although it’s considered a victory in Israel, Yom Kippur remains a black day in the history of the Jewish state s famed military intelligence services, which failed to notice Egypt and Syria had massed their forces on the border.
The then military chief of staff, General David Elazar told the commission that in the hours before the war broke out the military high command became an insane asylum.
He said he had requested a massive mobilization of reserve forces, many of whom were gathered in synagogues for Yom Kippur – Day of Atonement – prayers, but was turned down by Dayan and then Prime Minister 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 then a reserve general and who served as divisional commander during the war, told the Agranat commission, according to the declassified testimony.
What caused the most damage during the war was the absence of senior officers from the field, said Sharon, who went on to become prime minister in 2001. -AFP
