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I remember Dayan as both brilliant and flawed. His ability to think like an Arab made him a brilliant commander in battles with them. 

As a politician he tended to trust them too much and go out of his way to please them. 

When Dayan, Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres broke with the Mapai Party in 1965 to form the Rafi Party of Young Hawks (Right Wing?), I worked with them as a volunteer. 

After the 67 war he made terrible mistakes like giving the Temple Mount to the Arabs and closing the bridges crossing the Jordan River, preventing Arabs from fleeing to Jordan. 

He took advantage of women, including young Israeli female soldiers (18 yrs) and plundered Israeli archaeology for personal use. 

But many Israelis forgave his sins, because they admired his  macho behavioroutrageous. 

He would not survive today's politics....Bernard

 

When Dayan Wept

Sep. 26, 2009
ABRAHAM RABINOVICH , THE JERUSALEM POST

 

Moshe Dayan

 

With his reserve division starting north from its bases on the second day of the Yom Kippur War, Gen. Mussa Peled drove ahead to get a feel for the Golan battlefield. Near Almagor in Upper Galilee he saw army vehicles parked at the side of the road. A man was sitting on a boulder looking across the Jordan Valley, while a group of officers waited behind him at a discreet distance. Peled recognized the man as defense minister Moshe Dayan.

Joining him, Peled could see smoke rising from the heights and flashes of explosions attesting to the deep inroads the Syrians had made in little more than 24 hours. The division commander told Dayan he was awaiting permission to begin a counterattack the next morning.

The two men had grown up on adjoining farms on Moshav Nahalal, Dayan several years the senior. Their long acquaintance permitted Dayan to unburden himself of the deep pessimism that had overtaken him since the war began. He spoke "as if all is lost," Peled would remember. Peled, a veteran warhorse, put a supportive hand on Dayan's shoulder and was taken aback to see tears start to flow. The harder he pressed encouragement, the more Dayan wept.

The armor commander, whose division would drive the Syrians out of the southern Golan, did not tell this episode to me when I interviewed him about the war nor to other interviewers, but he did recount it in an oral history tucked away in a corner of the Armored Corps library at Latrun.

The public did not know that Dayan, the country's military icon, had suffered a failure of nerve in the opening hours of the Yom Kippur War. It was not why the protest movements led by returning soldiers demanded his resignation. On the contrary, the disparity between Dayan the myth and the stunning shortcomings revealed on Yom Kippur fed their indignation. As the country's ultimate security authority, Dayan - symbol of the great Six Day War victory, hero of the Sinai Campaign - was held responsible for Israel's unpreparedness, his hallmark self-confidence now seen as arrogance. The decision by the Agranat Commission to absolve him and prime minister Golda Meir of blame for the war's failings would infuriate the protesters. Responding to their outcry, Meir stepped down, taking with her the entire government.

The commission maintained that a defense minister, even a former chief of General Staff like Dayan, was not a "super chief of staff" overseeing operational decisions of the generals. Neither Dayan nor Meir, it said, had independent means of assessing the likelihood of war and neither could be blamed for Israel having been caught by surprise. Blame was assigned entirely to a handful of military officers, foremost among them chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. David Elazar and OC Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Eli Zeira.

Although the commission's report is still regarded by many as a political whitewash, in retrospect it can be more easily justified.

Contrary to the commission's assessment, Dayan did, in fact, act at times as a super chief of staff - generally with great astuteness, although one of his interventions would prove calamitous. More to the point, his input as the military's political overseer, by which he was judged by the commission, was wise and farseeing, not reckless or random. Judging his parliamentary responsibility, the commission held, was outside its mandate.

In hitherto unpublished extracts from the Agranat report released only a few months ago, Dayan played down his role as an uber-general. "From 1957 to '67 I wasn't in the army at all," he said. "I'm not a tank man, I'm not an artillery man, I'm not a paratrooper and I don't have a staff. I didn't return [in 1967, when named defense minister] to deal with the army but with political/defense issues. The defense minister is a political functionary. It would never cross my mind to enforce or decide [purely military matters]. Sometimes, I posed questions. The chief of General Staff decided. I didn't oversee the army's professional level."

That overmodest - and, in the circumstances, self-serving - assessment belies the influence that the charismatic Dayan had over the military establishment. He usually framed his requests as "ministerial suggestions" rather than orders, but they amounted to virtually the same thing. While generally fastidious in channeling requests through the chief of General Staff, he did not hesitate on occasion to intervene directly with Elazar's subordinates.

SUCH WAS the case on the second morning of the war - Sunday, October 7 - when he visited the northern front a few hours before his encounter with Mussa Peled and found the Golan defenses on the verge of collapse. Unable to get Elazar on the phone, he had himself patched through to OC Air Force Maj.-Gen. Benny Peled (not to be confused with Mussa Peled). Dayan urged him to call off a major attack on the Egyptian air defenses just getting under way and to send his planes north.

"The Third Temple is in danger," he said, an allusion to the modern State of Israel. Elazar would issue a similar order to the air force commander that morning, but it is unclear whether the chief of General Staff was simply confirming Dayan's "ministerial suggestion."

In any case, it was Dayan's call that activated Peled. Describing to me years later the vehement objections of his senior staff officers at aborting the attack in the south, Benny Peled said, "They hadn't heard Dayan's voice on the phone."

The change in plans would prove disastrous. The air force, which had to swiftly improvise an attack on the Syrian anti-aircraft missile sites without updated aerial photos, lost six Phantoms and destroyed only one missile battery. The major loss, however, was cancellation of the attack on the Egyptian batteries. The air force did not have the technology to overcome the Soviet-made SAM anti-aircraft missiles electronically. But it had devised a plan, codenamed Tagar, by which hundreds of aircraft would attack the 62 SAM bases in the Suez Canal zone in an elaborate choreography involving low-level attacks, high-level attacks, electronic deception and toss-bombing in a precisely orchestrated sequence.

After the attack was aborted, Tagar would not again be attempted. Senior air force planners remain convinced that if the attack had been carried out as planned, the Egyptian air defenses would have been shattered, although dozens of aircraft might have been downed. With the Egyptian army left without air defenses, it would have been a very different war.

That, however, was an extreme situation - the war's opening shock when battle-hardened combat officers - Ariel Sharon and Elazar being notable exceptions - froze, sometimes for a day or two, as they attempted to process a situation they had never imagined. Dayan's military interventions thenceforth were almost always incisive, while his political/security input provided vital parameters for the army and cabinet.

Three years before the war, he proposed that Israeli forces pull back 20 miles from the Suez Canal to enable its reopening and reduce Egypt's incentive for going to war. The proposal was rejected by Meir who believed that Israel's continued presence on the strategic waterway would ultimately force Egypt to make territorial concessions. Dayan warned that in the absence of political movement, the Arabs would probably attack. In May 1973, five months before Yom Kippur, he told the General Staff, "Gentlemen, prepare for war [with] Egypt and Syria in the second half of summer."

In September, the Syrians indeed began a large-scale buildup opposite the Golan, alarming Maj.-Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, head of Northern Command. He had only 77 tanks facing three Syrian divisions with 800 tanks. Unlike the Egyptian front where the Suez Canal separated the two armies, there was only a half-finished anti-tank ditch to slow down a Syrian lunge. Hofi was especially concerned by Syria's forward deployment of SAM batteries which now covered the skies over the Golan. In the event of a surprise attack he had relied on the air force helping him to hold the Syrians off for the 48 hours needed for the reserves to arrive. However, the SAM deployment meant that the air force would now have to deal with the missiles first, providing no ground support in the critical opening phase. He decided to bring his concerns to the weekly meeting of the General Staff on September 24.

Dayan, who attended these meetings occasionally, happened to be at this one. The main subject was the proposed acquisition of American F-15 warplanes. When it was Hofi's turn to speak, he said he wished to talk first about the Golan situation, which he termed "very serious." The discussion about the F-15s then continued around the table, without anyone referring to Hofi's warning.

It was Dayan who brought them back to it. "The General Staff can't let [Hofi's] remarks pass without comment," he said. "Either his scenario doesn't hold water or it does. If it does, we need a plan for dealing with it."

Rosh Hashana was only three days away. Dayan said he would not go off for the holiday without getting an answer. He asked Elazar to assemble the General Staff in two days to decide on appropriate measures. At that later meeting, it was decided to transfer 27 tanks from the Sinai to the Golan. "We'll have 100 tanks against their 800," said the chief of General Staff. "That ought to be enough." That equation neatly summed up Israel's post-Six Day War attitude toward the Arab armies.

Dayan decided not to leave it at that. A few hours before Rosh Hashana, he flew up to the Golan with journalists to send out a warning that the Syrians faced dire consequences if they attacked. His published remarks were duly picked up in the Syrian media.

At a meeting with Golda Meir three days before Yom Kippur, Dayan spelled out his growing unease at the buildup of Egyptian and Syrian forces along the border. Military symbol though he was, Dayan related to the 75-year-old grandmother with the deference due her position and wanted her fully in the picture. Other generals present, however, assured her that the likelihood of war remained low. Despite her palpable unease, she did not take it upon herself to challenge a roomful of generals counseling calm.

ON YOM KIPPUR morning, the Mossad forwarded a warning that war would break out this day. Elazar pressed for full mobilization and a preemptive air strike. Dayan rejected both. War, he said, was not a certainty despite the Mossad warning. The world, he said, would not accept another Israeli preemptive strike like the one it launched in the Six Day War. As for mobilization, he was willing to approve a limited call-up but, he said, mass mobilization could be seen as a provocation. It was Meir who decided in the end - no to a preemptive strike, yes to mobilization.

Dayan's briefing to the General Staff that morning laid out an unambiguous war goal. "Our main objective is destruction of enemy forces. Any move in the direction of Damascus will not be to capture territory which, I believe, we will be obliged to pull back from." The importance of a defense minister capable of offering the military clear guidelines and of looking beyond immediate contingencies can be appreciated by comparing Dayan's performance with, say, that of defense minister Amir Peretz and chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz in the Second Lebanon War, a conflict that became mired in confusion despite overwhelming Israeli strength.

The suave Dayan had ever been the symbol of "cool," but the success of the Arab attack shook him to his core. Virtually every assumption by the Israeli command, himself included, about the nature of the next war had proven wrong - the certainty that intelligence would provide ample warning of an Arab attack, that in a worst-case situation the air force could save the day, that the Arab soldier was a pushover and the Arab command inept, that Israeli armor would scatter all before it. The surprise attack had been a staggering psychological blow.

But it was basic operational unpreparedness, now suddenly revealed, that was responsible for the surprise becoming a debacle. The Arabs were employing new tactics, new weapons and astonishing will. Where, Dayan asked himself, was all this leading? His visits to both fronts on the second day of the war only increased his gloom. Returning to the underground command post in Tel Aviv, the "Pit," he told the generals that Israel's three million Jews were facing not just Egypt and Syria but the 80 million-strong Arab world. Even if there were a cease-fire, the Arabs could renew the fighting at any time with fresh arms from the Soviet Union and attempt to wear Israel down.

The breadth of his strategic vision had become the depth of his despair. Meeting with Meir, he painted a picture so grim that she felt the need to telephone her longtime personal assistant and friend, Lou Kedar, in an adjacent office and asked to meet her in the corridor. As Kedar would remember it, Meir, grey and drawn, leaned heavily against a wall and said, "Dayan is speaking of surrender." If he used that word, it was clearly not in the conventional sense. But he had spoken of surrendering territory - pulling back from the Bar-Lev Line on the canal - and of his belief that it would be impossible to push the Egyptians back across the canal.

Even in his diminished state, he continued to issue firm directives to the military. Meeting with Elazar, he did not advocate an immediate retreat from the canal but ordered him to prepare two fallback lines in Sinai. Dayan ruled out an attempt to cross the canal, as division commander Sharon was urging, but if the chief of General Staff believed that a counterattack in Sinai was realistic, Dayan said, he would support it in the cabinet.

On Monday, the third day of the war, a major counterattack in Sinai was badly botched by the front commander. Dayan and Elazar did not learn the dimensions of the failure until they helicoptered to Sinai headquarters that night. Returning to the Pit Tuesday morning, Dayan resumed his back-to-the-wall mode, but this time as a clearheaded war leader with a pragmatic agenda rather than as a demoralizing prophet of doom.

To prepare for a protracted conflict, he told the generals, the IDF mobilization pool had to be expanded to higher age brackets. The IDF should also explore the possibility of giving 17-year-olds advanced training, particularly those who qualified for pilot courses and those destined for tanks, so that when drafted at 18 they would more swiftly be readied for combat. More immediately, antitank weapons should be distributed "to the whole country" - that is, apparently, civilians - in case enemy armor penetrated Israel's heartland, a startling suggestion that indicated the magnitude of the danger Dayan saw.

In Sinai, he said, the army could fall back if it had to as far as a line between El-Arish and Sharm e-Sheikh, two-thirds of the way back to the Israeli border, since the desert offered ample room for maneuver. On the Golan, however, there was no room for fallback. "We fight there until the last man and we don't fall back a centimeter. We must bring the battle there to a decision." To end the war on the Syrian front, he said, "all possibilities must be examined, even the wildest, including the bombing of Damascus." That afternoon, a Phantom squadron, flying via Lebanon, struck Syrian military headquarters in the center of Damascus. One plane was brought down by the city's thick air defenses.

Dayan urged the General Staff to reach artillery range of Damascus. In a note to Elazar, he said he would not be averse to reaching Damascus itself with ground forces if that were possible, so as to offset politically the pullback from the Suez Canal. (US secretary of state Henry Kissinger also encouraged Israel to move on Damascus for similar reasons. "When you reach the suburbs you can use public transportation," he quipped to Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz in Washington.)

Something of Dayan's wry humor had also begun to return. Told of Sharon's recurring demands to cross the canal, he said of the reserve general-turned-politician: "If I know Arik, he'll head straight for Cairo and try to get votes for Likud." Dayan would visit the battlefronts every day, getting as close as he could to the actual fighting. Officers who saw him repeatedly venture onto dangerous ground suspected that, consciously or unconsciously, he was courting a soldier's death, perhaps as penance.

When a paratrooper battalion crossed the Suez Canal at night in rubber boats and staked out a bridgehead on the eastern bank, Dayan did not wait for a pontoon bridge to be completed. He crossed with Sharon on a raft and toured the bridgehead perimeter. When he related to Meir that evening that he had been across the canal, she was astonished. "You were there?" she exclaimed. "Yes," he said. "And tomorrow the whole State of Israel will be there."

Chief of General Staff Elazar's steady nerves in the midst of the gloom around him was an inspiration for the rest of the army. His performance as a war commander merits him a distinguished place in military history. However, the blame laid upon him by the Agranat Commission was inescapable. He had accepted a strategic doctrine for the IDF that rested on disdain for the enemy, he had chosen to maintain a defense line on the canal itself which proved a major error and he had bowed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to intelligence chief Zeira's insistence that Egypt and Syria were not going to war.

In reflections near the end of the war, Dayan told the cabinet that the Arab soldiers had surprised him with their steadfastness. "They didn't run, not even when they were defeated in battle." As for Israel's soldiers, he said, they had fought too boldly. "When I'm on the other side of the canal, I'm constantly thinking, 'What are we doing here? This isn't the Western Wall.' We generally understand these things a generation later. We should not be shedding blood unless it's necessary." But the army had fought magnificently, he said. "We have three divisions in the south, the likes of which the Israeli people have never seen." The IDF could reach Cairo, he said, but he did not advocate it.

In the months after the war, as reservists began to return to civilian life, Dayan was the target of daily demonstrations. The last surviving member of the wartime cabinet, former health minister Victor Shemtov, 93, recalled this month the shouts of "murderer" directed at Dayan during funerals in military cemeteries. "I made a point of standing next to him to indicate that all of us in the cabinet were responsible for the government's decisions," he said. "But later, when I thought about it, it was clear to me that Dayan, the foremost security figure in the country, bore a responsibility greater than ours."

Legally and morally, that may or may not be. But Israel was fortunate to have had a soldier/statesman of Dayan's caliber at the pinnacle of its defense structure at the time of testing.

The Six Day War had imbued Dayan with a sense of Israeli power and Arab weakness. "Better Sharm e-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm e-Sheikh," he famously said, insinuating that Israel's security lay in territorial expansion, not ephemeral peace treaties. The Yom Kippur War sent him down another road. Accepting Menachem Begin's offer in 1977 to serve as foreign minister, Dayan played a central role in opening a dialogue with Cairo.

With the signing of its treaty with Egypt in 1979, Israel got peace and, for those interested in snorkeling, it got Sharm e-Sheikh as well.

The writer is the author of The Yom Kippur War.
abra@netvision.net.il

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A day of wrath, onslaught and sacrifice

Sep. 26, 2009
YEHUDA AVNER , THE JERUSALEM POST

At one time or another most of us are like Don Quixote, all more or less the dupes of our own illusions. Even the alleged infallibility of the Israeli intelligence community is not immune. On the eve of Yom Kippur 1973 its highest echelons took a holiday from reality when they predicted that hostilities were not in the offing. The very idea of an Arab onslaught was an affront to Jerusalem's divinity of military doctrine, which postulated that neither Egypt nor Syria was capable of waging renewed all-out warfare at this time.

 

An Israeli flag flutters over the recaptured east bank of the Suez Canal on Oct. 30,1973.

And much as actors at dress rehearsals reassure their anxious producers, "Don't worry, it'll be all right on the night," so did Israel's top brass reassure prime minister Golda Meir, "Don't worry the IDF will be ready on the day, should it ever dawn."

 

And dawn it did, and the IDF was not ready. The thinly held lines in the north and in the south were sent bleeding and reeling under the hammer blows of the combined Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack, splintering and crushing the army's defenses as if caught in the jaws of a closing nutcracker. A combination of highly effective preparations and deceptions, astutely planned to make them look like training maneuvers, would allow the Egyptians and the Syrians vast opening-day victories.

 

Along the Suez Canal, 450 IDF soldiers with 50 artillery pieces tried in vain to stop 100,000 Egyptian troops crossing the waterway under the covering fire of 2,000 artillery pieces and under the shield of one of the most extensive anti-aircraft SAM missile umbrellas in the world. Within a few days, two whole Egyptian armies had occupied the entire Israeli-held east bank of the Suez Canal. Simultaneously, on the Golan Heights, 1,400 Syrian tanks hurled themselves against Israel's 160. Its defenders fought ferociously at point-blank range, lurching and roaring and dying in an unequal entanglement of tanks and armored personnel carriers and howitzers and other lethal paraphernalia that culminated in a contest of wills which left the IDF hemorrhaging.

 

Imagine then the inexpressible astonishment of people at prayer on this Sabbath of Sabbaths hearing in horror the sudden wailing of air-raid sirens filling the sky; of rabbis announcing from their pulpits to their congregants in prayer-shawls to report forthwith to their reserve units; of military vehicles violating the awesome silence of the sacred day as they sped along normally empty streets on errands of high emergency; of radios blaring out code names for instant mobilization; and of cantors chanting the brokenhearted liturgical, Unetaneh tokef - "Who shall live and who shall die."

Hours after its outbreak defense minister Moshe Dayan gloomily walked into the prime minister's room, closed the door, stood in front of her and said, "Golda, do you want me to resign?"

 

Golda shook her head. "No, Moshe, under no circumstances."

"Then you should know this is not going to be a short war. The attrition is serious."

"How serious?"

"If our stocks are not speedily replenished, we won't be left with sufficient arms to defend ourselves."

Golda, shocked at this apocalyptic prospect from the man who purportedly embodied the Jewish state's undaunted defiance, gasped, "Are you saying that we'll ultimately have to surrender to the Syrians and the Egyptians for lack of arms?"

 

It was as if David had aimed with his sling and missed. The thought of suicide passed through her mind.

"What I'm saying," said Dayan, "is that if our stocks are not replenished at a fast rate we may well have to pull back to shorter, more defensible lines, particularly in Sinai."

 

"Pull back? Retreat?" Golda Meir's features went ivory white. She looked despairingly at her defense minister, covered her face with trembling fingers, rose to stare out of the window, and the more she pondered the more the color seeped back into her cheeks until, composure restored, she turned to face her defense minister and said, "Moshe, one way or another I'll get you your weapons. Your job is to bring us victory, mine is to give you the means to do so."

 

She picked up the red telephone and instructed her secretary, "Get me Simcha." Simcha Dinitz was the ambassador in Washington.

"Simcha," she said into the receiver, "Dayan is here with me. I want you to call Kissinger immediately..."

 

"But it's three in the morning here..."

"I don't care a damn what time it is. We need help today because tomorrow may be too late. We are in desperate need of an airlift."

"What do you want me to tell him exactly?"

 

"Tell him what he already knows - that huge military transports of Soviet aid are being supplied by sea and air to the Syrians and the Egyptians. Tell him that we're feverishly shopping around for foreign carriers to transport material to us, but they refuse. Tell him that the French and the British have chosen to impose an arms embargo on us when we are fighting for our lives. Tell him that we are losing aircraft to the Soviet SAMs at an intolerable rate. Tell him I'm ready to fly to Washington incognito right now to talk directly to the president myself if I have to."

 

BUT GOLDA did not have to. Washington understood that the direction this war was taking could drag America into a perilous confrontation with the Soviet Union, with consequences too terrible to contemplate. So, on October 14, the ninth day of the war, after the prime minister herself had spoken to Washington personally any number of times, president Richard Nixon telephoned secretary of state Henry Kissinger from his retreat in Key Biscayne, Florida, where he was taking refuge from the ever mounting legal and congressional pressures emanating from his skullduggery in the Watergate scandal.

 

Pundits claim that by this time the president was drinking heavily, was losing sleep and was so distracted by the shadow of possible impeachment that he was not fully focused on the Middle East inferno. Certainly, when he phoned Kissinger that day his words were slurred and rambling. However, as the following extracts indicate, when it came to the crunch he was crystal clear: The Russians had to be reined in, a massive airlift to Israel had to be launched forthwith and Israel must be enabled to win without Egypt being totally defeated:  

 

Former prime minister Golda Meir.

Nixon: Hi, Henry, how are you?

Kissinger: OK.

N: Look, we've got to face this... we've got to come off with something on the diplomatic front. If we go the cease-fire route, the Russians will figure that we get the cease-fire and then the Israelis will dig in and we'll back them as we always have. That's putting it quite bluntly, but it's quite true, Henry, isn't it?

K: There's a lot in that.

N: So we have to be in a position to offer them [the Russians] something. We've got to squeeze the Israelis when this is over and the Russians have to know it. We've got to squeeze them goddamn hard. And that's the way it's going to be done. But I don't know how to get that across now [to the Russians]. We've told them before we'd squeeze them and we didn't.

K: Well, we are going to squeeze them...

N: The other point I want to make, what are we doing on the supply side [to the Israelis]?

K: Basically what we are trying to do is to stop military planes [from shipping supplies] and put commercial charters in.

N: Yes, yes. As I say though, it's got to be the works. What I mean is - we are going to get blamed [by the Arabs] just as much for three planes as for 300 - not going to let the Russians come in there for - with a free hand. On the other hand, this is a deadly course, I know, but what I mean is, Henry, I have no patience with the view that we send in a couple of planes, even though they carry 60 some... My point is, when we are going to make a move it's going to cost us out there. I don't think it's going to cost us a damn bit more to send in more and - I have to emphasize to you that I think the way it's being handled in terms of our things - we are sending supplies, but only for the purpose of maintaining the balance [with the Russian re-supply to the Arabs] so that we can create the conditions that will lead to an equitable settlement. The point is, if you don't say it that way, it looks as though we are sending in supplies to have the war go on indefinitely, and that is not a tenable position.

K: Right. Right. If it hasn't been said before, we'll say it certainly today.

N: The thought is basically: the purpose of supplies is not simply to fuel the war; the purpose is to maintain the balance, which is quite accurate incidentally, and then - because only with the balance in that area can there be an equitable settlement that doesn't do in one side or the other. That's really what we're talking about.

K: Exactly. Exactly right.

TWO HOURS LATER

N: Hi, Henry. I got a fill-in [on the airlift]. I'm glad to know we are going all out on this.

K: Oh, it's a massive airlift, Mr. President. The planes are going to land every 15 minutes.

N: That's right. Get them there… If we are going to do it - don't spare the horses. Just let...

K: Actually, Mr. President, in the big planes, [cargo C-5 Galaxies] we have flexibility. We can fly Skyhawks in them.

N: Put them on the plane, you mean?

K: Yes. I don't think there is another way - no [European] country will let them overfly [nor grant refueling rights].

N: All right. How many can a big plane take?

K: It can take five or six.

N: All right - put some Skyhawks in; do that too. You understand what I mean - if we are going to take heat for this, well, let's go.

K: I think that is right. And I think, Mr. President, we can offer to stop the airlift if the Russians do after a cease-fire is signed.

N: Exactly. I think we should say - I think a personal message now should go. I mean you have been sending messages, but one should go from me to Brezhnev [the Soviet leader].

K: Everything I am sending is in your name.

N: Good. But I think he should know - now look here: the peace is not only for this area but the whole future relationship [with the Russians] is at stake here, and we are prepared to stop if you are, and we are prepared - you know what I mean. I don't know - have you got anything developed along those lines so that we just don't have…?

K: I have. I'm developing it now and I think I could call Dobrynin [the Soviet ambassador] and point it out to him.

N: Right. Right. Put it in a very conciliatory but very tough way that I do this [the airlift] with great regret - great reluctance - but that we cannot have a situation that has now developed, and that we are prepared to give tit for tat...Well at least I feel better. The airlift thing, if I contributed anything to the discussion it is the business that, don't fool around with three planes. By golly, no matter how big they are, just go gung ho.

K: One of the lessons I have learned from you, Mr. President, is that if you do something, you might as well do it completely.

 

And do it completely he did. Reenergized and reequipped, the IDF decisively moved over to the offensive. What had begun three weeks earlier as an ignoble retreat ended in an almost total rout of the Egyptians and the Syrians, and the humiliation of their patron, the Soviet Union. Israeli forces advanced to a mere 40 kilometers from the gates of Damascus, battled their way along the highway to Cairo, smashed two Egyptian armies, surrounded a third and were poised to strike a knockout blow when Nixon and Kissinger put the squeeze on, saying in effect, "OK, Golda! Good job! Enough! Stop! It's over!"

 

Exactly as they had envisaged in their cryptic telephone exchange a few weeks earlier, Egypt's residual forces were rescued from total annihilation and Israel was robbed of a decisive victory. This enabled president Anwar Sadat to declare to his people that he had wiped clean the shame of 1967, and Kissinger was enabled to fly into the region to fine-tune the war's outcome, using the currency of Israeli concessions to convince Sadat that Washington, not Moscow, was henceforth the arbiter of affairs in the Middle East, and that it paid to be a friend of the United States of America.

 

As more and more reservists were demobilized and came home their anger boiled over. It was an anger fueled by that matchless fury which Israelis reserve for their fallen heroes. Anti-government demonstrations proliferated. By April 1974, following the findings of the inescapable commission of inquiry, the once indomitable Golda Meir, the woman who was an epic embodiment of true legends and legendary truths, became so discredited in the eyes of her exhausted and grieving nation that she and her fellow ministers, morally crippled, were compelled to resign.

 

Two thousand six hundred and eighty-eight soldiers died in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In the Yizkor prayers of this holy day Israel pays homage to its fallen. For the bereaved there is no solace as they mourn and weep over their private plots of grief on this day and on every day.

The writer served on the personal staff of five prime ministers, including Golda Meir.

avner28@netvision.net.il