Main Trends in the Historiography of the Yom Kippur War: A Thirty-Year Perspective

Abstract

Although the Yom Kippur War was the most traumatic event in Israel's history and had an enormous impact on Israel's subsequent development, it has not yet received the academic attention it deserves. The article reviews the somewhat dialectical form in which the academic and non-academic discussion of three critical aspects of the war has developed since the mid-1970s: the mistaken intelligence estimate before the war, and the institutions and persons responsible for this failure; the causes of the intelligence fiasco; and the impact it had on the course of the war. Finally, the article raises a number of questions concerning the 1973 war that remain to be thoroughly explored, and urges that they be studied even though not all the empirical evidence is yet available.

Notes

 [1] In a poll conducted among 5,603 Israelis who were asked what were the best and the worst decisions in Israel's history, 64% regarded this decision as the worst (Yedi'ot Aharonot, 26 April 2002).

 [2] A rather rare exception is a volume published recently by the IDF publishing house: Golan and Shay, eds., Milhamah ha-yom . The volume contains a number of papers on central aspects of the war and is mostly based on the documents available to the IDF History Department. Only a few papers are of good quality, which is not surprising since most of the writers are officers in active service or were involved in the events they discuss and none of them is an active academician in an Israeli university.

 [3] According to the head of the IDF History Department, Colonel Shaul Shai, his department has so far conducted 40 studies on the war which have been distributed within the IDF. In addition, 30 articles on the war have been published by the department's researchers in the IDF journal, Ma'arakhot (ibid., 7).

 [4] See, for example, Bergman and Meltzer, Milhemet yom kipur. Bergman and Meltzer succeeded in obtaining important primary sources, including the communication transcripts of the head of the Southern Command, Major General Shmuel Gonen, and produced a fairly comprehensive account of the war on the Suez front. However, the book is a journalistic rather than an academic study and suffers from many weaknesses, including factual errors, lack of professional understanding of the available evidence, and a strong tendency to sensationalism. An academic student of the subject could probably have produced a better study on the basis of those sources.

 [5] Agranat Commission, Va'adat ha-hakirah (hereafter Agranat Report), 18–19.

 [6] Bartov, Dado ; Ben-Zvi “Hindsight and Foresight”; Betts, Surprise Attack; Dayan, Avnei derekh; Gross Stein, “The 1973 Intelligence Failure”; Handel, Perception, Deception, and Surprise; Handel, “Intelligence and the Problem of Strategic Surprise”; Hareven, “Disturbed Hierarchies”; Herzog, The War of Atonement; Lanir, Ha-hafta'ah ha-besisit ; Meir, My Life ; Nakdimon, Svirut nemukhah ; Shalev, “Modi'in be-mivhan,” 17–22; Shlaim, “Failures in National Intelligence Estimate.”

 [7] Tal, Bitahon le'umi; Zeira, Milhemet yom ha-kipurim.

 [8] Tal, “Ha-hatra'ah,” appendix, 1, 10, 11.

 [9] “A stenographic protocol of a discussion in the Prime Minister's residence on 18 April 1973” (Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh , 172–77; Bartov, Dado, 257–61).

[10] Zeira, Milhemet yom ha-kipurim, 80.

[11] Ibid., 81, 89, 95–97, 182 (emphasis in the original).

[12] Ben-Porat, Ne'ilah , 103; Bartov, Dado, 304; Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh , 270–71, 298, 302–3, 315, 327, 335, 347, 413–15, 420, 423.

[13] Ben-Porat, Ne'ilah, 259; Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 333–38.

[14] For a discussion of Zeira's unethical behavior as a major cause for AMAN's failure, see Bar-Joseph, “Israel's Intelligence Failure of 1973,” 594–609; Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 413–15. For a psychological explanation for Zeira's behavior, see Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure.”

[15] Amir Oren, Ha'aretz, 5 October 2003.

[16] Smadar Peri, Yedi'ot Aharonot, 22 October 2003.

[17] Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor ; Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa .

[18] Handel, Perception, Deception, and Surprise, 7–8.

[19] Handel, “War, Strategy and Intelligence,” 34.

[20] Ben-Zvi, “Hindsight and Foresight”; Ben-Zvi, “Threat Perception and Surprise,” 241–71.

[21] Betts, Surprise Attack, 982, 68–69. The main source of the American estimate—especially that of the CIA and the DIA—that war was unlikely was AMAN's war assessment.

[22] Shlaim, “Failures in National Intelligence Estimates.”

[23] Gross Stein, “The 1973 Intelligence Failure,” 41–46; Gross Stein, “Calculation, Miscalculation, and Conventional Deterrence II,” 79. See Bartov, Dado.

[24] Lanir, Ha-hafta'ah ha-besisit, 54–57.

[25] Ben-Porat, “Ha'arakhot modi'in,” 223–50.

[26] Hareven, “Disturbed Hierarchies,” 3–19. “The mishap” (aka, “the unfortunate business”) was the name given by the Israeli press to an Israeli attempt to hinder the conclusion of the Anglo-Egyptian accord to end the British military presence in the Suez Canal sector in 1954 by sabotaging American and British installations in Cairo and Alexandria. For a discussion of the episode, see Teveth, Ben Gurion's Spy , and Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States, 149–254.

[27] Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure,” 80.

[28] Ibid., 81–91.

[29] el-Gamasy, The October War ; el–Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez , 213; Heikal, The Road to Ramadan , 4–6, 18, 24.

[30] Ze'evi, “Ha-hona'ah ha-mitzrit.”

[31] Zeira, Milhemet yom ha-kipurim , 124–25.

[32] Ronen Bergman, “Ha-yom tifrotz milhamah” (Today war will break out), Ha'aretz, Weekend Magazine, 17 September 1999; Bregman, Israel's Wars , 112–17; Bregman, A History of Israel , 142–48; Blum, The Eve of Destruction , 330–32; Bergman and Meltzer, Milhemet yom kipur , 177–89.

[33] Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 489 n. 302.

[34] Asher, Lishbor et ha-kontzeptziyah , 153–54.

[35] Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 211–13.

[36] Ben-Porat, Ne'ilah, 114–16.

[37] Hybel, The Logic of Surprise, 100.

[38] Levran, “Hafta'ah ve-hatra'ah,” 17–21; Aharon Levran's interview in Yedi'ot Aharonot, 24 September 1999.

[39] Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , 126–27.

[40] Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 354–55, 361.

[41] Agranat Report, 18–19.

[42] Gai, Bar-Lev , 256.

[43] Adan, Al shtai gadot ha-Su'etz , 72.

[44] Hofi, “Hazit ha-tzafon,” 98.

[45] Ben-Porat, Sihot, 123.

[46] Dayan, Avnei derekh , 684–85.

[47] Herzog, The War of Atonement , 270–75.

[48] Kober, Hakhra'ah , 334–35.

[49] Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes, 124–25, 130.

[50] Wald, The Wald Report , 100–1.

[51] Shai, “Ha-hafta'ah,” 85.

[52] Zeira, Milhemet yom ha-kipurim , 69–70.

[53] Gazit, “Ha'im efshar hayah limno'a?” 12. For a similar claim by Gazit, see Parker, ed., The October War , 130–31.

[54] Tal, “Ha-hatra'ah,” 7–8.

[55] Bar-Joseph, Ha-tzofeh, 115–16, 189–93, 307–8, 327, 333–35, 362–67, 370–72, 344, 351–52.

[56] For two valuable accounts of this state of affairs during the first hours of the war, see Or, Eleh ha-ahim sheli; Sabato, Adjusting Sites . Or was the commander of Brigade 679; Sabato was a gunner in one of the Brigade's tanks.

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Uri Bar-Joseph

Uri Bar-Joseph is a Senior Lecturer at the International Relations Division, University of Haifa, Correspondence to: Uri Bar-Joseph, The Division of International Relations, The School of Polical Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel; Email: [email protected]