Who lost the Yom Kippur War?

• Author: AMOTZ ASA-EL
• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Now, though it's been nearly half a century, the events of October 1973 are stirring renewed debate.

"The Yom Kippur War was an unparalleled victory," wrote Haaretz columnist Israel Harel. "Where else in the annals of warfare," he asked, "did numerically inferior forces manage to turn a war's tide and within 16 days rout two big armies? Where did the war end? In the outskirts of Tel Aviv or in the outskirts of Cairo and Damascus?" asked the former settler leader, who was among the paratroopers who crossed the Suez Canal.

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Hebrew University's Shlomo Avineri concurred. "A distorted image of the war has taken root in Israeli discourse," wrote the dean of Israel's political scientists. Yes, the war started off badly, but wars should be judged not by how they begin but by how they end. "The IDF's ability to overcome the shock of surprise and encircle a large part of the Egyptian army that crossed the canal – ultimately led to the burial of the Arab dream of annihilating Israel," he wrote.

True, responded military historian Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, the IDF won, but only because Egypt made its war's lone mistake, when it thrust armored brigades deeper into the Sinai, where they were crushed. Even that, however, did not offset the erosion of the IDF's power, and Israel's surrender to the foreign pressure that prevented the Egyptian Third Army's annihilation, opined Gat.

The war's blow to Israel's morale was compounded by an economic "lost decade," and a new dependency on the US. Moreover, Anwar Sadat realized war's futility already in 1970, so his strategic choice to make peace with Israel was not the fruit of Israel's performance in the war, wrote Gat.

Historian and former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami went further. Sadat was the war's victor, he argued, because he achieved the goals he set when he went to that war, namely, peace with Israel and defection from Moscow's orbit to Washington's.

The common denominator between these insights is that they ask who won the war, which leads to some combination of Egypt, Israel and the US. However, the war also had three losers, and their tales are no less telling, maybe more.

ONE LOSER was the Soviet Union.

Yes, Soviet anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles proved effective, but Soviet jets and tanks were again defeated, as they were in 1967. Worse, the largest foreign buyer of...