Ibrahim Moiz looks back on a rare moment of Arab and Muslim unity in Yom Kippur War against Israel in 1973.

The Autumn 1973 War with Israel: Redemption and Realignment

Judaism’s holiday of Yom Kippur in the year 1973 happened to fall within the Islamic month of Ramadan. Early on that morning, the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula (captured, in a shockingly swift six-day spree six years earlier and fortified by a line of forts on the Suez Canal’s east bank) received an unwelcome wakeup from Egyptian warplanes. This was followed by a hail of artillery fire behind which enemy engineers worked frantically to bridge the canal. The dazed Israelis barely had an opportunity to gather themselves before, beyond the artillery firewall, two corps of Egyptian troops steadily thundered across the canal to dismantle the Israeli forts. News came from far to the north, in the Asian section of the Israeli occupation, where Syrian warplanes had fired off their own opening salvo to herald an assault by commandos and tanks toward the Golan Heights. For Israelis, who had taken the six-day conquests of 1967 as a signal of Arab inferiority and weakness, this coordinated assault on two fronts was as dizzying for its existence as anything else: there was no doubt that the Arab armies had hit back with a vengeance.

Background

In truth, there had been ample warnings that a state less arrogantly drunk on its own sense of supremacy could have heeded. These included an explicit, secret warning weeks earlier from Jordan’s monarch Hussein bin Talal, then at a low ebb in his relationship with other Arab states. In August 1973, Egypt’s top military command had hosted its Syrian counterparts for a coordination conference, chaired by the Egyptian general Bahieddin Noufal. Attendants included the respective defence ministers, Ismail Aly and Mustafa Talas; army commanders Saadeddin Shazly and Yusuf Shakour; airforce commanders Hosni Mubarak and Naji Jamil; navy commanders Fouad Zikry and Fadl Husain; military spymasters Ibrahim Nassar and Hikmat Shihabi; operational directors Abdel-Ghany Gamasy and Abdul-Razzaq Dardari; and the commander of Egypts’s recently revamped air defence corps, Aly Fahmy, whose artillery firewall would play such a critical role in the war’s opening round.

The Syrians had arrived in disguise, but any intelligence service worth its salt might have been expected to have noticed the flurry of movement. Over the summer and early autumn of 1973 Arab envoys and officers had shuttled frenetically between different capitals: the ensuing war would see not only Egypt and Syria but the majority of Arab countries from Morocco and Algeria to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well as Pakistan and even a historically pro-Israel Iran, play a role. Even Hussein would, for purposes of public respectability if nothing else, be compelled to participate.

Egyptian ruler Anwar Sadat’s initiative for a morale-boosting war ran against Arab convention after the 1967 war, which had focused on a Soviet-assisted rearmament and a slow-burning border war with Israel over 1967-70 in which Palestinian fidayin militants played a more offensive role that emboldened them to carry out the majority of attacks against Israel even after a truce between the Arab states and Israel in 1970. A call for a quick war over Sinai thus surprised the Egyptian military, which Sadat had to thoroughly shake up in order to get his way.

Sadat sent his security advisor Hafez Ismail on several trips to persuade his American counterpart Henry Kissinger, whose government was Tel Aviv’s single biggest enabler, to pressure an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai; Kissinger’s casual arrogance convinced Sadat that war was the only answer. To plan it and simultaneously exert his control over the Egypt’s military, he recalled both navy commander Zikry and defence minister Ismail, who had been sacked during the border war in 1969. Ismail, a cautious military bureaucrat suffering from a terminal cancer, had a long-running friction with dashing army commander Shazly that would resurface during the war, but along with the stonily professional director Gamasy they worked well enough to plan the most successful Arab army campaign against Israel yet.

Early successes

On that bright October morning, then, Egyptian sappers led by Gamaleddin Aly scurried to bridge the Suez Canal. It was breathless, dangerous work as Israel worked up a response, which among others killed Gamaleddin’s second-in-command Ahmed Hamdy. Once the canal had been forded, two Egypt corps led by Saadeddin Mamoun and Abdel-Monem Wassel, as well as a taskforce led by Omar Khaled at the Sinai’s northern tip and Palestinian paramilitaries under the command of Mansour Sharif, dismantled the Israeli garrisons on the east bank. Fighting was extremely fierce, as at Qantara where Mamoun’s lieutenant Fouad Ghaly had to fight Israeli troops from building to building. The artillery firewall played a key role in covering the Egypt troops against the Israeli airforce; when a forward brigade led by Mahmoud Shoaib tried to venture beyond its cover into the passes leading to central Sinai, it was sufficiently bruised to discourage any further ventures, and the Egypts opted to consolidate their impressive gains.

On the Golan front, meanwhile, Syrian cavalry and commandos, backed by Palestinian paramilitaries under the command of Tariq Khadra, had similarly stolen a march on Israeli forces in the mountains. The Syrians’ northern prong briefly wrested control of the snow-capped Mount Hermon, which had served as a prime vantage point for its occupants, and engaged in fierce combat at what Israelis came to call, because of the major bloodshed there, the Vale of Tears; among the slain was Syrian field commander Omar Abrash. To the south, Syrian forces led by Taufiq Jahani pressed toward the Jordan river. So unprepared were the Israelis that defence minister Dayan, boastful scourge of many an Arab army for a quarter-century and the man whose overconfidence had led to the debacle, was flung into a panic, telling anybody who would listen that Israel – the “Third Temple”, as he put it – was on the verge of destruction.

Lost momentum and new dangers

Yet at this moment of apparent triumph, the Syrian command simply halted, remaining static for a critical period: Jahani’s lieutenant at the vanguard, Shafiq Fayyad, had nimbly maneouvred his way to the Jordan river’s east bank but simply stopped there. The reason for this halt is not clear, but one factor in Syrian hesitation was the heavily politicized nature of their military leadership after years of infighting, which precluded initiative. Critically bolstered by massive American reinforcement, Israel recovered to mount a bruising counterattack. Their navy had already had some success raiding Syrian shifts off the Ladhaqia coast, and now the rest of the military caught up. The fearful Israeli airforce struck the Syrian headquarters itself, while their cavalry in the Golan region broke out and outmaneouvred the Syrians in the Qunaitra region, making for the road leading north toward Damascus. Having been apparently poised on the brink of victory, Syria was now fighting for its own life.

Damascus was fortunate that at this stage, its rival regime in Iraq sent in major cavalry reinforcements under the command of Abdul-Munim Lafta, Fathi Amin, and Dakhil Hilali. Amid major fighting between Saasaa and Mount Qasioun, a stone’s throw from the Syrian capital itself, the Israeli attack was halted. But by then the damage had already been done on the Sinai front, where Assad’s requests for Sadat to relieve his forces threw the painstakingly assembled Egypt bridgeheads into turmoil.

Having lost the element of surprise and well aware of their vulnerability beyond the firewall to Israeli warplanes, army commander Shazly and several of his lieutenants in the field protested that the line must hold firm. Eventually, though, Sadat’s stolidly loyal defence minister Ismail overruled them and ordered several brigades into the Sinai passes. As expected, the result was a disaster: some thousand Egypt soldiers, including division commander Ahmed Zummur and brigade commander Noureddin Abdel-Aziz, were slain. Organization was rendered more difficult when corps commander Mamoun suffered a heart attack and had to be replaced with Abdel-Monem Khalil. Still more seriously, the disruption to the Egypt formations had opened a breach in their lines that the Israelis now exploited, with the infamously brutish Ariel Sharon returning from retirement to take the lead in crossing the canal and circling around west.

A supplementary Israeli air attack on Mansoura suffered an unexpected defeat against Abdel-Rahman Nasser’s airforce wing, but momentum on the ground was unambiguously turning against the Egypts. Through intense fighting between commandos and tanks, the Israelis shouldered their way west across the Suez Canal, beating aside Egypt cavalry led by Abdrabbennaby Hafez and Ibrahim Oraby. Helmy Badawy, sent to reinforce them, fell into a trap. Sharon now turned north toward Ismailia, aiming to cut off Khalil’s supplies, while a second force led by Bren Adan turned south and made for Suez city. This would not only encircle the southern corps – whose commander Wassel, at the frontline, was cut off from his troops, so that Ahmed Badawy had to stand in. More ominously, it also put Israeli forces within striking distance of Cairo, just forty miles to the west.

Oil and Blood

As the scale of the Israeli ambitions became clear, their Arab opponents scrambled to recover. On the ground, Khalil and Ismailia commandant Ismail Azmy managed to repel Sharon’s assault on the city. Internationally, the enormous supply of American weapons to Israel galled not only anti-American states such as Muammar Qaddhafi’s Libya but even historically pro-American states such as Saudi Arabia, whose monarch Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz made good on a longstanding threat to punish Washington’s uncritical support of Israel by cutting off Riyadh’s oil exports. Bolstered by other Arab states and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, then led by Algerian bureaucrat Abderrahmane Khene, the ensuing oil embargo caused a major jolt to the international economy, not least in the heavily energy-dependent American and European states and drove home the value of the region’s long-exploited natural resources as a political weapon.

Perhaps more than anything, it was that economic threat that prompted Israel’s enablers to call for a ceasefire at the United Nations. But the war was not yet over; hoping to bolster their negotiating position by fully encircling the Egypt southern corps, Adan’s Israeli cavalry drove into Suez city. It was a mistake: the city’s commandant, Youssef Afify, had prepared for such an eventuality, army troops and local volunteers pouncing on the Israeli tanks entering Suez’s streets to carve them up. It was on this relatively uplifting note that the October 1973 war ended in a stalemate: both the Arab and Israeli sides had attacked to some extent but strained themselves to the limit in this bloodiest of duels.

Aftermath

The unprecedented cooperation between Muslim states – Libya to Saudi Arabia, Iraq to Iran, Morocco to Pakistan – might have promised a bright future, and indeed the mid-1970s was a period of renewed optimism. Yet in fact the 1973 war marked the peak of such cooperation: the Muslim states realized they had agency and clout but proceeded to compete fiercely over the spoils. Before the decade was out, Faisal had been assassinated; Assad had violently rounded on the Palestinians in Lebanon’s civil war and on his own Muslim subjects at home; Libya had mounted ungainly invasions of Egypt and Chad; Iran had resumed its feud with Iraq while competing fiercely with the Saudis for American patronage. Nothing, however, epitomized the waste of the 1973 highwater mark than Sadat’s decision, just five years later, to sign a peace treaty with Israel as part of a wholehearted tilt toward the American camp.

In retrospect, the war had for Sadat not been so much about Israel or indeed boosting morale as it had been to tilt Cairo toward the United States and elevate himself in Washington’s eyes, a concealed aim whose eventual materialization drew the protest of such military lieutenants such as Shazly and Gamasy. Even American diplomats such as Kissinger and their Israeli favourites were pleasantly surprised at how much Sadat was willing to barter away, but repaid him by painting him as a realistic visionary – an impression that was clearly not shared at home, where he was assassinated to widespread public indifference in 1981. From then on, and very much against the run of a frequently suppressed public opinion, Cairo has had an almost uninterrupted run as an American vassal, tyrannical at home and craven in Washington. It is a path that, especially in our day, has tempted more and more Arab regimes.

All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.