by Prof. Hillel Frisch
Nearly a half-century after the Yom Kippur War, it is instructive to note how the war is remembered and understood by the chief protagonists.
IDF tanks crossing the Suez Canal during the 1973 War, photo via IDF Flickr
To Israelis, it is the Yom Kippur War. To
Egyptians, it is the October (Tishrin), Ramadan, or Freedom War. Fought
45 years ago, the war retains a significance in both societies far
beyond many other wars. In Israel, the 1973 War is a source of both
contention and pride. In Egypt, too, it is a source of pride – and more
importantly, it is a source of justification for Cairo’s decision to
stop making war against Israel from that point on.
Nearly a half-century later, it is instructive to
note how the war is remembered and understood by the chief protagonists.
A comparison between the well-written and well-documented Wikipedia
entries on the war, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, is a good way to
gauge the basic assessments of the war in Jewish and Arab societies.
Of course, the comparison is only valid if the two
entries are not mere translations of one another. They are not, as can
be easily ascertained by the different sources they cite. The Hebrew
entry cites works in Hebrew and English, including sources like the
memoirs of Sa’ad al-Din Shazli, the Egyptian chief-of-staff, written in
Arabic and subsequently translated into English. The Arabic entry cites
sources in English and Arabic, including sources written in Hebrew and
subsequently translated into English. The Arabic entry includes one
source in Russian.
Both entries thus suffer the same deficiency in
that they were written by experts who did not know the languages of both
protagonists. This is characteristic of many scholarly works on the war
and an obstacle to objectivity.
That the entries were written by experts is beyond
doubt. Both entries are well-written; are organized into appropriate
sub-sections; provide ample political background; and analyze political
differences within the political decision-making elite (the Arab, mostly
on the Arab side; the Hebrew entry on the Israeli side) and their
effects on strategy and battle outcomes. They both judiciously discuss
the ramifications of the war for subsequent political outcomes. The
entry in Arabic provides US army maps in English archived at the West
Point military academy.
So academically impressive are the entries that
were one to translate the Arabic entry into Hebrew for the first week of
the war – borrowing the differing titles of the entries, the Yom Kippur
War for the Hebrew entry, the October War for the Arabic entry – the
average Israeli reader would scarcely be able to tell that the source
had been written in Arabic.
This is not the case from the end of the second
week of the war entry on the Egyptian front, when the Egyptians began
facing setbacks. The claim that a US Air Force R-71 spy plane flew over
the entire Egyptian-Israeli front on August 13 and subsequently provided
information to the Israeli side as it prepared for its
counter-offensive is not mentioned in the Hebrew entry.
While the Hebrew entry amply documents both the
massive Soviet airlift to its Egyptian and Syrian allies and the US
airlift that began on October 14, the Arabic entry devotes only one
paragraph to the Soviet airlift compared to four paragraphs on the
American airlift to Israel. The aid from the US is described “as the
entry of the United States into the war with the newest weapons in
saving Israel,” while the Soviets before the war made sure to provide
their Arab allies with relatively old equipment. This sentence is
completely detached from the otherwise objective description of events
of the Israeli counter-attack that began on October 15 and ended in the
crossing of Israeli forces into the western side of the Suez Canal and
the encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army on its east side.
The short lapse into political fiction by the
author(s) of the Arabic entry can be adduced to political conformity
with the official line that the setbacks were due to the intervention of
the US, not to the shortcomings of Egyptian strategy and performance.
The entry spells out the debate between the Egyptian generals at the
front (chief-of-staff Shazli and the commanders of the Second and Third
Armies) and the minister of war, Ahmad Isma’il. Elsewhere, the entry
states that for political reasons, Sadat wanted an Egyptian presence on
the eastern side of the Nile, even if this meant sacrificing the Third
Army.
As for the ramifications of the war, according to
the Arabic entry, they extend all the way to the “freeing of Taba,” the
small piece of territory south of Eilat that Israel relinquished in
1989, as well as the Oslo Accords and the Jordanian peace treaty. In the
Hebrew entry, the major ramifications appear to have been internal: the
pain of massive losses; the Agranat Commission; and the 1977 Ma’hapacha
elections, in which, for the first time in the history of the Jewish
state, Mapai and its allies were replaced by a Likud government. Taba,
the Oslo Accords, and the Jordanian peace treaty are not mentioned in
the Hebrew entry.
The entry in Arabic, written with an Egyptian
bent, was keen to stress that Egypt did not make peace with Israel alone
and that the war facilitated peace-making by other Arab actors. A brief
section identifying the Palestinian issue as the key problem yet to be
resolved has no parallel in the Hebrew entry.
Both entries, interestingly, end with sections on
the memorialization of the war. The Hebrew entry discusses Israeli and
Egyptian culture, while the Arabic entry is amplified to include Syrian
culture as well.
Overall, a comparison of the two entries reveals
that judiciousness and reason prevail on both sides as they try to
understand this important event. This gives reason for hope that the
long era of (cold) peace between Israel and Egypt will last.
An earlier version of this article was published in The Jerusalem Post on October 10, 2018.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/yom-kippur-war-wikipedia/
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