Summary
The Yom Kippur War, in Lahav’s account (Chapter 13): the simultaneous surprise attack by Syria and Egypt launched at two o’clock on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, in which more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers were killed in three weeks, and whose unpreparedness produced the Agranat Commission and the end of the post-1967 euphoria (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2552-2791).
Details
- Israel suffered its first defeat: by the war’s end it recovered most territorial losses and reestablished military superiority, but the sense of invincibility melted and the euphoria of 1967 gave way to renewed fears of another Holocaust; for two days the government misled itself and the public expecting a repeat of 1967 (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2552-2646).
- Simon Agranat’s son Ronnie fought in the Golan and was wounded; Agranat wrote the Yurman tort opinion during the war clinging to its argument “no matter what”, with Gilbert and Sullivan’s spring-flowers refrain stuck in his mind (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2552-2646).
- Critics located the failure not in the generals’ “conception” alone but in the worldview of the post-1967 years: public opinion viewed the status quo as beneficial and change as welcome only on Israel’s conditions, gave little credibility to Sadat’s resolve to restore Arab honour, and held an image of Arabs as weak, helpless and incompetent (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2647-2760).
- The war signified an era’s end: on 18 November 1973, the day Attorney General Shamgar completed the commission mandate’s consultations, David Ben-Gurion suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 2586-2646).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Agranat Commission, David Elazar, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir