The 1973 Syndrome

[bemildred]

A few days after the outbreak of the war, I spoke to old Israeli friends. They live in the Tel Aviv area, and are therefore not directly exposed to the missile attacks in the north. Like most Israeli families, though, they have friends and relatives in the north, some of whom they now host in their home. “Are you winning?” I asked. “No,” my friend said. “We can’t win. For years we all knew that the military was not training — that the state was cutting military budgets and closing down bases. We knew it was just a question of time before this would happen.” “What is your mood?” I asked, hearing gravity in his voice. “We can’t believe that we don’t even have the ability to stop an organization like Hezbollah. It’s not even a state, you know. Where is our great Israeli army? This feels like 1973 all over again.” I’ve heard that comparison again and again from other Israelis in the past few days. And I’ve heard a great deal of disappointment — in a political leadership that is not leading and a military leadership that is not performing.

I was a child during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but I remember it well. Israel was not defeated or destroyed in that war, but the Arab armies’ ability to wage a broad surprise attack and seriously challenge the Israeli military shocked us all. The failure to anticipate the war and to obviate severe losses quickly became known as the mechdal, (great oversight). This negligence on the part of military intelligence eventually led to a commission of inquiry, which in turn forced the dismissal of much of the Israeli Defense Forces’ leadership and the resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan. This smashed all illusions of the Israeli public that leaders could be trusted and that victory could always be rapidly assured. It robbed them of the triumphalism bred by the 1967 war, in which the Israeli army stunningly defeated its enemies in a mere six days. 1973 was a rude awakening, reminding Israel of its vulnerability. The war now being waged on Israel’s northern cities is likewise stirring such an awakening.

The Israeli public, two million of whom are refugees from their northern homes or hunkering down in shelters, is quietly questioning its leadership and its military prowess. As a nation full of pride for its military — a true military of the masses in which service is compulsory — even a modicum of doubt in victory is a tremendous rupture for the Israeli psyche. This is a nation of soldiers, parents of soldiers, and friends of soldiers, and so a loss of faith in the army is a loss of faith in oneself. But such is the reality in Israel. “Where is the army of 1967?” is a common question. In the absence of visible results from the incursion into Lebanon, under the strain of continuous rocket fire, the public is growing more and more concerned. They fear that complacency overtook the army in post-Oslo years; that real regional dangers were tragically overlooked in favor of local policing, leaving soldiers more comfortable at checkpoints than in battlefields. They fear that Palestinian claims and the need to suppress Palestinian terror emanating from Palestinian-controlled territories overshadowed the threats of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran — the current-day menaces lurking on the border. As Professor Zeev Sternhall wrote recently in Haaretz newspaper: “the average citizen, who is not working day and night in the corridors of power and is not sunning himself near the generals’ command rooms, is at a loss. Is this how we are restoring the IDF’s power of deterrence? … If several thousand guerrilla fighters do constitute an existential danger to a country with a strike force and weaponry that are unparalleled in this part of the world, how is it that during the past five or six years we heard nothing to that effect from government leaders?” In other words, once again there seems to have been a mechdal, a grave, fatal oversight on the part of the military and the government.

National Review