|
|
Yom
Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War (also known as the October War and
Ramadan War), was fought from October 6 (the day of Yom
Kippur) to October 22/24, 1973, between Israel and a
coalition of Egypt and Syria.
Table of contents
1 Summary
2 Background
3 The War
Summary
President Nasser of Egypt died in September 1970. He was
succeeded by Anwar Sadat, considered more moderate and
pragmatic than Nasser. However, to counter internal
threats to his power and improve his standing in the Arab
world, Sadat resolved to fight Israel and win back the
territory lost in 1967. The plan to attack Israel in
concert with Syria was code-named Operation Badr (the
Arabic word for "full moon").
Egypt and Syria attempted to regain the territory under
Israeli occupation by force. Their armies launched a
joint attack – the Syrian forces attacking
fortifications in the Golan Heights and the Egyptian
forces attacking fortifications around the Suez Canal and
on the Sinai Peninsula. The troops inflicted heavy
casualties on the Israeli army. After three weeks of
fighting, however, and resupplied with ammunition by a
large-scale U.S. airlift operation, the IDF pushed the
forces back beyond the original lines.
Background
This battle was part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a
conflict which has included many battles and wars since
1948. In the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel had
occupied the Golan Heights in the north and the Sinai
Peninsula in the south, right up to the Suez Canal.
In the years following that war, Israel erected lines of
fortification in both the Sinai and the Golan Heights. In
1971, Israel spent $500 million fortifying its positions
on the Suez Canal, a chain of fortifications and gigantic
earthworks known as the "Bar-Lev Line", named
after Israeli general Haim Bar-Lev. After the
overwhelming victory against the massed Arab armies in
1967, and having emerged undefeated from the three-year
long War of Attrition with Egypt in the south and several
border incidents with Syria in the north, the Israeli
leadership had grown somewhat complacent. Flush with a
sense of their own overwhelming military superiority,
they failed to recognize the aggressive effort made by
their enemies, Egypt in particular, to rearm and
reorganize their armies into a far more disciplined
fighting force that could challenge the IDF.
In 1971 Anwar Sadat stated that if Israel were to
unilaterally withdraw from all land it conquered during
the 1967 war, Egypt would consider a comprehensive
ceasefire or truce. Israel was reluctant to withdraw from
so much territory without any guarantee of a peace treaty
from Egypt and, at that time, with no chance at all of a
peace treaty with any of its Arab neighbors. In response,
in 1972 Anwar Sadat publicly stated that Egypt was
committed to going to war with the State of Israel, and
that they were prepared to sacrifice one million Egyptian
soldiers. From the end of 1972 Egypt began a concentrated
effort to build up its forces, receiving MiG-23s,
SAM6s6s, RPG-7s and especially the 'Sagger' ATGM
(Anti-tank Guided Missile) from the Soviet Union) and
improving its military tactics.
In 1972 and 1973 Sadat publicly declared again that Egypt
would go to war with Israel unless it unilaterally
withdrew from all the territory it conquered in 1967. In
1973 Sadat went on a diplomatic offensive to convince
African nations, European nations and the Soviet Union to
back his war against Israel. Since the Soviet Union was
trying to better relations with the US through d?tente,
the Soviet Union refused to accede to Sadat's demands for
yet more weapons and public backing for a war against
Israel. In response, Sadat expelled some 20,000 Soviet
advisers from Egypt.
In an interview published in Newsweek (April 9, 1973),
Sadat again threatened war with Israel. However, as this
threat had been repeated many times since 1971, the
Israeli military did not take it seriously. Blinded by
the success of the Six-Day War, the Israeli civilian
leadership and military intelligence were unable to treat
the possibility of an Arab attack seriously. Several
times during 1973, the Arab forces conducted large-scale
exercises that put the Israeli army, the Israel Defence
Forces (IDF), on the highest level of alert, only to be
recalled a few days later. The Israeli leadership already
believed that if an attack took place, the Israeli Air
Force would be able to repel it easily – and now
they became increasingly convinced that the attack would
simply not take place.
Most analyses of the Egyptian intentions in the war
assume that they involved the reconquest of all or most
of the Sinai, which was indeed the publically stated
objective. However, certain Egyptian writers later
maintained that Sadat's instructions to his generals were
only to capture a strip of a few kilometers wide on the
east side of the Suez Canal. As Israeli military
archives, and Egyptian documents captured by Israel
during the war, started to become available, a number of
Western historians have begun to support this version.
For example, this is the opinion of Dani Asher, whose
book was published by the Israeli Ministry of Defence in
2003. Absolute certainty may need to wait until the
Egyptian archives are opened.
The War
Certain other Arab and Muslim nations were involved in
this war, providing additional weapons or financing.
Exact amounts of support are uncertain. According to some
sources, Iraq sent a squadron of Hunter jets to Egypt.
During the war itself, Iraq sent a division of 18,000 men
and a few hundred tanks, which were deployed in the
central Golan; these forces, including some of Iraq's MiG
fighter aircraft, did play a role in the war. The nations
of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait gave financial aid and sent
soldiers to join in the battle. Saudia Arabia sent 3,000
Arab soldiers to Syria, which engaged the Israeli forces
on the approaches to Damascus. Between 1971 to 1973,
Qadhafi's Libya sent Mirage fighters to Egypt, and it
gave Egypt some $1 billion to arm Egypt for war. Algeria
sent squadrons of fighters and bombers, armored brigades,
and dozens of tanks. Tunisia sent over 1,000 soldiers,
who worked with Egyptian forces in the Nile Delta. Sudan
sent 3,500 soldiers; Morocco sent three brigades to the
front lines.
In the Golan Heights, the Syrians attacked the Israeli
defenses of two brigades and eleven artillery batteries
with five divisions and 188 batteries. Over three days of
fighting, the 7th Israeli brigade in the north (commanded
by Yanush Ben-Gal) managed to hold the rocky hill line
defending the northern flank of their headquarters in
Nafah. The battle of Latakia, a revolutionary naval
battle between the Syrians and the Israelis, took place
on October 7, the second day of the war, resulting in a
resounding Israeli victory that proved the potency of
small, fast missile boats equipped with advanced ECM
packages. The battle also established the Israeli Navy,
long derided as the black sheep of the Israeli services,
as a formidable and effective force in its own right.
To the south, however, the brigade nicknamed Barak did
not have a natural obstacle to defend from, and was badly
mauled as the Syrians pushed inwards towards the Sea of
Galilee. At one point, the only obstacle between the
Syrian attackers and Nafah was a single tank (the so
called Zvika force). However, the tide in the North soon
turned, as the arriving Israeli reserve forces were able
to contain the Syrian offensive. The tiny Golan Heights
was too small to act as an effective territorial buffer,
unlike the Sinai Peninsula in the south, and the Israelis
gave the northern front first priority for their
still-mobilizing reserves. By October 11, the Syrians
were pushed back beyond the 1967 frontier.
In the following days, the Israeli forces pushed into
Syria. From there they were able to shell the outskirts
of Damascus, only 40 km away, using heavy artillery. A
ceasefire was negotiated on October 22, based on a return
to pre-war borders.
In response to the Israeli success and the US support of
Israel, on October 17 the Arab states declared an oil
embargo against the west.
The Egyptians burst across the Suez Canal and had
advanced up to 15 km into the Sinai desert, with the
combined forces of two army corps. They were opposed by
the Israeli "Sinai" division, which they
overcame with relative ease and whose counter-attacks
they repelled. The Israeli counter-attacks in air and on
land were unsuccessful because of the new anti-tank and
anti-aircraft missiles the Arabs had.
However, the Egyptians had not planned to develop on
their initial success, and their forces were now thinly
spread at the Canal, vulnerable to a counter-attack. On
October 15, a division led by Ariel Sharon managed to
breach the line between the Second and the Third Egyptian
armies and to create a bridgehead; on the night of
October 16/17, an Israeli bridge was deployed on which
passed the divisions of Avraham Eden (Bern) and Sharon.
They wrought havoc on the lines of supply of the Third
Army stretching south of them. A ceasefire was then
negotiated following pressure from the USSR and the
United States.
The ceasefire did not end the sporadic clashes along the
ceasefire lines nor did it dissipate military tensions.
On March 5, 1974, Israeli forces withdrew from the
canal's west bank, and Egypt assumed control. Syria and
Israel signed a disengagement agreement on May 31, 1974,
and the UN Disengagement and Observer Force (UNDOF) was
established as a peacekeeping force in the Golan.
U.S. efforts resulted in an interim agreement between
Egypt and Israel in September 1975, which provided for
another Israeli withdrawal in the Sinai, a limitation of
forces, and three observation stations staffed by U.S.
civilians in a UN-maintained buffer zone between Egyptian
and Israeli forces.
Text is available
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
|
