The Right to Be Unafraid

When it is raining on you and you are tired and soaked to the bone, always remember that the enemy is also getting wet
—Yitzhak Sadeh, founder, Palmach

On May 1, 1948, Major David ‘Dado’ Elazar of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, stood on the rooftop of the San-Simon mon­astery on a south Jerusalem hill and watched his 200 men whittle down to 15, with 85 dead, the rest injured. About to order a retreat, Elazar decided to wait a bit longer. Soon, the call came that the Arabs were pulling back. That round was won. Elazar, of such legendary tenacity, would end his military career after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when he was forced to resign as the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

On May 28, 1948, another young commander of the Palmach, Yitzhak Rabin, stood on Mount Zion watching the Jewish Quar­ter in Jerusalem’s Old City burn. The irony of Israel’s moment of birth—that Jews had a country of their own in their ancient homeland but not a foot inside the holy city—was lost on nobody, least of all Rabin. Israelis had to get back there.

There was never any ambiguity or ambivalence about the word ‘Defense’ in the Israeli military’s English name because ‘Haganah’, in Tsva ha-Hagana le-Yisra’el (IDF’s Hebrew name), meant just that. Israel was founded in the toughest post-war neighbourhood on the planet and would need to be defended from Day 1 because, while the rest of the world had largely rec­ognised it, its immediate neighbours had not, banding together to erase it from the map. Two decades later, they were preparing to try again till stopped in their tracks, literally, by a pre-emptive strike that amounted to an unparalleled gamble in modern war­fare. “With nothing to lose, they wagered everything on a single, spectacular throw of the dice, doing what no nation has done before or since: use the entire air force on a single tactical mis­sion, a single mission to destroy Arab air forces on the ground,” writes Uri Kaufman about the Six-Day War of 1967 in his new book, Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East, timed for the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

That 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War will now live in ignominy, its solemnity turned into sacrilege. Echoes of history repeating itself—by Israel being blindsided—are not a cliché. In fact, Israel was already mobilising, albeit at the last minute, by the time war had begun at 2PM on October 6, 1973 (it was expected to begin at 6PM as per intelligence). Fifty years later, on October 7, there was not a hint of anticipation of trouble across the Gaza fence, someone going to the extent of allowing a music festival practically on the border. The biggest damage from Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians and soldiers will be psycho­logical. For, this country born in desperation, to provide a home to people who had just survived the Holocaust, and declared liable for extermination by its neighbours, had spent the last 16-odd years becoming fully ‘normal’—by making FEAR just another word, not a defining characteristic of the national psyche, not­withstanding the periodic rockets from Gaza.

A little less than 2,500 civilians were killed in the 1948 war which overlapped with the civil war between Jews and Arabs after the British withdrawal. About 20 Israeli civilians were killed during the Six-Day War in 1967, mostly in Jerusalem. There were very few civilian casualties in 1973 as the theatres of war were far from population centres. Almost 200 Israelis died during the First Intifada (1987-93). The Second Intifada (2000-05) ended with more than 1,000 Israeli deaths, 700-800 of them civilians. It’s in com­parison to these major outbreaks of hostilities—treating 1948 as an outlier given the fledgling state of the country—that the scale of the horror on Saturday, October 7, becomes clear. About 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, dead, killed in the first few hours of Hamas’ attack. Death is not a statistic. But to make sense of it, deaths are counted. It rarely helps.

To survive, Israel has needed five things. Memory: never for­getting what happened because it must never happen again. Preparedness: eyes and ears among the enemy and a readiness to mobilise. Realism: knowing how to separate the knowable from the unknowable and the actionable from the unaction­able. Resourcefulness: thrift, using everything available, and turning everything into a weapon. Tenacity: since the enemy would also be getting wet, holding on for a bit longer and mak­ing him blink first.

To survive, Israelis have depended on four institutions. IDF: to protect the borders of the state and by extension everybody and everything within it. Mossad and AMAN (military intelligence): as the eyes and ears getting authentic and actionable intelligence on time. Shin Bet: to take care of internal security. A chink in any of these would be the gap the enemy would come in through, as the Egyptians did between the maozim (fort-like mounds made from the displaced silt and sand) on the banks of the Suez Canal in October 1973.

In his Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East (2003), Jeremy Bowen was only summing up history’s judg­ment that the “[f]ailure to capture the Old City… was the biggest Israeli defeat of the 1948 war.” Israel’s borders were not secure, its people were huddled together on the Mediterranean coast, and lived in constant fear of the next mobilisation of the much bigger Arab armies. In 1967, the Arabs, by mobilising against Israel and forcing it to pre-empt their attack, gave Israel exactly what it needed: Israel became four times larger, with an undi­vided Jerusalem in its control. Opening up Jerusalem and the mingling of the populations released economic energies and both Israel and the Palestinian territories experienced unprec­edented growth. However, the victory soon turned into a curse. As Michael B Oren argued in his Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2002), “Rarely in modern times has so short and localized a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences. Seldom has the world’s attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifi­cations. In a very real sense, for statesmen and diplomats and soldiers, the war has never ended.” The threat to Israel was now within its borders too, the new lands becoming an ulcer that wouldn’t cease to burst, exploding in the First Intifada 20 years later and then again in the Second Intifada when Israelis became scared of stepping out of their homes, with night club and bus bombings in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv becoming regular fare in news from West Asia. Eventually, Israeli resilience, the famed tenacity, won and people went about their lives with a nervous alertness matched only by their determination.

The War of Attrition that began after June 1967 and devastated Egypt, counting among its victims Gamal Abdel Nasser’s health and life, Black September and the Munich Massacre of September 1972, the two Lebanon Wars (1982 and 2006), the unsettled issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, etc all came out of the box of troubles opened by the Six-Day War which, significantly, killed off the very physical threat to Israel’s geographical exis­tence. But if Israeli history is also a history of overcoming fear, then its darkest hour was October 1973. Consistent intelligence from high-placed sources inside Egypt were ignored as were ‘signs of war’, including constant enemy exercises leading up to an actual mobilisation, while the listening devices planted inside Egypt were not turned on till too late. Yet, Israel was saved when Golda Meir overruled Moshe Dayan and sided with Elazar on a full mobilisation after a midnight meeting in London between Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and the ‘Angel’, Israel’s top source in Cairo who was none other than Ashraf Marwan, Nasser’s son-in-law and Anwar Sadat’s right-hand man. Questions about all that had gone wrong and nearly gone wrong, how Israel was caught by surprise, would be asked by the Agranat Commission—and they are still being asked today.

The establishment did not fail Israelis in 1973. It didn’t through 75 years of the State of Israel’s existence. That happened on Sat­urday, October 7, 2023. During the War of Attrition, the problem was that while the Arabs had the equipment thanks to the Soviets, they did not know how to operate them, and Israel had soldiers who could fight but lacked weapons. With Lyndon B Johnson’s help, IDF got its jets and Israel invested in technology to gain the advantage—above all, the certainty that it would always have advance warning (although it did not quite work in 1973 as humans erred in ignoring the warnings). Israel’s technological superiority only improved over the next decades. But the Yom Kippur War convinced Israel that IDF was no longer the only military worth the name in the Middle East, just as it convinced Sadat that a change in direction was needed. The logic behind the Camp David Accords of 1978 has fed into the Abraham Accords of today—coexistence had to be a reality. Live together, and grow together, never mind irreconcilable differences. That translates as freedom from fear, better lives for all.

Hamas and Hezbollah and their Iranian patrons remain the last adherents of Nasser’s Three Nos from the September 1967 Khartoum Conference: No negotiations with Israel. No recogni­tion of Israel. No peace with Israel. When Hamas becomes quiet, it is buying time. The most important weapon in their arsenal is fear. Israel has won every war it has fought, including the Inti­fadas, because it freed itself from fear since it could not afford it. Jewish History, it is said, became Memory—a moment frozen in time in 70 CE when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. But it’s a long memory. And it is not all dark. It always rebuilds and the righteous among nations always marvel at what the tiny Jewish nation can do.

Golda MeirHezbollahIsrael At WarIsrael historyIsrael-HamasMoshe Dayan