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Tim Cribb

The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East

by Abraham Rabinovich

Schocken Books $220

Israel scored a breathtaking victory in the Six Day War of 1967, driving back the armies of the Arab world. It humiliated Egypt and took the Sinai, all the way to the Suez Canal. Syria was routed from the Golan Heights. Jordan surrendered the West Bank.

More important than the territorial gains that gave it defensive depth for the first time since its creation in 1948, Israel won the psychological high ground - its air force controlled the skies and its fast-moving armour was unmatched on the battlefield.

Israel believed its own propaganda and forgot the Judaic proscriptions against arrogance.

Its people would pay a terrible price for that arrogance in a two-week, two-front war that began on October 5, the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, in 1973.

The Egyptians, armed with Soviet- supplied anti-tank weapons, had prepared to take 20,000 casualties in the initial attack across the Suez Canal; in the event 280 were killed. Syrian tanks broke the Israeli lines in the Golan Heights. Israel, its armour unable to break the infantry and well-deployed surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) keeping its air force at bay, held to its crumbling ramparts.

By the time a ceasefire had been secured, Israel had suffered 2,686 dead and 7,250 wounded. On the Arab side there were officially 8,528 dead and 19,540 wounded. Israeli estimates put Arab losses at nearly double, and mostly Egyptian. Relative to its population, Israel lost three times as many men in 19 days than the US lost in Vietnam in more than half a decade.

The outcome of the war left both sides 'with honour intact and a desire not to taste of war again'.

Abraham Rabinovich, a journalist for the South China Morning Post and the Jerusalem Post who reported from the Golan, has written extensively on Israel's wars, and this book, which describes the fight in often cinematic detail, explores the realpolitik of a conflict that, as his subtitle asserts, transformed the Middle East.

Rabinovich draws on already published works, as well as the war diaries of the military units involved, but his unique strength lies in some 130 interviews he conducted with  Israeli soldiers, from generals to privates.

He captures magnificently the madness of war. Imagine a 200-metre bridge being towed over desert sand dunes by a brigade of Centurion tanks; or a gazelle's sudden appearance in a gun's sights amid the bedlam of battle.

The stories of Rabinovich's subjects add a layer of suspense. Not all of his soldiers survive - 19-year-old Sergeant Yadin Tannenbaum, a flautist hailed as a musical prodigy and praised by Leonard Bernstein, was killed in the opening hours as his stalled tank continued to fire on overwhelming Egyptian forces.

There are heroes aplenty on both sides, though Rabinovich, unable to gain access to Arab documentation or interviews, can only report in passing the courage of the Egyptian and Syrian soldiers in the face of witheringly accurate Israeli fire. In the ceasefire that followed - and while United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger engaged in 'shuttle diplomacy' that would establish US hegemony over the Middle East - armistice broke out along the Sinai front. Israeli paratroopers and Egyptian commandos brewed coffee together and played backgammon and soccer.

Rabinovich marshals his evidence that the Yom Kippur War was inevitable, and necessary. Egypt's President Anwar Sadat needed a victory to restore Arab honour, without which peace would not last. Israel was purged of its arrogance, emerging as a healthier and more vigorous society.

Only the question of a Palestinian homeland remains unresolved. The solution might rest with Ariel Sharon, the most interesting of Rabinovich's generals, and now prime minister  - a man mindful of his place in history.



The Yom Kippur War