Egypt is these days celebrating its victory at the 1973 October War with Israel in which the Egyptian armed forces destroyed the “invincible army” myth. The celebrations feature symposiums, lectures and various cultural functions attracting Egyptian intellectuals as well as members of the armed forces, especially those who took active role in defeating the Israeli army.
Since the end of the war in 1973, new important information and historical facts, which are of great significance and would go down as important chapters in Egypt’s history, have come light.
At one of the functions held a few days ago, Retired Gen. Abdul Moniem Saeed, one of the October War heroes, revealed facts never known before about the Israeli government’s war plans and the never-ending plots by the Jewish state for controlling the entire region. Had those plans materialized, the region would have been plunged into yet another major catastrophe.
Gen. Saeed said until Oct. 1972, just one year before the war, the Egyptian military plan for confronting Israel was a purely defensive one known as Plan 2000. There was an air of military relaxation in the region with no movement in sight by any of the front-line states. However, the prevailing situation had cast its shadows on Arab-Israeli conflict.
On Oct. 24, 1972 the Egyptian leadership under the late President Anwar Sadat reached the conclusion that there was no alternative to war if Sinai was to be liberated. Plan 2000 was substituted with an offensive one known as Badr. The leadership succeeded in concealing the secret and the Israeli and Western intelligence agencies failed to discover anything about the plan or the true intentions behind it. That led to the state of military relaxation prevailing further.
What was never known at that time was the fact that Israel was preparing an offensive plan targeting all neighboring Arab states. Israel was to exploit the state of no war and no peace and the military and diplomatic stalemate in the region as well as the unlimited support it was receiving from the United States. They gave their plan the codename “The Black Belt” and defined its objectives in the following:
1. Occupying South Lebanon.
2. Expanding in the Syrian Golan Heights, which Israel had occupied in the 1967 War, and drawing new borders with Syria that would be under permanent Israeli control.
3. Building a new line of defense inside Jordan modeled on the Bar Live line in Sinai.
4. Launching a pre-emptive air strike to destroy the Egyptian air force, including planes, airports and air defenses as happened in 1967.
5. Turning Sinai into a nuclear test zone for Israel so the peninsula would remain under permanent Israeli control and prevent any future Egyptian moves to restore it.
The Black Belt was presented to Prime Minister Golda Meir by the then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in the presence of the chairman of the joint chief of staff and the head of military intelligence. Meir agreed to the plan after the military intelligence chief assured her that Egypt was incapable of crossing the Suez Canal and that the Egyptian Army was demoralized and had lost self-confidence. Meir, however, asked whether the plan could be accelerated to launch the attack before the Israeli elections scheduled for November of that year.
After hasty studies, Dayan told Golda Maier that the date for the execution of the plan has was set for Oct. 8, 1973, immediately after the Jewish Yom Kippur celebrations. It was a timing that no one would expect.
The Egyptian plan was for Oct. 6 and the Israeli plan for Oct. 8.
On the morning of Oct. 5 Israeli reconnaissance planes spotted some Egyptian movements which were promptly reported to the political leadership. The Israelis thought then that some information about the Black Belt might have leaked to the Egyptian side. Israel Foreign Ministry rushed to inform the American side asking them to tell the Egyptians that Israel had no intention of attacking Egypt. Washington conveyed the message to the Egyptian foreign minister who was visiting the US at that time. However, the time difference between Washington and Cairo did not allow the foreign minister enough time to inform Cairo and he was only able to do so until after 2:05 p.m. Cairo time, by which time war had already started.
