SATURDAY WAS Yom Kippur, and almost automatically my thoughts, like those of everybody else who was around at the time, went back 34 years, to that Yom Kippur.
I was sitting at home, deep in conversation with a friend, when the sirens suddenly started to wail.
The sound of sirens is always frightening, but sirens on Yom Kippur are something from another world. After all, this is a day of total silence, the day when not a single car moves on the streets of Israel.
Outside, a flurry of unusual activity. Military vehicles speeding by, people in uniform rushing out with kitbags on their shoulders, the roar of airplanes overhead.
We gathered round the radio, which is normally silent on Yom Kippur. It announced that a war had started.
I was not called up, but on the following days I saw the war from several different angles. I was at the time a member of the Knesset and the editor-in-Chief of the Haolam Hazeh news magazine, but the Knesset was on vacation (it all happened in the middle of an election campaign) and the editorial staff of the magazine was almost incapacitated, since most of its members had been called up. Rami Halperin, a young photographer who had just been released from army service and started to work for the magazine, did not wait to be called up but rushed to join his former unit, in time for the battle for the “Chinese Farm”, where he was killed.
A well-known German TV director came to the country and asked for advice about filming the war. While we talked, the idea came to him of making a film about me covering the war.
That way I saw all the fronts. We were searching for Ariel Sharon in the south and followed him to the Suez Canal. A few kilometers from the canal we came under heavy Egyptian shelling. We were stuck in a huge traffic jam — a whole division with its troop carriers, cannon, tanks, ambulances and whatever else was on the move towards the canal. On the way we entered a mobile field hospital, where a military doctor, Ephraim Sneh — now a prominent member of the Knesset — was operating.
Next we hurried to the Northern Front. We passed large numbers of burned-out tanks, theirs and ours, and reached a village about a dozen kilometers from Damascus. Somehow, I remember a conversation with a small boy about cats.
In between we inspected a refugee camp near Nablus and the Old City of Jerusalem. From every coffee shop blared the voice of the Egyptian president, Anwar Al-Sadat, explaining his war aims. The members of the German team were flabbergasted. They remembered stories from World War II and found it incredible that the occupied population was allowed to listen freely to the enemy radio.
But the event that is engraved in my memory — and in the memory of most Israelis who lived through that time — did not happen on the front.
We were sitting in a neighbor’s apartment, when an image appeared on the TV screen: Dozens of Israeli soldiers crouching on the ground, hands over bowed heads, with terrifying Syrian soldiers towering over them.
Never before had we seen Israeli soldiers like this: Dirty, unshaven, obviously frightened, miserable as only prisoners of war can be.
There was silence in the room. At that moment the myth of the Israeli superman, of the invincible Israeli soldier, which had dominated our lives for a generation, died. This myth was the ultimate victim of the Yom Kippur War.
True, the Israeli Army proved itself. In three weeks of war it snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. At the beginning of the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was muttering about the “destruction of the Third Temple” (meaning the state of Israel), at the end, the army was threatening both Cairo and Damascus.
But the legend of the invincible Israeli Army was shattered. The picture of the helpless and humiliated Israeli prisoners refuses to be eradicated from memory. Right after the war, the Battle of the Generals broke out. Their quarrels destroyed the prestige of the military leaders, who until then had been the idols of the public. It has never fully recovered.
This psychological rupture was followed by a political break. The generation of Golda Meir left the stage, the generation of Yitzhak Rabin took its place. Only three and a half years later, the unbelievable happened: Menachem Begin, the eternal opposition leader, assumed power.
Begin’s main achievement, the peace with Egypt, was a direct result of the Yom Kippur War, which the Arabs call the Ramadan War. The crossing of the canal and the breaking of the Bar-Lev Line restored Egyptian pride, and that made peace possible. I was one of the first of five Israelis to reach Cairo after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, and I vividly remember the hundreds of posters hanging over the streets: “Sadat — Hero of War, Hero of Peace!”
In Israel, too, many remember Begin as a hero of peace. After all, he was the first Israeli statesman to make peace with an Arab country — and not just any Arab country, but the most central and important one. In spite of all that has happened in the meantime, this peace has held.
Some people are berating Bashar Al-Assad and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia for not following Sadat’s example. Why don’t they dare to come to Jerusalem?
This line of reasoning is based on a misreading of the facts. Sadat did not just decide to come. It did not happen the way he described it so many times: That he was coming back from a visit to Europe and, while flying over Mount Ararat, was suddenly inspired to do something unparalleled in history: To visit the enemy’s capital while still in a state of war.
The truth is that before the visit, emissaries of Sadat and Begin had held secret meetings in Morocco. Only after Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan had promised, on Begin’s behalf, to give back all the occupied Egyptian territories, did Sadat make his decision.
Where is the Israeli leader today who is ready to promise Assad the return of all the Golan, to promise Mahmoud Abbas a withdrawal to the Green Line?
Before the Six-Day War, the British historian of the Crusades, Steven Runciman, told me that we live in a paradox: “Israel was founded in the land that once belonged to the Philistines, while the Palestinians, who got their name from the Philistines, live in the land that belonged to the ancient Kingdom of Israel.” The borders between the state of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were laid down by the war of 1948.
Since then, the state of Israel has been working hard to eliminate this paradox.
Everything significant that is happening nowadays is a part of the Israeli effort to take over the West Bank and to turn it into a part of the state of Israel. All else is but foam on the water.
