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The big one "Of war,‘ said Seneca, ’men ask the outcome, not the cause." That might have been true in his day, when war was mostly the business of rulers, and defeat left few survivors to fathom the gaps between prewar visions and postwar realities. In the modern era, the probing of war’s causes — as part of a broader effort to demonstrate their criminality, their insanity, or (less often) their justice — has become a cultural bon-ton, an intellectual obsession, and a political axe. The Jews, to be sure, have been in the business of postwar soul searching for thousands of years. War-related disasters generated a culture of remorse, powerfully symbolized by the biblical Lamentations and the prayer "because of our sins we have been exiled from our land," that Jews chant until this day. In this era, the Jewish war-probing tradition has of course undergone a dramatic transformation in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which generated an immense corpus of testimonial, academic, literary, and philosophical literature. Yet in contrast to past calamities, when Jewish writers took it as a given that their misfortune was part of a divine plan, the Holocaust was usually followed by a search for secular conclusions. The Yom Kippur War was followed by a national bout of introspection and self-flagellation almost reminiscent of what followed the Temple’s destruction. The media’s extensive treatment of the war’s anniversary has no parallel in the country’s treatment of other events in its past, including the "unforgettable" Six Day War. This is understandable, considering that in fall ’73 Israel’s very survival was threatened, and the entire population was shocked by the initial setbacks in the battlefield, some of which are described here in an excerpt from Abraham Rabinovich’s new book, The Yom Kippur War. It takes a collective trauma to shake a society so deeply, and in Israel — as in so many Jewish settings before the establishment of the Jewish state — nothing is more sobering than a massive loss of life. The loss, within three weeks, of more than 2,500 men — including one case of two pilot brothers, and another of 11 members of a single kibbutz — shook Israel to its foundation. Moreover, the Israeli emotional response to the war was more than the ordinary Jewish reflex to attribute calamity to sin. In its post-’67 arrogance — vividly recalled in this issue by combat-officer-turned-activist Motti Ash-kenazi — Israel really had committed that mother of all war-related sins: Thou shalt not underestimate the enemy. More even than the physical toll, the psychological shock transformed Israeli history, politics, culture and society beyond recognition. Militarily, says political scientist Yehezkel Dror, the war persuaded Anwar Sadat that he could never hope to defeat the IDF. Israel had to be accommodated — a realization that soon generated the first-ever peace agreement between an Arab country and the Jewish state. But as historian Martin van Creveld also notes, Israel’s conventional military strength persuaded our enemies to invest their energies in other tactics. Politically, the war signaled the beginning of the Labor establishment’s downfall. The public’s loss of faith in the country’s founding elite would take three years to gel. But the era when Labor would always win elections and merely debate which coalition partners to select, and at what price, had effectively ended. The first harbinger of that transformation came in 1974, when the National Religious Party raised demands that transcended its traditionally narrow agenda of religious legislation and funding. Now the party demanded that the West Bank be settled in what, as Yossi Klein Halevi contends, would arguably indicate the passing of pioneering Zionism’s baton from secularists to believers. In the same vein, the war saw for the first time the rise of the fighting Hesder yeshiva soldiers, who are represented in this supplement by award-winning novelist Rabbi Haim Sabato. Socially, that new breed of Talmudist-warrior would soon after the war fuel and man much of the settler movement, which for better or for worse, has shaped much of Israel’s post-’73 political setting. Theologically, religious Zionism emerged from that war emboldened in its belief that Jewish secularism was but a passing phenomenon, and that the moment in which observant Jews would lead Israel was rapidly approaching. The war also transformed the Israeli press. As recalled here by Meir Ronnen, a media that once had all but worshiped the military would overnight lose its respect for officialdom. Within three years it would do the once unthinkable: It would unseat a prime minister following a series of corruption revelations. Today’s intense interest in the war reflects not only the shock of ’73, but also the perplexity of ’03. Now, as then, a conflict we did not anticipate is shaping Israel’s political, emotional and moral consciousness at every level, and in ways that are still not clear. More than just a distant memory, 1973 serves as a mirror on the present, showing our face to ourselves.
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