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Veteran Post correspondent Abraham Rabinovich discussed with Pnina Baumgarten his new book, The Yom Kippur War: The epic confrontation that transformed the Middle East (to appear in January by Schocken Books, New York). JP: What prompted you to write the book? AR: It began with an article I wrote for the Jerusalem Post Magazine on the war’s 20th anniversary, about the battle for the northern Golan. I had been up there early in the war as a reporter and had not understood anything beyond what my eyes told me. And that was very little. In doing the anniversary piece, I learned for the first time something of what had really happened. This experience was repeated on the 25th anniversary when I wrote an article on the battle for the southern Golan. I realized that even these "in-depth" pieces did not penetrate very deeply. What was missing was the connectedness of things. The story of the Egyptian front was full of holes and conflicting accounts. The Yom Kippur War was an epic tale, but what we had was a more or less random collection of episodes. What did you set out to do in the book? To write a narrative of the war that connects the pieces, not just those on the Israeli side. And to tell the story as much as possible through recognizable individuals. This means following the deliberations of the politicians and the high command and getting out into the field with the troops. By tying the pieces together, I hoped not only to make the story clearer but to give it resonance. A decision in a command bunker leads a specific tank or air crew to a life-or-death encounter a few hours later. We’re often able to follow that. The best previous attempts to write overall accounts were the books by Chaim Herzog and the Insight team of the London Sunday Times, but both were written within a year or two of the war. They were remarkably good given when they were written, but we know a lot more today about what actually happened. How come there have been so few attempts since to write the history of the war? Perhaps because the story was perceived as too monumental or too difficult to access or too tinged with trauma or too unresolved. But after 25 years, it was time. How long did it take to write the book? I thought I could do it in three years. It took five. The book is more than 500 pages long. Do you have any scoops? The narrative of the war is the scoop. Give us some idea of the research involved. Most of the relevant material is in Hebrew and much of it has become available only in the last few years, like the 2,000-page Agranat Report. There are excellent books and articles on various aspects of the war by Israeli military historians and intelligence officers. Unit histories were important in reconstructing battles. There are useful memoirs by Israeli and Egyptian military and political figures. I also interviewed more than 130 people, from generals to tank crewmen. Did anybody refuse to be interviewed? Only two or three. Unfortunately, one of them was Ariel Sharon.
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