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’Sic transit gloria’ In the runup to this year’s holiday season, every visit to a post office counter brings an offer from the teller of a purchase of a packet of Rosh Hashana greeting cards. Once upon a time, holiday greeting cards were sold on the street by elderly men wearing skullcaps. In Jerusalem, outside the main post office, the curb of Jaffa Road was lined with little stalls, all flogging elaborately kitschy greeting cards, most of which, following the Six Day War, featured the visage of Moshe Dayan or generals like Yitzhak Rabin and Motta Gur. This form of military hero worship and popular folklore vanished after October 1973. The generals, the supermen of 1948, 1956, and 1967 who had revived Jewish pride worldwide, were for the first time perceived as being all too human, all too fallible and, at times, all too flappable — even unheroic. In October 1973, as bad news followed bad news from the Egyptian front, an initial image shock was the unforgettable appearance of defense minister Moshe Dayan on television, then screened austerely in black and white. Haggard and sweating profusely, Dayan looked nothing like his usual, forceful self. As was his wont, he invoked a biblical phrase, promising to smite the enemy hip and thigh. This statement, delivered without any conviction, was received with disbelief. To me, Dayan’s October appearance made an even worse impression than did that of Levi Eshkol in May 1967, when the prime minister and minister of defense stuttered over a radio address prior to the Six Day War. Eshkol was later to complain that he had been handed an unread text; in 1973, Dayan was later to complain that he was sweating because he had been seated directly beneath hastily installed lighting. But it was obvious to all of us that he was badly rattled, a shadow of his former self. The damage to Israeli morale was enormous. It also became obvious that the commander of the southern front, Shmuel Gonen-Gorodish, who had been the first to reach the canal in 1967, was badly rattled as well; bad news travels fast in the army. As the Egyptian forces streamed across the canal, Gorodish, who felt betrayed by his minister and the IDF’s intelligence chief, was in a state of near-shock. All this was soon revealed in the press with the very public recall to arms of former chief of General Staff Haim Bar-Lev, brought in "to bring order‘ and sort out the quarreling division commanders on the southern front; a lieutenant-general, he outranked them all. In the press, the famously unflappable Bar-Lev was quickly praised as ’a calming influence." Nevertheless, all the photos from his HQ published at the time reflected nothing but grim anxiety. A FEW months before the war, at age 47, I had been transferred from an infantry battalion in which I had served for nearly 25 years to a civil defense unit specializing in rescue from collapsed buildings. For reasons still unclear to me, this training was considered by the IDF as less arduous and less dangerous than being in the infantry; the opposite was the case. In October 1973 my unit was far from the front line, stationed in a Jerusalem school. Shortly after Sharon’s crossing of the Suez Canal and the battle of the "Chinese Farm," my Haga unit buzzed with the news that I had been summoned to Dayan’s HQ in Tel Aviv. My commander was enormously impressed. Mystified, I was ferried to the Tel Aviv Kirya and found myself at a briefing, sitting across from the desk of the great man. There were only some eight or nine journalists present. The great man now bore no resemblance to the wretched creature I had seen on TV a few weeks earlier. He was the more familiar, tough-looking Dayan, brimming with self-confidence as he elaborated the dramatically improved military situation to us with the aid of the large ordnance map on the wall behind him. The Third Egyptian Army was cut off in Sinai. We were going to be taken on a military junket across the canal and to a key mountain feature behind Suez City (still in Egyptian hands) known as Jebel Ataka. (It turned out to be an exciting trip and I photographed Egyptian soldiers on our side of the Canal while standing on their side.) The IDF, Dayan demonstrated, sat astride a highway that led to Cairo. In his business-like delivery, he made no mention of his generals. He spoke to us as if all this miraculous change had taken place solely under his aegis. As surprise at this intimate briefing at the very heart of events wore off, I began to take in my fellow journalists. None of them were military correspondents. All of them were columnists, opinion formers. The penny dropped. It was clear that my presence there was due to the fact that I was the political cartoonist of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s biggest daily; at the time, my cartoons appeared daily and also in the Friday satirical section of Yediot’s political and literary supplement — a section that Dayan, on more than one occasion, had dubbed "Fatahland," a term previously applied to South Lebanon. We were clearly there to bear witness to the altneu Dayan, arisen Phoenix-like from the ashes.
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