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Re-engineering history For Egypt, the October attack was a strategic initiative on the scale of Israel’s building of the Dimona reactor The 1973 war and its partner in history, the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, were an anomaly in a region which is generally characterized by its failure to change. Sadly, Israel has failed to learn the lessons it could have drawn from that brief but fateful era. The full significance of the Yom Kippur War can only be seen when it is placed in the context of Arab-Israeli interactions before and since, and when the deeply-entrenched features of the Middle Eastern landscape are properly appreciated. Accordingly, I will consider the war from three perspectives: o As a stand-alone event accompanied by the peace treaty with which it is inextricably linked, the symmetry between Egyptian and Israeli achievements and failures in the war having brought about the peace (as opposed to the lack of any such parity on the Syrian front) o As one in a series of events that changed Arab-Israeli realities. o As embedded within deep historic processes full of constants shaping the present and future Middle East within a global context. WITH THE Yom Kippur War, the Egyptians threw a spanner into the works of history in an attempt to extricate themselves from a situation they found intolerable. The Middle East provides additional illustrations of this strategy — some successful and some not — such as the building of the nuclear reactor at Dimona, the US-Israeli peace offers during the Clinton-Barak period, the Palestinian initiative in the first intifada, and the shared Israeli-Palestinian initiative at Oslo. The Yom Kippur War constituted a turning point in history, shattering the illusion abroad and at home that Israel was undefeatable in battle, while simultaneously demonstrating the robustness of Israel’s defenses and making it clear that the chances were very low of any combination of Arab states emerging victorious in a conventional war. In Israel, the extreme self-confidence engendered by the Six Day War was replaced with intense scrutiny of the army’s performance. The public at large and the political elite in particular were traumatized by having widely accepted beliefs proven wrong. This made the country receptive to an agreement which earlier might well have been rejected. The same happened in Egypt, where mixed success and failure in the war motivated it to search for peaceful ways to change the unbearable fact of Israel sitting on the banks of the Suez Canal within striking distance of Cairo — a situation which proved itself immune to change by force. The direct consequence was the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, which was a much more radical change in the history of the Middle East than the Yom Kippur War itself; though inextricably linked to it — both, in fact, constitute a single extended event. TO REALIZE the significance of the agreement — together with that of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem and his address to the Knesset — one must bear in mind that until that time the general consensus (including intelligence estimates) was that no peace treaty and certainly no visit by a major Arab leader would take place for at least another generation. Having served at the time as an adviser in the Knesset, I can testify to the widespread feeling that a miracle was taking place. As a result, even though the peace with Egypt proved to be quite cold, the idea that peace can be achieved in our time became real both for Israel and other Arab countries. Thus, the Yom Kippur War together with the peace agreement was a change for the better in the history of the Middle East. What might have happened if Egypt had not attacked, or if it had been rapidly and totally defeated? It is unlikely that history would have turned out very different. The chances that a peace treaty could have been achieved without the terrible costs of war are low. The probability that Israel could have held onto all of Sinai with Egypt de facto accepting the situation is even smaller. Most likely Egypt would have attacked sooner or later, and the IDF — with the blinders caused by its overconfidence — would initially have suffered serious losses but would have recuperated quickly. In sum, in the absence of enlightened, innovative statecraft — which were improbable given the consequences of the Six Day War, with Israel feeling invincible and Egypt shamed by defeat — it is likely that a war was inevitable. What was happening internationally in the background during the Yom Kippur War, including US involvement as further described in Henry Kissinger’s recent book Crisis, and Russia’s behavior, among others, do not change the basic picture. Nor did the war make much difference to the world’s geo-strategic situation. Even the peace treaty did not make much difference globally, other than reducing the chances of another major conventional Middle East war into which the superpowers could have been drawn. QUITE A different picture emerges when the Yom Kippur War and the ensuing peace treaty are put into the context of preceding and subsequent events. Among the many events preceding the Yom Kippur War, three are of paramount significance. The establishment of the State of Israel, the Six Day War, and the country’s public identification as a nuclear power. Other important events, such as the Sinai Campaign and the War of Attrition are less significant and need not be considered here. The establishment of the State of Israel and the results of its War of Independence brought about a metamorphosis of Middle Eastern, Jewish, and global realities and initiated a radically new historic process. The hypothetical question of what the Middle East, the Jewish People, and global geo-strategy would look like had there been no Zionist movement and no State of Israel invites wild speculation but cannot be answered. But what is certain is that though the Middle East would be extremely different, it would still be an underdeveloped area torn by tensions between traditional Islam and modernity. The Six Day War, while not as historically momentous as the establishment of the state, was more of a rupture in history than the Yom Kippur War and the Egyptian peace treaty. It provided Israel with strategic security against conventional war and essential bargaining assets for achieving peace. It also caused profound ideological, mass-psychological, and political transformations within Israel itself. The existential importance of the Six Day War can be fully grasped only by considering what would have happened if a Yom Kippur War-style surprise attack had been launched at an Israel which had only the pre-1967 borders. A reading of deep Middle Eastern historic processes leads me to conclude that sooner or later Israel would have suffered such an attack, with no assurance of being victorious. Thus, while the consequences of the Six Day War provoked Egypt to attack, I believe that a massive attack was well-nigh inevitable. The results may well have put Israel’s very existence at risk, or forced it to use weapons of mass destruction with the concomitant grave results. MORE AMBIGUOUS are the consequences of Israel’s nuclear posture and image, which were reinforced by the attack on the Iraqi reactor in 1981. The long-term consequences of this are not yet fully known. On the plus side, potential attackers have been deprived of any hope of destroying Israel without being totally annihilated in return, thus helping to avoid total wars — the Yom Kippur attacks had limited objectives — and helping to bring about peace agreements. But Israel’s nuclear policy may have contributed to a nonconventional arms race, though I believe that Arab and Islamic nations would in any case have tried to achieve nonconventional capabilities. Future historians may well regard Israel’s nuclear capability as part of a metamorphosis of the Middle East, either by advancing a voluntary peace, by shocking the region and the world into enforced stabilization, or by causing a catastrophe. Seen against this background, the Yom Kippur War becomes both more understandable and less of a radical rupture, though still a very important one. This conclusion is reinforced by taking into account major events following the Yom Kippur War. First is the absence of a "normal" peace between Egypt and Israel, together with the scarcity of additional peace treaties and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel. This reduces the impact of the Yom Kippur War and the Egyptian-Israeli peace. More important is the escalation of the Palestinian issue, with its zigzags between agreements and violence, the involvement of the Arab minority in Israel, and — most ominous of all — the rise of mass terrorism including suicide bombers. The Yom Kippur War and peace treaty in no way helped to ward off these negative developments, even though the treaty included provisions addressing the Palestinian issue. These were ignored with the tacit agreement of Egypt. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict harks back to the Mandatory period, thus reflecting a historic cycle unbroken by the Yom Kippur War. However, mass terrorism and suicide bombers are much more of a rupture. They threaten to mutate deep historic processes into an extremely harsh reality, driven on the one hand by clashes between the West and parts of Islamic societies, and on the other by the newfound capacity of the few to kill the many with relatively little effort. Compared to this leap in history, the Yom Kippur War and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty lose much of their significance. They neither terminated the Arab-Israeli confrontation nor prevented its escalation into an extremely dangerous future. This conclusion should not surprise those who think in terms of deep historical processes rather than directly observable events. But such thinkers and policymakers are a tiny minority, as demonstrated by what is happening before our eyes in the Middle East and in the world. The Middle East, including Iran and North Africa, is dense with basic, deep-rooted, and rigid elements that limit the potential pace of improvement. These include, for instance, the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity, authoritarian regimes that fail to promote the welfare of their people, social underdevelopment combined with high birth rates, envy of the West and a love-hate relationship with it, and finally, the fundamental conflict caused by a strong Jewish entity "occupying" the Land of Islam. Such factors are unlikely to improve soon, despite the impacts of globalization, which can also be detrimental. They will largely shape the future of the Middle East, at least for the next 50 years or so, unless radical intervention brings about a metamorphosis. In an earlier epoch, without the curse of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, one could take a long-term historic look and feel assured that in time, change would come about, with interim costs being painful but not catastrophic. However, with the deadly tools supplied by modern technology and the vulnerabilities of Western society, no such long-term approach is reasonable. The risk of catastrophe starting in the Middle East is too high, as illustrated by the events of September 11, which well may be a harbinger of much worse to come. It is within such a perspective that the long-term significance of the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent peace treaty should be reevaluated. They were important; they changed history for the better, but they did not have an impact on the deep historical processes and their constants which will shape the future. BOTH EGYPT and Israeli coped well with the Yom Kippur War after the initial shock, thus bringing about the peace agreement with its positive, though limited, results. The same cannot be said of Israelis or Palestinians coping with the results of the Six Day War. Just as Israel should have foreseen that an Egyptian attack was unavoidable as long as it occupied all of Sinai, so too Israel should have foreseen the Palestinian uprising as a predetermined result of a long-lasting occupation unaccompanied by democratization, prosperity, and prospects of independence. The Palestinians, on their part, should have foreseen that the Clinton-Barak offers were the best they could get, that violence will give them less and not more, and that escalation will lead to disaster. Without thinking, planning, and acting within long-term historic perspectives, seeing both the invariables and the possibilities of change realistically, the future of the Middle East is bleak. No single event along the lines of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty — even a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement — will overcome the negative momentum of the Middle East and bring about an epoch of peace and prosperity in less than a generation or two. Every problem that seems to be "solved" will produce new and not necessarily easier ones. Thus, even assuming that a Palestinian state is established and it signs a full peace treaty with Israel, the future is sure to remain unstable with the Palestinian state endangering Jordan and causing turbulence in other areas, with harsh repercussions for itself, all of the Middle East and perhaps the world. Events, even ones as massive as the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath, or the US-led war in Iraq, cannot achieve the critical mass needed for overcoming the unchangeability of the Middle East. Needed instead are even more radical and holistic policies, based on much-improved thinking in terms of deep historic processes. Thus, to return to the Israeli-Arab situation, it may well be that the "road map‘ should be abandoned in favor of an ’atlas," with peace treaties to be signed simultaneously among Israel, the Palestinians, Syria, Iraq, and Iran in combination with strictly enforced arms limitations. However utopian this suggestion may seem, it may well be more realistic than the piecemeal approach characterizing contemporary policies. THIS, I think, is the main lesson to be drawn from the Yom Kippur War and the consequent Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Events, if handled well, can ameliorate some problems, but others, often even more difficult and dangerous, are sure to emerge. Cutting off the head of a hydra saves you from death now, but to prevent a more poisonous head from emerging, you have to either kill the hydra or change its nature. I am afraid contemporary global statesmanship is not up to this challenge. Israel cannot wait for the big powers to learn from bitter experience. It has no choice other than to exercise its free will and act more wisely than they do, if it wants to survive and thrive. The profound lesson that Israel should have learned from the Yom Kippur War is to make the best of the current situation by thinking creatively and learning the lessons of deep history, correctly seizing passing opportunities, and taking the initiative in effectively influencing the course of history. At the same time, Israel should have no illusions as to the maximum that can be achieved given the current intractibility of the Middle East, as well as external events and global trends. It is tragic that, instead, conclusions drawn from the Yom Kippur War — as well as from other dismal failures — have often been shallow (despite some important initiatives), missing the absolute necessity to understand deep historical processes in order to craft effective policies. Unless rapidly redressed, this grave malfunction may well lead Israel into decline — as contemporary events demonstrate. The writer, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University, is author of Grand Strategies for Israel.
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