Learning the Right Lessons from the Yom Kippur War

The new year of 2023 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which began when the IDF was caught off guard by a coordinated, simultaneous attack by Syria and Egypt. Although the war lasted a mere twenty days and concluded with a resounding Israeli victory, its disastrous beginning led to the postwar Agranat Commission investigating how the country’s leaders ignored or dismissed various warnings of the impending invasion. Amir Oren, examining the commission’s findings, argues that its highest-ranking officer, Yigael Yadin, put too much emphasis on the failures of the Department of Military Intelligence (DMI or Aman), and not enough on those of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir and her storied defense minister Moshe Dayan:

The sins of the Agranat Commission became gradually evident as its bias and secrets were exposed and declassified. Yadin went easy on Golda Meir because he wanted to join her cabinet. Meir’s meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein one week before the war on September 25, when he warned her that the Syrian military was on “pre-jump positions,” came up in her closed-door testimony but was only revealed to the public fifteen years later—a decade after her death. Meir and Dayan were depicted as being wholly dependent on the DMI’s assessment; therefore, if the DMI was mistaken, they were not at fault.

In reality, Israel’s political leadership made the wrong call. On the eve of Yom Kippur 1973, Israel’s leaders thought that acting upon war indicators would be more costly than inaction, especially three weeks before an election, and believed that the worst-case scenario could not be that bad. Meir and Dayan were confident in the IDF’s ability to repel an invasion easily and go on a counter-offensive.

Yet despite the deficiencies of its assessments, Oren argues that the recommendations of the commission did much good:

The Agranat Commission’s reform of Israel’s intelligence community did . . . bring about one very positive result—fresh brainpower, recruited out of academia and the military to staff the new research and analysis organs. They went on to other positions as spies, diplomats, and managers across the Mossad and the Foreign Ministry, a big plus for their employers and the entire system.

Read more at Jerusalem Strategic Tribune

More about: Golda Meir, Intelligence, Israeli history, Moshe Dayan, Yom Kippur War

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society