Who needed the October 1973 war?

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• ‘Israel’s short-sightedness becomes even more unpardonable when one realizes that her leaders were fully aware of the boldness of Sadat’s move,’ argues Shlomo Ben-Ami, who concludes, ‘It would take the trauma of the Yom Kippur War for Israel to make peace under the same conditions Mrs. Meir now so haughtily rejected.’ 1 These words represent an approach that is shared by many scholars and among the public, according to which it was Israel’s
  and especially Golda Meir’s
  defiance that left Sadat with no choice but to go to war

• Others put the blame, and not without association with Meir, on US President Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Scholars argue that his lack of interest in an Egyptian
  Israeli settlement
  due mainly to arguments over authority with Secretary of State William Rogers, but also to his viewing the Arab
  Israeli conflict through a Cold War lens
  curbed any chance of progress through Sadat’s peace initiatives.

• In fact, the argument of the article will be that it was Sadat who needed the war, and he needed it not in order to force Israel into a political process, but for himself, so as to accept terms he could not accept without a war

• Both Israel and Egypt accepted Resolution 242, but from the very beginning they differed in their interpretations as to the meaning and pace of the resolution. Israel argued that the resolution was only the framework, the beginning of a process, and it should be followed by negotiations on the exact terms of the peace and withdrawal. Egypt argued that the resolution was a package ready to be executed: it covered everything, and it should be carried out as it was. Egypt’s Foreign Secretary Mahmoud Riad bluntly told Jarring that, first and foremost, Israel should announce that it would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in June 1967. Prior to that, Egypt would discuss nothing.19 Israel argued that Resolution 242 was not a ‘self-executing’ document but a set of principles over which the parties would negotiate, and which would lead to a peace agreement and secured and agreed borders.

• Resolution 242 brought a sense of relief to Israel. Israeli leaders had been convinced in the aftermath of the war that as happened in 1957, when joint Soviet
  American pressure led to Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, now too, Israel would be subjected to international pressure to withdraw. The government decision of 19 June
  that Israel would withdraw to the 4 June 1967, borders in return for peace agreements
  was a result of that fear.

• Another dimension of Sadat’s refusal to negotiate with Israel was his adherence to Nasser’s view of the meaning of the June war for the Arabs. Sadat defined the struggle with Israel as a ‘battle of honor’. 27 Just like Nasser, Sadat also believed that the June 1967 defeat was a humiliating experience for Egypt and the Arab world and that any further achievement for Israel from that defeat of Egypt would perpetuate the humiliation. Israel and the United States argued that as Egypt ‘must’ make concessions because it had ‘lost the battle’. They ‘wanted to impose a peace treaty and achieve Israel’s political objectives’ and to bring Egypt ‘to our knees’. However, declared Sadat in January 1971, this was ‘not peace, this is surrender’, and Sadat would never agree to it.

• So why did Sadat go to war, if eventually he accepted the principles for peace as outlined by Israel before the war? His widow, Jehan Sadat, provided a clue to an answer. In an interview to the Israeli Yediot Aharonot in November 1987, she said: I don’t agree with those claiming today, among us and in Israel, that Sadat tried to achieve genuine peace before 1973. I believe that he tried to achieve a cease-fire, no more than that. Sadat needed another war in order to win and to commence negotiations as equals. My husband was a man of peace, but as an Arab leader he was unwilling to sit with Israel while feeling ‘short’.

• Sadat was offended by the Egyptian military defeat in 1967. The Israeli occupation of the Sinai hurt, of course, but of no less importance in Sadat’s rhetoric was the humiliation that came with the defeat, and the damage the defeat caused to Egypt’s pride. In his memoires, he described his reaction to the defeat as follows: ‘I myself was completely overwhelmed by our defeat. It sank into the very fabric of my consciousness so that I relived it day and night.’ 83 There were two options for erasing the humiliation, according to Sadat: either by regaining the territories without having to negotiate with Israel, or by going to war.84 With the failure of the diplomatic campaign that aimed to return the Sinai to Egypt without negotiations with Israel, Sadat felt that only the second option, war, remained open to him

• Sadat relates how Nasser told him that ‘if we get even 10 cm of the Sinai, and [are able] to entrench there in a way that no power could remove us from there, the whole situation would be changed, in the east and in the west and anywhere! We will remove the shame that we carried from the 1967 defeat.’ 85 And indeed, this was precisely Sadat’s war plan. He aimed for a symbolic yet significant achievement, occupying a narrow strip of land on the eastern banks of the Suez Canal.

• Indeed, that was the main point: it was only now, after restoring Egypt’s pride and honour, erasing the humiliation, that Sadat could meet the Israeli leaders and talk with them. Once the humiliation was gone, Sadat ‘had no doubt that a face-to-face confrontation with the Israelis was the only way to reach [a] just and sustainable peace in the Middle East’. 90 Only now could Sadat agree to terms that, before the war and under the burden of defeat and humiliation, had been impossible. Now that he was facing Israel as an equal, peace no longer meant ‘surrender’ and diktat. Now Sadat could hold direct negotiations that would lead to a contractual peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, including fully open borders and diplomatic relations.