Yom Kippur War and Oil Crisis
Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, on the holiest day of the Jewish year. The intelligence failure was total and had a name afterwards: the concept, meaning the Israeli assumption that Egypt would not attack without air superiority and that Syria would not attack alone. Warnings accumulated for weeks and were fitted into the assumption. The Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal was the best-planned operation of the war. Water cannon cut passages through the sand rampart in hours, some 80,000 men crossed in a day, and the Israeli tanks that counterattacked ran into infantry with newly supplied Soviet anti-tank missiles and were destroyed in numbers nobody had expected. On the Golan, Syrian armour nearly broke through against a handful of Israeli units. The line held after three days and Israel counterattacked on both fronts, crossing the canal on 15 October and encircling the Egyptian Third Army. The superpowers then nearly collided: an American nuclear alert on 24 October in response to a Soviet threat to intervene. The war killed some 2,600 Israelis and perhaps 15,000 Egyptians and Syrians. Its political consequences were large in every direction. The Arab oil embargo quadrupled prices and reshaped the world economy; Golda Meir's government fell; and Sadat, having restored Egyptian standing by fighting, was able to go to Jerusalem four years later and make peace. Sadat's own object was diplomatic rather than territorial and he said so afterwards. He needed to break the assumption that the 1967 lines were permanent because Israel could not be moved, and a war that ended badly on the map still achieved it.
- Year: 1973 CE
- Category: Military
