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By Gilad Atzmon
Today is Yom Kippur and the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Arab–Israeli (Yom Kippur) War. That war caught Israel totally on the hop. In the first days of the conflict, both the IDF and the IAF were defeated and humiliated. Moshe Dayan, the legendary Israeli defence minister, contemplated out loud the ‘destruction of the 3rd Temple’ and, according to different intelligence sources, Israel was close to using its ‘Samson option’ - a nuclear strike against Egypt.
Interestingly, neither the Egyptians nor the Syrians had any plans to ‘throw the Jews to the sea.’ In fact, their military objectives were rather limited – liberating land occupied by Israel in 1967. The Egyptians attempted to secure a narrow bridge-head over the Suez Canal and the Syrians hoped to free the Golan Heights or at least part of it.
But driven by pre-Traumatic Stress (Pre-TSD), Israeli army generals and the government managed to recast this joint Arab operation as nothing less than an emerging Shoa. Consequently, at least for the first days of the war, they panicked and unnecessarily and critically exhausted Israeli military assets and force.
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