The Yom Kippur syndrome

It's been 33 years since the Yom Kippur War. In the meantime, we have made peace with Egypt and Jordan, our population has grown by a million and a half people, our military might has improved by leaps and bounds, and most Israelis, thanks to Ariel Sharon, have awoken from the Greater Israel dream and the illusions of occupation. Even so, the sober observer will see similarities between what happened to us back then and what is happening now.

Let's start with our boastfulness and arrogance before the war. We mocked Anwar Sadat's dramatic announcement in the Egyptian parliament that he was prepared to sacrifice a million solders to win back the territories conquered by Israel. We said, at the time, that it was just hot air, that he wasn't strong enough to go to war on his own - because our celebrated intelligence network didn't know that while we were sitting here bragging, Syria was secretly planning a revenge attack on Israel in cahoots with Egypt.

By the same token, we never imagined that Hezbollah, a measly gang of terrorists, all of 2,000 men, would be more prepared for a showdown than we were, and would fight back tooth and nail despite being equipped with weapons that are bows and arrows compared to our arsenal.

Then and now, our chiefs of staff responded with bravado and excessive self-confidence. On the first day of the Yom Kippur War, then chief of staff David Elazar told a room full of journalists: "We'll break their bones." The current chief of staff, Dan Halutz, responded to the Hezbollah kidnapping with a threat to "set Lebanon back 20 years." In both cases, the attackers inflicted a heavy blow on Israel. Syria and Egypt killed Israeli soldiers on both fronts, and Hezbollah has inflicted terrible damage on the home front with its mortars and Katyushas - primitive as far as arms go, but lethal to old people, women and children.

In both cases, Israel was taken by surprise and fell victim to what became known as "The Conception" - in a nutshell, the belief that "they wouldn't dare."

The theory in 1973 was that Egypt wanted to invade but couldn't cross the Suez Canal and breach the Bar-Lev line. But it did, in a big way, surprising us in the bargain. All the confidence that we could hold them back and defeat them on their side of the canal went up in a puff of smoke. The chief of staff made a similar mistake today, in going to war rather than just retaliating. In hindsight, it appears that this was just the opportunity Hezbollah was waiting for - laying a trap for the Israel Defense Forces that would then provide Hezbollah with an excuse to attack the Israeli home front.

In both cases, intelligence fell down on the job, not only with respect to the enemy's war plans, but in assessing its military capacity. Egypt surprised Israel with Sager missiles, shoulder-launched missiles that wreaked havoc on our tanks, and ground-to-air missiles that downed many of our planes and weakened the air force's power of deterrence - "the missile that sent planes flying off with their tails between their legs," as Ezer Weizmann put it.

Hezbollah surprised us not only with the quantity and type of its missiles, but with its ability to fire 200 of them at us every day, to reach almost as far as Hadera, and to turn a quarter of a million Israeli citizens into refugees. It also surprised us with anti-tank weapons capable of penetrating the Merkava, and its deployment throughout the length and breadth of Lebanon in the event of a land incursion.

In both wars, senior commanders were sacked. Chaim Bar-Lev replaced Shmuel Gorodish in the south, and Moshe Kaplinsky is replacing Udi Adam in the north. Major General Adam, a plodding sort of man, made a mistake to tell the journalist interviewing him that he had lots of options. What he doesn't seem to be able to do is stop the Katyushas.

The difference between then and now is that back in 1973, the IDF finally managed to get its act together, after thousands of soldiers were killed, crossing the canal and surrounding the Third Army. Henry Kissinger persuaded Israel not to demolish the Egyptian force, thereby paving the way for dialogue that ended, three years later, in a peace treaty.

That kind of happy end doesn't look likely on our northern front. Neither a political accord nor a military victory will change the situation as long as Iran is around, controlling the height of the flames.