The Yom Kippur War, 1973

What happened

On Oct. 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel at the same time, Egypt across the Suez Canal into Sinai and Syria into the Golan Heights. ¹ Israel had received warnings beforehand. Israeli military intelligence had concluded the Arab states were not capable of, or ready to risk, a coordinated attack. ³ They were.

Egypt's opening move broke through the Bar-Lev Line, the chain of fortifications Israel had built along the Suez Canal after the 1967 war. The line was meant to stop a major Egyptian crossing and had taken two years to build, with a sand wall up to 25 meters high backed by 22 forts. Egyptian engineers punched through it in under two hours using water cannons to blast the sand apart. Of 441 Israeli soldiers defending the line's forts, 126 were killed and 161 were taken prisoner. ⁴

The fighting ran nearly three weeks. Israel lost 2,688 soldiers, with thousands more wounded; Arab estimates run far higher, around 19,000 killed, though wounded figures on both sides are estimates only. ⁵ Israel took heavy early losses on both fronts before its counterattacks turned the war around, in part because of a US airlift, Operation Nickel Grass, that began arriving Oct. 14 and resupplied Israeli forces with weapons and ammunition during the fighting. ² Arab oil-producing states responded with an embargo against the United States and other countries supporting Israel, a decision that reshaped global oil markets for years afterward. ² The UN Security Council called for a ceasefire on Oct. 22, but fighting continued on the ground; Israel accepted a ceasefire that held on Oct. 25, after a second UN resolution and a US-Soviet standoff over enforcing it. ² A Geneva peace conference convened that December. ¹

Why it still matters

Israel won the war militarily, in the sense that it ended up closer to Damascus and Cairo than it had started. But the country did not experience it as a victory. It had been caught by surprise on its holiest day, and the public wanted to know how.

The answer came from the Agranat Commission, appointed on Nov. 21, 1973, to investigate the intelligence and command failures that let the attack succeed. ³ Its finding centered on what became known in Hebrew as "the conception," hamechonet: military intelligence had settled on the assumption that Egypt would not go to war without air superiority over Israel, and that assumption filtered out the actual warning signs analysts were seeing in the days before the attack. ³

The commission's interim report, published April 1, 1974, ended careers. Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned nine days later. Chief of Staff David Elazar was dismissed and died two years later at 50. Military intelligence chief Eli Zeira and three other intelligence officers were removed, along with Southern Command's Shmuel Gonen. ³ The fallout went beyond individuals: it exposed a gap in civilian oversight of the military that led to Israel's 1975 Basic Law on the army, which formally subordinated the military to the cabinet. ³

The war also reset the region's diplomacy. Egypt came out of it believing it had restored its dignity by crossing the canal at all, even though Israel ultimately held the advantage on the ground; Israel came out of it less certain that its military edge was permanent. ² That mutual reassessment is a large part of what made the 1978 Camp David Accords possible, where Israel agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel. ² Israel's peace treaty with Egypt followed in 1979. ¹ The diplomacy moved faster on the Syrian front in the short term: Israel and Syria signed a disengagement agreement in 1974 that separated their forces on the Golan Heights, though it never grew into a full peace treaty the way the Egyptian track did. ¹

The words you'll hear

Bar-Lev Line. The chain of Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal, named for Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev, that Egypt breached within hours of the war's opening. ⁴

The Agranat Commission. The Israeli commission of inquiry, chaired by Supreme Court president Shimon Agranat, that investigated the intelligence and command failures before the war and forced out Israel's top military and political leadership. ³

"The conception." The flawed intelligence assumption, that Egypt would not attack without first securing air superiority, that led Israeli analysts to dismiss real warning signs of the coming war. ³

Yom Kippur War / October War / Ramadan War. The same conflict, named differently depending on who's talking. Israelis and Americans generally say Yom Kippur War, for the day it began; some Arab sources call it the October War or Ramadan War, for the same reason from a different calendar. ¹

Camp David. Shorthand for the 1978 negotiations, hosted by President Jimmy Carter, that produced Israel's 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the diplomatic path the Yom Kippur War helped open. ²