The Eve of Destruction

Howard Blum

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061980855
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

On October 6, 1973—Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar—the Arab world launched a bold and ingeniously conceived surprise attack against Israel. After three days of intense, bloody combat, an unprepared Israel was fighting for survival, while the Arabs, with massive forces closing in on the Jewish heartland, were poised to redeem the honor lost in three previous wars.

Based on declassified Israeli government documents and revealing interviews with soldiers, generals, and intelligence operatives on both sides of the conflict, The Eve of Destruction weaves a suspenseful, eye-opening story of war, politics, and deception. It also tells the moving human tale of the men and women who fought to maintain love and honor as their lives and destinies were swept up in the Yom Kippur War.

PART I

“RETURN TO ZION”

Haifa/Alexandria
Summer 1973

…and who shall die

ONE

Haifa/27 June 1967

Nati fell in love with Yossi before she ever met him. She was sixteen, still in high school, and all it took was just one look. But at that moment in Israel’s history, the entire nation, or so she would grow to complain, was in love with Yossi—the tousled-haired soldier with the coal dark eyes and the gleaming smile in the famous photograph.

The photograph first appeared on the June 27, 1967, cover of Life magazine. Newspapers and magazines across Israel, full of xenophobic pride for the local boy who had made good in the larger world, were quick to purchase reprint rights. Soon it was everywhere. It even had a second life as a poster; sales, especially to teenage girls, were impressively strong.

The image was clever in its directness. Twenty-two-year-old Yossi Ben Hanan, wearing tanker’s overalls, a battle-scraped AK-47 assault rifle clutched in his hand, stared straight up into the camera. The soot-covered face, the strained brow beneath the fringe of haphazard curls, spoke of hard combat. Yet the grin bursting through all the weariness left no doubt: This soldier had fought and won.

But the picture’s true power, and the source of its enduring fame, lie in the complex story it succinctly told. For as Yossi crooked his head up into the lens, he was cooling off from the heat of battle in the Suez Canal—water that until that day had been as Egyptian as the Nile.

This soldier’s spontaneous celebration, the editors of Life realized, captured in a single snapshot the totality of Israel’s victory over the Arabs in the Six Day War. It effectively condensed all the “astounding”—this was the unrestrained yet not inaccurate adjective on the magazine’s cover—battle reports from every front.

In the air, within two hours and fifty minutes after launching preemptive strikes on June 6, 1967, Israel had destroyed 300 Egyptian planes. The Egyptian air force, for all tactical purposes, simply ceased to exist. The Israeli bombers quickly moved on to maul airfields in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. By noon on the first day of the war, 452 Arab planes were lost and Israel controlled the sky above the Middle East.

On the Syrian front, the fighting was brief, too. Protected by concrete bunkers and rocky mountainous terrain, the Syrian troops at first grappled with the Israelis in bloody hand-to-hand combat. But as the sun rose on a second day of battle, the Syrian officers began to flee. Israeli troops pushed rapidly up the Golan Heights, taking strategic towns and peaks. A rout followed. After only twenty-seven hours of fighting, the road to Damascus was wide open, the Syrian capital ready to be seized if the Israelis decided to advance.

Jordan, despite Israel’s diplomatic attempts to convince King Hussein not to get involved in the conflict, also entered the war. Its artillery opened up on the Jewish section of Jerusalem and shelled Tel Aviv. In response, eight Israeli brigades poured into the West Bank. On the morning of the third day of the war, Israeli soldiers reached the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem, rejoicing as they reclaimed the sacred religious site that had been lost a quarter of a century ago in the War of Independence.

And in the battle against Egypt, Israeli armor swiftly penetrated on three axes through the heart of the Sinai Peninsula, only stopping when they reached the east bank of the Suez Canal. The Egyptian force, 100,000 strong and outfitted with modern weapons and tanks provided by the Russians, was left in shambles. They fled in disorganized droves, leaving more than 15,000 of their dead and almost all of their equipment behind in the sand. More than 12,000 soldiers—including nine humiliated generals—were taken prisoner. Israel had 275 casualties in the desert campaign.

In less than a week’s fighting, Israel’s soldiers had decisively changed the political—and, no less significant, the strategic—geography of the Middle East. On the seventh day the nation, even if it were too jubilant to rest, could for the first time since it came into existence breathe easily.

The old territorial boundaries, a relic of the 1949 armistice, were history. Now the Sinai, the West Bank, a united Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights belonged to Israel. And with this new land, Israel’s leaders were convinced, came safety. Egyptian forces would now need to cross the Suez Canal and, as if that alone were not enough of an obstacle, then march across a 150-mile-wide desert before being able to threaten a major Israeli city. The unification of Jerusalem placed the holy city for the first time in more than two decades out of the range of Jordanian artillery. Similarly, the villages in the northern Galilee were no longer easy targets for Syrian shelling.

In fact, the potential for a devastating first strike was now reversed. From their outposts in the newly seized land, the Israeli forces loomed ominously closer to the Arab capitals: Cairo was sixty miles away, Damascus only thirty-five.

An impressed community of nations, both friends and foes, uniformly acknowledged the strength of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “The Israelis are very patriotic, brave and skillful soldiers, brilliantly led,” announced one widely reprinted, and quoted, editorial essay that seemed to sum up the international reaction to the incredibly one-sided war. And the editorial did not stop there. It bluntly went on to ask “an impolite but unavoidable question: What is the matter with the Arab armies? Was there ever a people so bellicose in politics, so reckless and raucous in hostility—and then so unpugnacious in pitched combat—as Nasser’s Egyptians?”

But even this reaction was restrained when measured against the swaggering confidence many Israelis expressed. “Israel is now a military superpower,” Gen. Ariel Sharon, a commander in the Sinai campaign, boasted. “Every national force in Europe is weaker than we are. We can conquer in one week the area from Khartoum to Baghdad and Algeria.” The Arab armies, Sharon and many other Israeli generals believed, were no longer a threat—just an annoyance. It would only be a matter of time before they became an irrelevancy.

And thanks to the editors of Life and the powerful shorthand of journalism, one handsome face became the symbol for Israel’s bursting pride. The chosen image of a chosen people. Yossi Ben Hanan, a novice platoon commander, became the link in the minds of the young nation for all the suffering that had come before, and the glittering future that lie ahead. The Holocaust launched to annihilate the Jewish people, the two decades of war intent on destroying the Jewish state—all these deep fears could finally be laid to rest. For now there was a new generation of Jews and a new generation of Jewish soldiers. Men who were brave, robust, and perhaps even invincible. Men like Yossi Ben Hanan.

And so the nation applauded Yossi, as with equal enthusiasm, they applauded themselves. He became a celebrity, unable, he would say with a twinge of embarrassment, to walk down a street in Tel Aviv or turn a corner in Jerusalem without someone calling out, “Shalom, Yossi.” He was quickly promoted to captain, and the government sent him off to show the resolute face of the new Jews—a warrior people—to adoring crowds in Japan, Europe, and, of course, the United States. With his easy charm, his natural friendliness, his self-deprecating candor, and his smile, his nearly incandescent grin, his success seemed assured. Chief of staff would someday be his for the asking. Or, perhaps politics was his destiny. Would minister of defense or even prime minister be out of the question?

Yet as his comrades in the armored brigades speculated at what was in store for their beloved Yossi—“our Greek god, our golden boy,” his close friend and commander Col. Avigdor “Yanosh” Ben Gal described him without irony—Nati quietly and confidently made her own plans. By the time she went off to do her compulsory military service two years after she had first seen the photograph on the cover of the magazine, Nati still had never met the object of all her fantasizing. But the passing of time and the blur of adolescent dalliances had diminished neither her ardor nor her conviction. Nati knew that someday she would meet Yossi and when she did, he would want her, too. No other outcome was possible. In her mind, their love had the force of a biblical prophecy. It was inevitable.

TWO

Golan Heights/June 1971

Four years to the month after the photograph had appeared on the magazine cover, they finally met. Capt. Yossi Ben Hanan, a battalion commander in the Seventh Armored Brigade, hurried into Col. Shmuel Gonen’s briefing, apologized for being late, and then growled at a lieutenant, “What are you doing sitting in my seat? Get up.”

Lt. Nati Friedman was not intimidated. She fixed the superior officer with her honey-colored eyes. A moment passed. Then she rose, and standing ramrod straight as if at attention, executed a smart salute. In the Israel Defense Forces, a populist army where even commanding officers are addressed by their first names, her gesture was clear parody, an implicit reprimand for the sharp tone. But in case the famous captain missed the point, there was more to her performance. Nati walked from the conference table with a deliberate, unmilitary slowness. A tall, slim woman, her dark hair piled into a neat bun, she wore tight green fatigues. Her back was to Yossi, so she could not see his eyes following her every step. But she felt them, she would say. She knew he was watching, appraising. And all the time, undaunted by the discordant circumstances, she was thinking, I knew someday we would meet.

When the briefing ended, Yossi went off to confer further with Gordish, as Colonel Gonen was known to his troops. Yossi had served under the colonel in the Sinai, and knew too well whom he was up against. Gordish was a slight, prim tanker, frosty as a monk, and as devout as a rabbi. He would not respond well to a frontal assault. So Yossi dutifully asked question after question about the upcoming maneuvers in the north. The colonel, who enjoyed talking about the complicated mechanics involved in getting a column of tanks to the battle line, responded to each successive inquiry with eager detail. Yossi listened respectfully. He desperately wanted a cigarette, but he knew Gordish considered smoking a vice, and, therefore, unsuitable behavior for an officer. It was only hours later as the two men were leaving the briefing room that Yossi, with an impressive casualness, eased into his primary mission. “Your aide who was sitting in my chair,” he asked. “What was her name?”

They went for a walk that night. The moon, as if Nati’s coconspirator, illuminated the water as they strolled along the rocky shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was an auspicious beginning, a childhood prophecy made real.

And it was an illusion. The relationship quickly became complicated, even hurtful. For the next two years, Yossi and Nati suffered through a tumultuous on-again, off-again courtship. Nati’s commitment did not waiver. But Yossi, with a hero’s prerogative, grabbed his opportunities as quickly as he found them. He would return to Nati, but his excursions, always guiltless, always predictable, took their toll.

Nati finally had enough. She grew tired of sharing Yossi with, as she put it, “the rest of them.” The sense of his absences became too wearying. She announced that she did not want to see him again. Determined to prove her sincerity as much to herself as to Yossi, she made plans. She would leave the army and, trading one uniform for another, become a stewardess for El Al. It would be a new life full of new possibilities.

Yossi accepted her decision. But, with his charm as manipulative as ever, he cajoled Nati “for old times’ sake” to spend one last weekend with him. Reluctantly, she agreed. But she was surprised when they rode in Yossi’s jeep up north, back to the Sea of Galilee.

The moon was not as full, not as theatrically bright as on their first night. But nevertheless it shined down with drama on the ancient water where Peter had fished, and remained her ally. They were walking hand in hand, tenderly, old friends, when Yossi said, “Why don’t we just go ahead and do it?”

Months ago she had given up hope, dismissed all her previous fantasizing as a young girl’s silliness. Now Nati understood she had been right all along. Her love was justified. A single word leaped up in her mind: destiny. But still this would not do. She refused to accept so passive an acquiescence.

“Do what?” she asked, full of innocent wonder.

Yossi fell to one knee. He took her hand, cradling it in his. And fulfilling her prophecy, he asked, “Will you marry me?”

She kissed his lips, and he held her. A long moment of complete stillness filled the night. The silence deepened, and stretched taut between them. When she finally spoke, it was a single word, as solemn and serious as a vow. “Yes,” she said.

Later that night, they sorted through the practicalities. Yossi was now a lieutenant colonel, a battalion commander of an armored brigade. The ceremony would take place as soon as possible, as long as it did not interfere with his command responsibilities. Of course it would be in Haifa, at her parents’ house. The back lawn, they both agreed, would be perfect. “But I don’t want a big wedding,” Nati said.

“Neither do I,” he agreed. “Just my friends.”

THREE

Haifa/Summer 1973

By the time they added the last name, they had invited 830 people to the wedding. Yossi had a lot of friends.

But more was inflating the quickly growing guest list than the many fellowships of arms of a professional soldier. Nor could the stack after stack of invitations that Nati mailed simply be attributed to Yossi’s diligent ambition. As soon as the engagement announcement appeared in the newspapers, “shofars,” Nati imagined with only a hint of facetiousness, “blew throughout the land.” Each day the phone rang and there was someone new—an obscure relation, a long-forgotten friend of a friend—wishing Nati a genuinely heartfelt mazel tov. Each day another apparent stranger offered congratulations as Nati bought groceries or boarded a bus. Each day things seemed to get more and more out of hand. Yet as the weeks passed, as the buildup to the carefully planned day drummed on, she began to understand.

Her marriage was not simply another summer wedding between two young people who had fallen in love. She had chosen August 13, 1973, for the festivities because it was the fifteenth of the month of Av on the Hebrew calendar, the biblical Valentine’s Day. Now she recognized the timing brought with it more powerful symbolism.

Everyone was eager to come, to be invited. She sensed that it wasn’t just Yossi and Nati they wanted to celebrate. It was something more. Larger. It was becoming a national celebration.

Nati’s mother was sixth-generation Israeli. Her family’s roots were deep into the land since the days of Ottoman rule. They were farmers when the arid, sunbaked earth was strewn with formidable boulders, and a Jewish state, a land of plowed fields, of milk, honey, and commerce, existed only in biblical stories.

Her father’s family had arrived in Palestine one generation earlier, and had also lived through the early struggles. In the War of Independence, Ephraim Friedman’s parents had to abandon their home on the banks of the Jordan River. Along with their neighbors, they ran in panic from the Arab advance, leaving behind all they owned, all they had built in the Galilee wilderness. Yet he was a son who made a heartfelt promise to his parents and fulfilled it: An army commander, Ephraim led troops in fierce hand-to-hand combat to reclaim the home where he was raised. In his second life, he labored to design and build the highways that linked the northern towns and cities to the urban heart of the nation. The much traveled road stretching from the hills of Haifa to the shoreline of Tel Aviv was his accomplishment; and as the nation prospered, he did, too.

Yossi’s family had been part of Jerusal...