The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East [Hardcover]

Abraham Rabinovich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2004

In this galvanizing account of the most dramatic of the Arab-Israeli hostilities, Abraham Rabinovich, who reported the conflict for the Jerusalem Post, transports us into the midst of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Rabinovich’s masterly narrative begins as Israel convinces itself there will be no war, while Egypt and Syria plot the two-front conflict. Then, on Yom Kippur, Saturday, October 6, 1973, we see Arab armies pouring across the shattered Bar-Lev Line in the Sinai and through the Golan defenses. Even the famed Israeli air force could not stop them. On the Golan alone, Syria sent 1,460 tanks against Israel’s 177, and 115 artillery batteries against Israel’s 11. And for the first time, footsoldiers wielding anti-tank weapons were able to stop tank charges, while surface-to-air missiles protected those troops from air attack

Rabinovich takes us into this inferno and into the inner sanctums of military and political decision making. He allows us to witness the dramatic turnaround that had the Syrians on the run by the following Wednesday and the great counterattack across the Suez Canal that, once begun, took international intervention to halt.

Using extensive interviews with both participants and observers, and with access to recently declassified materials, Rabinovich shows that the drama of the war lay not only in the battles but also in the apocalyptic visions it triggered in Israel, the hopes and fears it inspired in the Arab world, the heated conflicts on both sides about the conduct of the war, and the concurrent American face-off with the Soviets in Washington, D.C., Moscow, and the Mediterranean. A comprehensive account of one of the pivotal conflicts of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rabinovich, a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, has researched thoroughly and written with clarity, balance and compassion for the victims of a war much larger and fiercer than most Western readers have believed. Anwar Sadat emerges as a major player, having reformed the Egyptian Army and evolved a national strategy of limited objectives. The Israelis, Rabinovich argues, then played into Sadat's hands by intelligence failures that delayed their mobilization, gross underestimation of Arab fighting qualities, and not reckoning on new enemy weapons (the SA-6 antiaircraft missile and the Sagger antitank missile) that would make the Israeli Air Force and armor-heavy ground troops vulnerable. The result was a war that began with serious Israeli losses and major Arab advances, in the Sinai and on the Golan Heights, within miles of Israeli civilians. Sheer hard fighting by the Israelis at the front limited the damage, however, and in spite of leadership conflicts and a few outright failures that Rabinovich dramatizes with flair, a viable Israeli strategy supported by improved tactics gradually emerged. The result was a victory for Israel that was actually more devastating than the Six-Day War, with the added effect of leading to a partial peace with Egypt and later Syria and Jordan. Rabinovich may overpraise Henry Kissinger, and he may underplay the Israeli Air Force, but his book covers everything else at a level equally useful to both the newcomer and the experienced student of the subject.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War just passed, and this is the second major work to commemorate that conflict. Howard Blum's Eve of Destruction [BKL S 1 03] tended to focus on more sensational aspects, such as Israeli plans for nuclear war, double agents, and suicide pills for leaders. A resident of Jerusalem, Rabinovich is a journalist who covered the war for the Jerusalem Post. His work is more restrained than Blum's and emphasizes the military and political struggles. Yet the story contains inherent drama and tension, and Rabinovich effectively captures both. He uses recently declassified materials and information gleaned from participants to reveal how Israel was caught unprepared but managed to turn the tide with some bold tactical maneuvers. His portraits of familiar figures--Sadat, Meir, Sharon, Kissinger--are revealing and often surprising. His analysis of the long-term effects of the war is likely to stoke controversy in both Israel and the Arab world. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 543 pages
• Publisher: Schocken; 1st edition (January 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805241760
• ISBN-13: 978-0805241761
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #832,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most thorough account to date, January 20, 2004

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (Hardcover)

This wonderful new book on the Yom Kippur war is the most updated, accurate thorough account yet written on the subject. Early works on the Yom Kippur war suffered due to secrecy on both sides of the conflict. Later works, like Blums 'eve of destruction' are narrow in their outlook and focus usually on only one or two elements of the conflict. This masterful work focuses on the entire conflict. From AMAN's intelligence failures to the planning for operation Badr to the 'last temple' statements of Mr. Dayan. Here is blow by blow coverage of the minor skirmishes and the large battles as well as day to day accounts of the fate of the men along the Bar-Lev line. The Yom Kippur War has long been relegated to the Sack Heap of history, a seminal conflict ignored in the broader context of the Arab Israeli wars. Usually it plays second fiddle to the `Six Day War' yet the Yom Kippur War was the most fascinating of the conflicts due to its multi-dimensional nature, from the surprise attack to the early setbacks, the airlift and the final world shattering gains in the Golan and across the Suez.

Rabinovich is well known for his other work in the Jerusalem Post and he is an acknowledged expert on political and military affairs. But this book remains a tour de-force of epic proportions. Simply a very readable, extremely accessible and detailed account. Scholars of Israeli history as well as those looking for an epic military history book will enjoy this new volume. Anyone interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the modern geography of the middle east will find this book insightful.

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive account of the Yom Kippur War, April 12, 2004

By 

J. N. Mohlman (Barrington, RI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (Hardcover)

In reading military history, one will often find that all human perspective is drowned in tactics and weapons systems or, conversely, that human elements have distracted the author and overwhelmed the war's place in history. This can be especially true in regard to the wars of Israel because there is such an intense emotion surrounding them. Happily, Abraham Rabinovich has avoided both of these problems with his masterful "The Yom Kippur War". Moreover, he succeeds admirably in placing the war with in the broader context of the region and the times.

What makes "The Yom Kippur War" so successful is that Rabinovich captures and dissects all of the elements necessary to look at the war not just as a series of battles, but as a subject worthy of historical study. These might be described as the prologue, the war itself (battles, casualties, personalities, etc.), battlefield innovation (tactics and weapons), geopolitics and historical perspective. Alone, each area is well researched and written, combined they form one of the most effective and impressive military histories one is likely to encounter.

By defining the Yom Kippur War as a product of numerous clashes dating back to Israel's founding, Rabinovich transcends a simple narrative of events and forces the reader to consider the root causes of the conflict, and how those causes dictated its course. One simple example is how Israel's stunning victory in The Six Day War lead to an institutional arrogance that meant they started the war poorly deployed and with limited ability to improvise in its early days. Moreover, Rabinovich does a nice job of capturing the Arab, and particularly the Egyptian, point of view. Unlike previous Arab military misadventures, The Yom Kippur War was based more upon the demands of realpolitik and less upon ideology than ever before. Egypt took a calculated roll of the dice, and in spite of taking a beating, over time accomplished all of their goals as a result.

Tactically, The Yom Kippur War set a new standard for ferocity and violence in a relatively compact area. Never before had so much firepower been deployed so quickly and to such great effect. In particular, the massive deployment of RPG's and precision anti-tank weapons marked a genuine revolution in military affairs that rocked Israel to its very core. However, Rabinovich indicates a deft grasp of the rapid vacillations between offense and defense as he revisits the roles and interactions of infantry and tank time and again. Moreover, his purview isn't limited to tactics alone as he lays out a litany of failures in Israel's grand strategy which included such basic errors as a failure to dictate the shape of the battlefield by trading land for time, the failure to exploit greater maneuverability in flanking attacks, and the failure to concentrate armor at the critical point. All of these lapses would be glaring in most any army, but in Israel, where the tank reigned supreme, they were unforgivable. Likewise, he considers similar interactions between the fighter-bomber and the SAM at both the tactical and strategic level.

However, as I said before, this isn't a dry recitation of tactics and plans. Rabinovich infused his narrative with anecdotes and primary sources that nicely capture the tremendous pressure that Israel faced, and the enormous ingenuity that allowed it to eventually turn the tide. Arab perspective is likewise strong in the early sections and again at the book's conclusion, but is noticeably lacking during the actual fighting. Given the even-handedness and professionalism with which Rabinovich writes, it is my opinion that this is probably due to a regrettable lack of source material. This conclusion is supported by the fact that it is a problem that spans most Mid-Eastern military history as largely autocratic societies have little incentive to release information about their military's consistently mediocre performance. Also, Ariel Sharon is a central figure in the Yom Kippur War, and any student of current events will gain tremendous insight into his actions today from Rabinovich's portrait of him thirty years ago.

In terms of geopolitics, Rabinovich pays little head to the UN (appropriate given their total irrelevance in the war, which was in turn a function of their total ineptitude in the months before, during and after the Six Day War) but does a superb job of a detailing Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy and a surprisingly good job capturing the Kremlin's machinations. What is perhaps most shocking about these details is how completely out of the loop Nixon was as Watergate came crashing down around him. Had Kissinger not taken the initiative, it is entirely likely that a radically different, and most likely much worse scenario would have unfolded.

Finally, in a brief, but excellent conclusion, Rabinovich revisits the root causes of the war and considers how they changed because of the conflict. Of course, the most obvious outcome is the détente between Israel and Egypt that developed over the following six years, but the author also eloquently captures the wrenching national introspection that Israel underwent. The Yom Kippur War was a watershed that led to a complete rethinking of not just Israel's military, but it's entire world view.

To conclude, "The Yom Kippur War" has all of the characteristics of the best military history. Evenhanded and unflinching in criticism, offering astute insight and a superb portrait of men at war, Rabinovich has written what may prove to be the definitive history of the war.

Jake Mohlman

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Work, March 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (Hardcover)

This is a generally well written and comprehensive history of the Yom Kippur War. It includes an extensive discussion of the days leading up to the war, as well as its immediate aftermath.

While I strongly recommend the book, I believe there were areas for improvement. The detail on some of the battlefield encounters could have been shortened. In addition, while the book discusses the thinking and actions of Arab leaders, the focus is overwhelmingly on the Israeli side. More detail on the Arab side would have made for an even more interesting book.

Among the more fascinating parts of the book:

1. The sheer volume of intelligence ignored by the Israeli defense and intelligence establishments prior to the war.
2. Ariel Sharon standing out not so much for his military daring but for being one of the few senior Israeli military leaders not initially paralyzed by the surprise and early success of the Arab invasion.
3. The role of Henry Kissinger who almost micro-managed the conflict to a draw to set the table for future peace negotiations.
4. The degree to which individual initiative at relatively low ranks in the Israeli Army helped Israel stem the tide until it was able to counterattack.

This book argues, convincingly, that the Yom Kippur War was actually the first step in the Egyptian-Israeli peace process. It is an important work in understanding the Middle East today.