1.
On Yom Kippur thirty five years ago, Israel was simultaneously attacked by Egypt and Syria. The military and political leadership of Israel was taken by surprise because over the preceding years they had convinced themselves that the Arab states had no viable military option open to them to recover the territory lost in the Six Day War.

In the south the Egyptians managed to cross the Suez canal, quickly overrun the flimsy Israeli defense and establish control of a substantial strip of territory in the Sinai. Fearing an Israeli counterattack, they didn’t initially move beyond the protective umbrella of anti-aircraft missile (SAM) batteries based in Egypt proper and came well equipped with anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM). In the north Syria attacked with armored forces that vastly outnumbered the defending Israelis.

Even if the Egyptians had managed to break out from under the cover of their anti-aircraft missiles, they would still have been hundreds of kilometers from Israel proper and even farther from its population centers. By contrast, had the Syrians managed to break through on the Golan Heights, they would have immediately encroached on Israeli territory and been in a position not just to recover the land lost in 1967, but perhaps to conquer Israel itself or at least to cut off the Galilee panhandle.

The Syrians came very close to the critical breakthrough but the Israeli regular forces, combined with the reserves that were rushed into action, just managed to hold them. Once that tide was turned the Israeli government decided to press home its counter attack beyond the 1967 ceasefire line and deep into Syria. When the ceasefire came the IDF was within heavy artillery range of Damascus.

In the south the Israelis launched a number of inadequately prepared counterattacks on the Egyptian bridgehead. These attacks were met by waves of ATGMs and were broken up with heavy losses. The IAF also suffered very heavy losses from SAM fire. Emboldened by their successes and anxious to relieve pressure on the Syrians, the Egyptians themselves launched an attack out of their bridgehead which was in turn beaten back by the Israelis

The turning point in the war in the south came when the Israelis found a relatively weak point in the Egyptian defenses, broke through to the Suez Canal, improvised a bridge across it and sent forces into Egypt proper to attack SAM batteries and isolate the Egyptian forces on the Sinai bank. By the time the ceasefire came on October 22nd, the Egyptian Third Army was cut off and there wasn’t much in the way of coherent resistance standing between the IDF and Cairo.

2.
The Egyptian armed forces executed the opening stages of the war in an exemplary manner, but when called upon to move beyond the initial play book they were outmatched by the Israelis. Nevertheless, the Yom Kippur was a strategic success for Egypt. It succeeded in breaking the post-1967 status quo and eventually recovering the Sinai peninsula in the Camp David agreement. That agreement also brought with it a great deal of economic and, especially, military assistance from the United States.

3.
The relatively narrow front on which it was obliged to attack and the nature of the terrain on the Golan Heights limited the attacking options open to the Syrian military. There probably wasn’t a tenable plan available to them other than the one they implemented: trying to overwhelm the Israeli regulars before enough reserves arrived to bolster them. Once a commitment was made to that option it meant that the Syrians were either going to win big or lose big - and they lost big. Their armed forces took a terrible beating - though they never collapsed - and over the course of the fighting they were pushed back well behind the starting line for their attack. Their failure to capture and retain even the merest sliver of Israeli territory fatally weakened any chance of a negotiated handing back of the territory captured by Israel in 1967. Since 1973 peace has reigned on the border between Israel and Syria. The Yom Kippur War was a strategic failure for Syria.

4.
In spite of its disastrous start, the Yom Kippur war was successful for Israel too. Crossing the Canal and conquering a large slice of Egypt showed that the IDF was still able to come up with successful responses to seemingly insoluble problems. Enough resolve was shown by the defenders on the Golan Heights to hold the Syrians and later allow for a severe defeat to be inflicted on them. Paradoxically, cutting off the Egyptian forces on the Sinai bank of the Canal, rather than destroying them, served Israel’s interest too as their presence there led to negotiations that eventually produced the peace treaty with Egypt, a huge strategic gain for Israel.

Israel lost 2688 soldiers killed during the war and 7,250 more were wounded. The scale of these figures ought to put the casualties suffered by the IDF in the 2006 conflict with Lebanon into perspective. There is simply no comparison between the slaughter that well matched conventional armies involved in high-intensity conflict can inflict on each other and those that irregular forces, no matter how well trained and motivated, can impose on a conventional army over a comparable period of time.

It’s 35 years - with the partial exception of Lebanon in 1982 - since the IDF has had to slug it out, toe to toe, with another conventional force. Since then Israel’s enemies have chosen either to make peace or to resort to unconventional warfare and/or to operate through proxy forces. Given how costly they are in lives, having avoided a conventional war for this length of time is not a small achievement.

5.
The shock produced by the initial reverses suffered in the war and the casualties suffered during it led to the downfall of Golda Meir’s government and played a part in bringing the hegemony of the Labour Party in Israeli politics to an end. Though not on the same scale, the 2006 Lebanon War also produced a wave of dissatisfaction with Ehud Olmert’s government. There are many more differences than similarities between the two conflicts and the Israeli public attitude to them; however, I think that at least one point relevant to both can be made. Conscripted soldiers in democratic, pluralist societies can’t be expected to lay down their lives with the same alacrity as members of organizations whose belief systems exalt death and guarantee an eternal reward for those who find it at the hands of the enemy, or the same resignation as soldiers in the armies of dictatorships where there is not the vaguest notion of respect for human rights. Sensitivity to casualties is a mark of societal maturity and sets Israel apart from its main enemies. The military history of the Second World War is replete with examples of Allied troops being outfought by German and Japanese troops, but the cure for this was not found by seeking to foster the same fanatical attitudes in American and Commonwealth troops as those held by their Axis counterparts. Of course, there is a price to pay for this sensitivity to casualties, conflicts will be messy and victory, when it comes, will not always be overwhelming but there is no reason to think that soldiers from democratic societies will not fight with determination given good leadership. In spite of all its failings, Israeli political and military leadership in the Yom Kippur War was good enough.

6.
One final point. If there is any lesson from the Yom Kippur War still relevant today it’s this; don’t get cocky. The enemy may be weaker than you, may appear to have no option but to accept what you seek to impose on him but, at the moment you least expect and in a way you aren’t prepared for, he can still strike back at you and if he does it in an intelligent way, inflict heavy losses on you and oblige you to accept at least some of his demands. There’s reason to think about that now, whether your political sympathies lie with Likud or Peace Now.