October 1973 War

This chapter focuses on two moments of exception in Egyptian cinema—the first prompted by the 6th of October war and the second following the January 2011 uprising. I examine two sets of films that do not fit into the typical generic conventions of documentary films, specifically Khairy Beshara’s Tank Catcher, Shadi Abdel-Salam’s Armies of the Sun, and Samir Ouf’s Traveler to the North, Traveler to the South, which celebrate Egyptian soldiers and the October war and, almost 40 years later, a creative documentary by Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke entitled Crop. I argue that through their employment of sound, their disruption of the conventional voice over narrator, and the fetishization of technology and war machinery, these experimental films allow us to rethink the generic conventions that split documentary from fiction film at the same time that they also prompt us to review representations of the institution in other instances of Egyptian cinema.

The relatively short history of Cairo's Unknown Soldier monument not only reminds us that national monuments, however “eternal” they may appear to many who grew up with them and were taught to believe in a ‘natural’ connection between the symbol and its referent, are always works in progress. These texts are being written, sometimes erased, and always appropriated and overwritten by other contemporaries and in subsequent generations. It also points to the different layers of historical signification that may reside in one and the same symbol: while it seems likely that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, because of its central element for contemporary Egyptian identity (representing the biggest Arab military victory over Israel, at least as Egyptians see it) will remain an important national symbol for Egyptians in the future; it has already changed its symbolic valuation several times in barely three decades. Moreover, even in its original form, in 1975, it was already a variant of a tradition, since it combined the concept of the “Unknown Soldier” monument with that of another, the commemorative mural.

Before the 1973 War, Egypt conducted a series of military exercises that served as smokescreen for the actual attack on Israeli forces in Sinai. Iraq conducted similar exercises to cover its surprise attacks on Iran in 1980 and on Kuwait in 1990. Nevertheless, this pattern of conducting military exercises as trial runs for offensive action in the 1970s until the late 1980s has receded in recent decades in the Middle East in favour of another pattern of conducting joint, multi-national exercises, for the purposes of alliance reassurance and joint force operability such as Bright Star, North Thunder, and other Turkish-Israeli, Israeli-Greek, Egyptian-Russian exercises. This is puzzling; there is no shortage of war in the conflict-torn Middle East and conducing military exercises has not failed its mission in preparing troops to fight. This chapter examines these past and current military exercises in the Middle East and accounts for the observed patterns by the change in the threat environment and international alliances in the region. The Cold War alliances and threats under which the old pattern took hold, particularly the adoption in Arab armies of Soviet military doctrine and the Arab-Israeli wars, declined. These were replaced by different alliances, operationalised through another pattern of exercises-as-reassurance, and different threats, from regional ‘rogue’ states to terrorist organizations.

The article analyzes the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to foresee the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel in October 6, 1973. The paper deconstructs the various elements of the American failure and explores the reasons that led to it. The paper shows that at the heart of the flawed American assessment was a paradigm formulated by U.S. intelligence analysts, one that was influenced by Israeli intelligence analysts.  With this conclusion, the paper suggests that alongside the numerous advantages of intelligence liaison between states, the practice can also lead them to make grave errors.

الوحدة، الألم النّاتج عن عزلة، كلمةٌ دائمًا ما ارتبطت بالمجتمع ككلّ. في اللغة العربيّة وفيها وحدها دون غيرها، نجد أنّ كلمة الوحدة يمكن أن تُستخدم للإفادة بمعنى آخر، أي الاتّحاد. في الإنكليزيّة أو الفرنسيّة أو الألمانيّة مثلًا، تتناقض كلمة الوحدة - تلك النّاتجة عن عزلة (loneliness) - تناقضًا تامًّا مع نسختها التي تفيد معنى الاتّحاد (unity). لطالما شكّلت هذه العزلة المؤلمة جزءًا عضويًّا من السينما العربيّة منذ نشأتها، إذ نجدها مع بدايات هذه السينما في النصّين الذين وضعتهما كاتبة السيناريو التّونسيّة هايدي سمامة شيكلي تمزالي للفيلمين الرّوائيّين، القصير “زُهرة” (إخراج ألبير سمامة شيكلي، 1922) والطّويل “عين الغزال” (ألبير سمامة شيكلي، 1924). الفيلمان يتناولان موضوع الوحدة وهما من أوّل الأفلام التي صنعها بالكامل تقنيّون وممثلون عرب وأفارقة.

This article analyzes the quality of the Egyptian and Israeli intelligence advice and decision-making process in the October 1973 War as key factors that determined its course. Following a background to the subject, we focus on the 9–13 October standstill stage, in which Sadat decided, despite his generals’ advice, to renew the Egyptian offensive. Effective Israeli intelligence collection about the coming attack, which was well used by the decision-makers, saved Israel from accepting an undesired ceasefire. The result was the14 October failed Egyptian offensive that turned the tide of the war and led to Israeli military achievements at the war’s final stage.

The article analyzes the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to
foresee the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Israel in 6 October
1973. The paper deconstructs the various elements of the American
failure and explores the reasons that led to it. The paper shows that
at the heart of the flawed American assessment was a paradigm
formulated by U.S. intelligence analysts, one that was influenced by
Israeli intelligence analysts. With this conclusion, the paper suggests that alongside the numerous advantages of intelligence liaison between states, the practice can also lead them to make grave errors

Using a New Historicist methodology, this paper explores the ideology in selected poems by Ada Aharoni. The paper begins by investigating the three major paradigms used by Israeli society to mythologize the Yom Kippur War. After that, an overview of the new historicism theory is presented, with a focus on the concepts of power and ideology. This helps to develop the argument of the paper into illustrating the connection between Aharoni and new historicism by discussing how she achieves her ideology in her poetry. Finally, the paper presents an analysis of selected poems from a new historicist perspective.

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

Nearly half a century after the fourth Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, despite the flood of reconstructions drawn up by protagonists and military historians, numerological confusion reigns: official as well as unofficial data must be taken with a grain of salt, sometimes even if proposed by trustworthy authors. In short, the historiography concerning the October War shows no shared agreement neither on the initial order-of-battle, nor on the final losses. Frequent numerical discrepancies tend to significantly hamper or even invalidate tactical analysis and historical judgement. However, in recent times several studies, reports, minutes of meetings, etc. have been declassified, enriching historical understanding while indicating new research paths. This paper seeks to clarify some aspects of the historical reconstruction of the events that happened on the Syrian front during the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973, with particular attention focused on the contribution of the Israeli Air Force and the performance of the Syrian air defence.

Extant literature explains Egyptian successes and failures in the October 1973 War by Sadat’s restoration or abolition of ‘objective control’: when restoring ‘objective control’, Sadat succeeded; when abolishing it, he failed. However, Samuel Huntington’s theory cannot account for Sadat’s command performance, not because Sadat zigzagged between this theory’s extremes, but because he never thought or acted according to its recipe. I employ Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command concepts to argue that Sadat’s command constituted an eccentric combination of military romanticism and politicization of war, whose paradox was reflected in the initial military successes and the achievement of Egypt’s strategic objectives despite the military failures by the war’s final stage.

The volume
What did the Atlantic Community mean for the nations of North America and Western Europe during the 1960s and early 1970s? This book, spanning the period from presidents Kennedy to  Nixon, offers a wide-ranging set of views on this topic. National perspectives from the main protagonists—the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany— are complemented by studies on the role of non-state institutions and public diplomacy in maintaining close transatlantic relations. The book moves from the high optimism of the Kennedy years, with the attempt to reframe transatlantic relations around two more equal poles in the United States and a uniting Europe, to the series of disagreements and disputes that energized transatlantic diplomacy during the Nixon years. In doing so, the book provides a unique overview of the main trends and troubles of the transatlantic relationship during a critical period and shows how various channels—both diplomatic and non-diplomatic—were used to overcome them and maintain a strong alliance.

The Chapter
This chapter traces and analyses the Community’s involvement in the Middle East and its first collective approaches to the Arab world, the impetus behind these approaches, its stance during the 1973 October war, and the wider conflict with the US. Particular emphasis is placed on the attempt of the EEC member states to define a European identity in the context of the dynamic construction of a United Europe, and the part played by the oil factor in dissipating European cohesion and obliging the Community to reconcile the goal of establishing a political identity with the need to preserve a close working relationship with the US.