October 1973 War

يحاول هذا الفصل مقتصرًا على تغطية وجه واحد من نظرة الفلسطينيين من الحرب ونتائجها متصل برأس هرم التنظيمات الفلسطينية "فتح"- تقديم قراءة وثائقية لحرب تشرين الأول/ أكتوبر 1973 من خلال هذه الوثائق المكتومة سابقًا، وباستحضار نصوص أخرى مختلفة رافقت الحرب ومآلاتها، لبيان الموقف الفلسطيني من الحرب، و"حيرة" قيادة المقاتلين الفلسطينيين التالية للحرب وتطوراتها. كما يضيء من خلال بعض الوثائق، التي يمكن اعتبارها "تذكرات" قريبة من لحظة الحدث، على بعض المواقف المصرية من الحرب، ومن مشاركة الفلسطينيين فيها.

בעיית בני הערובה קיימת עוד מימי קדם. איפשהו בסביבות השנים 367-361 לִפנֵי הַסְפִירָה הפילוסוף היווני הנודע אפלטון דן בנושא זה בדיאלוג שלו "החוקים". הוא טען שבעיר הנמצאת בעת מלחמה במצור יש לתת יחס מיוחד לתושבים שבני משפחתם נחטפו על ידי האויב ולהבטיח את שלומם ורווחתם. חייבים להפגין רגישות מיוחדת למצבם הנפשי של משפחות החטופים ולתמוך בהם בזמנים כה קשים עבורם.
יחד עם זאת, זהו בדיוק מה שמחייב אנשים חכמים, ללא קשר לרגשותיהם הטבעיות, להפעיל את שכלם הישר. לכן, סבר אפלטון, כדי למנוע סכסוכים אפשריים, בגידות, וכדי שהחברה תוכל לשמור על המורל שלה ולעמוד במצור קשה, יש לבודד את המשפחות החטופים הללו משאר אוכלוסיית העיר.

تحاول هذه الورقة رصد بعض مظاهر تحولات المجتمع المصري في الفترة الحرجة التي مر بها بعد هزيمة يونيو 1967، وانهيار المشروع الناصري بخطابه الشعبوي، وصولا إلى انتصار أكتوبر 1973، الذي أعاد بعض التوازن إلى المجتمع المصري. لذا يمكن أن يؤدي استعراض بعض مشاهد ما جرى في هذه الفترة الخصبة إلى فهم طبيعة المتغيرات التي جرت في عمق المجتمع المصري، وحولته من تجربة جمال عبد الناصر بكل سلبياتها وإيجابياتها، إلى تجربة عصر أنور السادات في النصف الثاني من عقد السبعينيات التي مثلت قطيعة مع الميراث الناصري ونقلت الحراك الاجتماعي إلى مستويات أخرى، ولم يكن هذا ممكنًا إلا بعد المحنة التي دخلها المجتمع المصري ونظام عبد الناصر بفعل الهزيمة.

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.

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.

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.

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 crisis that began in March 2011 with the outbreak of the revolt against Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now in its tenth year. The intensity and complexity of the crisis derive to a great extent from the fact that almost from the start it has been conducted at three levels: domestic, regional, and international. The United States and Israel are among the countries involved in the crisis; they are influenced by it and affect how it unfolds. This article is now available in a PDF file in the Hebrew version.

The English Version is Available Here: https://bit.ly/37srkBc

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.

This thesis presents a longitudinal case study of strategic planning operations at the Palestinian National Archives Center, by describing the transformations of the Palestinian Archive in important historical joints that include the post-Oslo stages through the second intifada and the division between the Fatah and Hamas. This thesis builds a description of the mutual effects between these events, their accumulation and their subsequent formation of the National Archive Center’s strategic framework, the common environment between archival institutions, their organizational culture, and various strategic directions of stakeholders.
This research goes beyond analyzing the environment to draw conclusions about the reasons for the failure of the National Archives Center’s strategic endeavors, which are represented by several reasons, including institutionally inherited structural weakness, the Center’s failure to bring about strategic change and its failure to create a strategy for stakeholder management.
The researcher adopted a pragmatic perspective on the study of this case, relying on the philosophy of Callon and Latour on the sociology of translation, which enriches the details of the case under study, where this relative perspective depends on the flattening of relations between entities that include the plans of the National Archives Center, the goals of stakeholders, the particulars of archives and the political and cultural intermediaries; all of which swarm towards a moving goal ,and make formulations that leave traces of patterns for the strategic interventions taking place. Consequently, the strength of the data collected through the triangulation method and the multiplicity of information sources had the ability to produce an accurate description of the relationships between these entities that formed through its movement the most important joints of the Palestinian National Archives Center strategies. This methodological movement was framed with a conceptual framework developed from the deliberate and emerging strategic model of Mintzberg and Waters.
The research presents lessons learned from the experience of the Palestinian National Archives Center in the form of recommendations for strategic planners, archive policy makers and decision-makers in this arena today. These recommendations include the adoption of a comprehensive national archive concept that takes into account the whole spectrum of various archival institutions’ goals, and calls for enabling the category of marginalized archivists. In addition, the research calls to consider the Israeli occupation as a threat that can be overcome. The research also affirms the need to take into account alternative scenarios in the planning process, especially with regard to the administrative and legislative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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

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.

המחקר עוסק במאמצי השלום סביב בעיית השטחים במזרח התיכון במהלך ממשל ריצ'ארד ניקסון בארצות הברית ודן בשאלה מדוע לא הושג כל הסכם שלום. המחקר מנתח את הגישות הראשוניות מצד ממשלת ישראל כלפי השטחים עליהם השתלטה, והשפעת הדבר על גישות להשגת שלום. המחקר גם עוסק בשאלת יחסן של הממשלות הערביות כלפי אפשרות של משא ומתן עם ממשלת ישראל וכיצד השפיע הדבר. בנוסף, דן המחקר בעמדות האמריקאית והסובייטית והשפעת המלחמה הקרה על המצב במזרח התיכון. הוא דן במאמצי האו"ם ביישום בהחלטה 242, ומנתח את גורמי הכישלון של שר החוץ האמריקאי ויליאם רוג'רס. המסקנה המרכזית של מחקר זה כי ההתקשרות לשטחים והשאננות בעקבות הניצחון במלחמת ששת הימים היו הגורם העיקרי לחוסר התזוזה מצד ממשלת ישראל, כמו גם פעילותו של היועץ הנשיאותי קיסינג'ר בהכשלת מאמציו של רוג'רס.

The Arab nations of Egypt and Syria achieved strategic surprise in the Yom Kippur War.  Understanding of Israeli cognitive biases allowed the Arabs to craft a denial and deception plan that fed the Israeli's beliefs and clouded their judgment.

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.

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.