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 The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
On Oct. 6, 1973, at precisely 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the Middle East exploded. The armies of Egypt and Syria launched massive simultaneous attacks against Israeli forces in the Sinai desert and the Golan Heights. The Israelis, who had received irrefutable indications of the impending assault, were nevertheless caught unawares. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than 500 defenders faced a cross-water onslaught by 80,000 Egyptians. Also radically askew was the ratio of Israeli to Syrian infantry. The ensuing Yom Kippur War, named after the Jewish holy day on which it erupted, threatened Israel with destruction and the world with nuclear holocaust. Yet, just over two weeks later, the Israeli army had driven the Syrians back to Damascus while entrapping much of the Egyptian army. This revolutionary outcome facilitated the beginning of the Arab-Israeli peace process and pushed the Palestinian issue to the fore, changing the Middle East forever.Such a tectonic event, understandably, has inspired a great number of books in Arabic and Hebrew. The corpus was broadened in the past year, the 30th anniversary of the war, particularly in Israel where it has remained a national trauma, similar to America's in Vietnam. In English, too, there is no shortage of studies of the war, from military histories such as The Yom Kippur War, compiled by the London Sunday Times, to analyses of the Israeli side, typified by Chaim Herzog's The War of Atonement, and the Egyptian view presented in The Road to Ramadan by Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal. Memoirs abound -- by Egyptian generals Saad el-Shazly and Mohamed Gamasy, and by the Israelis Avraham Adan and Ariel Sharon, and by many of the principal political figures involved: Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger and Anwar Sadat. Still missing, however, is the comprehensive book that examines the war in its entirety, that encompasses both the Arab and the Israeli dimensions, as well as the volatile regional and international contexts in which the war occurred. Two new studies now aspire to be that book. One of them almost succeeds.There is injustice in reviewing Howard Blum's Eve of Destruction together with Abraham Rabinovich's Yom Kippur War. The first is a bizarrely titled, minimally researched and highly anecdotal account told mainly from the perspective of several invariably heroic and prescient Israelis. It is riddled with embarrassing errors, from repeated references to "gray-uniformed" Egyptians -- they in fact wore tan -- to green Israeli recruits erroneously described as jobniks, Hebrew slang for deskmen. Inexplicably, Blum skirts over the war's final week and some of its most dramatic events -- Israel's encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army, the Arab oil embargo and the near-nuclear clash between the U.S. and Soviet fleets. He purports to tell "The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War," but departs only once from the well-known record, asserting that an Israeli spy in the Egyptian government was actually a double agent -- a claim rejected by all serious historians. By contrast, Rabinovich's book is the best available on the war to date. Unlike Blum, a former reporter for the New York Times but a Connecticut resident who does not know Hebrew, Rabinovich is an Israeli journalist with decades of experience living and writing on the Middle East. If Blum's prose is purplish and partially fictionalized (for example, "the boots of Shazly's group beat a steady tattoo throughout the long descent [to his bunker]. With the last step, Shazly felt he had reached the earth's core"), Rabinovich's is both compelling and intelligent. He combines a wealth of published and archival material with dozens of oral history interviews in a seamless, riveting narrative reminiscent of the books of Rick Atkinson or Stephen Ambrose. Sample this single passage, describing the desperate battle for the Golan:"Large dust clouds could be seen moving toward Hushniya, four miles south, and [Maj. Haim] Barak could see the two Israeli tanks burning in that direction. . . . The boulder-strewn terrain confined passage at points to a single navigable track. The battalion commander led the way, pausing at every rise to scan the terrain ahead. After three miles, he crested a ridge and saw below him . . . a mass of tanks -- some fueling, some in defensive positions, some preparing to move out. There seemed to be hundreds. Syria's First Armored Division had arrived, joining units that had been in the area since the previous day. Barak ordered his tanks to take position on the ridge and open fire. 'Just point the gun anywhere and shoot,' he said to his gunner. 'You're sure to hit something.' "With penetrating insight into the Israeli military and political mind, Rabinovich reveals the origins of Israel's failure to recognize the abundant signs of the approaching war, to prepare for battlefield innovations -- SAM anti-aircraft and Sagger anti-tank missiles -- and to appreciate the combat-readiness of the Egyptian and Syrian soldier. He not only reconstructs the horrors of the front but also the tensions and uncertainties in the headquarters and cabinet rooms. Never before has the Israeli experience in the Yom Kippur War been so sensitively and intricately documented.Yet the book's strength is also its major shortcoming. Rabinovich is overwhelmingly concerned with the Yom Kippur War and not with the October or Ramadan War, as all Arabs call it. The impact of domestic and inter-Arab politics on the war, the dynamics of Arab decision-making, the view from the Arab lines -- all are scantily explained. Portraits of Arab participants are mostly two-dimensional and meant to serve as targets for Israelis. The reason Rabinovich gives for this shallowness -- "The Arab side of the war is poorly documented" -- is simply untrue. Myriad books and articles on the Arab side, and even some documents, are available. Arab veterans, no less than Israelis, are willing to share their stories. Accessing these sources requires knowledge of Arabic and the ability to travel freely through the Arab world -- clearly obstacles for Rabinovich. Of the 125 interviews he conducted for the book, very few are with Arabs.Another unfortunate, if less glaring, imbalance is the relatively brief attention Rabinovich accords to the superpowers' role in the war. He presents the critical actions of the U.S. and Soviet governments as a backdrop to the battles rather than as parallel struggles whose results proved equally important. Those actions can now be reconstructed through interviews with former Soviet and American officials, and by examining thousands of declassified documents from both sides. These show how American support for the Israelis, and the Soviets' for the Arabs, nearly triggered a nuclear showdown and revealed U.S. plans to seize Arab oilfields in response to the embargo. Yet Rabinovich did not conduct such interviews and largely overlooks the documents. Still, it must be said that he at least mentions the war's international aspect. Blum completely ignores it.Students of Israeli and military history and readers of quality nonfiction will certainly find The Yom Kippur War a book that is both rich in information and riveting in style. Those interested in a more comprehensive study of "the epic encounter that transformed the Middle East," as Rabinovich calls it, may still have to wait. Reviewed by Michael B. OrenCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. 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

Review
"The Yom Kippur War of 1973, exceeding in scope even the 1942 Battle of al-Alamein, has found its ideal chronicler. Abraham Rabinovich has long enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the acuity of his insights into Middle Eastern political and military issues. Nevertheless, while his earlier articles and books have been widely read and praised, the current volume may well be his magnum opus. Its revelations are astonishing. Its prose is gripping. Its conclusions, richly documented and austerely objective, are intensely relevant to the Middle Eastern crisis of our own day."
--Howard M. Sachar, author of A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Own Time

“As no one before, Abraham Rabinovich recounts the whole story of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that most elusive round of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based primarily on Israeli sources, his well-written history skillfully covers everything from the individual soldier’s experience to the deep implications of the war."
--Daniel Pipes, author of Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics

Review
"The Yom Kippur War of 1973, exceeding in scope even the 1942 Battle of al-Alamein, has found its ideal chronicler. Abraham Rabinovich has long enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the acuity of his insights into Middle Eastern political and military issues. Nevertheless, while his earlier articles and books have been widely read and praised, the current volume may well be his magnum opus. Its revelations are astonishing. Its prose is gripping. Its conclusions, richly documented and austerely objective, are intensely relevant to the Middle Eastern crisis of our own day."
--Howard M. Sachar, author of A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Own Time

?As no one before, Abraham Rabinovich recounts the whole story of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that most elusive round of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based primarily on Israeli sources, his well-written history skillfully covers everything from the individual soldier?s experience to the deep implications of the war."
--Daniel Pipes, author of Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics

Book Description
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.

From the Inside Flap
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.

From the Back Cover
"The Yom Kippur War of 1973, exceeding in scope even the 1942 Battle of al-Alamein, has found its ideal chronicler. Abraham Rabinovich has long enjoyed a distinguished reputation for the acuity of his insights into Middle Eastern political and military issues. Nevertheless, while his earlier articles and books have been widely read and praised, the current volume may well be his magnum opus. Its revelations are astonishing. Its prose is gripping. Its conclusions, richly documented and austerely objective, are intensely relevant to the Middle Eastern crisis of our own day."
--Howard M. Sachar, author of A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Own Time

“As no one before, Abraham Rabinovich recounts the whole story of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that most elusive round of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Based primarily on Israeli sources, his well-written history skillfully covers everything from the individual soldier’s experience to the deep implications of the war."
--Daniel Pipes, author of Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics

About the Author
Abraham Rabinovich, a graduate of Brooklyn College and a United States Army veteran, worked as a reporter for Newsday before joining the Jerusalem Post. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Republic, among other publications. The author of several books, including The Boats of Cherbourg, he lives in Jerusalem.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One

Footprints in the Sand

Capt. Motti Ashkenazi was not a man to accept a perceived wrong without protest. The outpost in Sinai his unit of reservists took over two weeks before Yom Kippur was in an advanced state of neglect. Barbed-wire fencing had sunken almost entirely into the sand, trenches were collapsing, gun positions had insufficient sandbags, and the ammunition supply was short. When the officer he was relieving asked him to sign the standard form acknowledging receipt of the outpost in good condition, Ashkenazi declined. Without this formality, the unit being relieved could not depart. When Ashkenazi refused an order from his battalion commander to sign, the exasperated commander signed the form himself.

Ashkenazi's unit was part of the Jerusalem Brigade, which had never before been assigned to a tour of duty on the Bar-Lev Line. Unlike the units which normally undertook this task, the Jerusalem Brigade was a second-line formation which included men well into their thirties. Some were immigrants who had received only a truncated form of basic training before being relegated to the reserves. A sprinkling of younger reservists with combat experience stiffened the ranks, and officers too were generally veterans of combat units.

The assignment of such a unit to the Bar-Lev Line, once considered hazardous duty, reflected the relaxed situation on the Egyptian front. It was six years since Israel had reached the canal in the Six Day War, and three years since the intense skirmishing across the waterway-the so-called War of Attrition-had ended.

The reservists had grumbled as usual upon receiving their annual call-up notices for a month's duty, particularly since their tour began on the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and would last through Yom Kippur and the subsequent Succot holiday. However, by the time they boarded the buses that would take them to Sinai, some were looking forward to a month of camaraderie, far from the routine of work and home. The men brought books and board games, finjans (pots) for brewing coffee, even fishing rods. Ashkenazi, a thirty-two-year-old doctoral student in philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, took along his four-month-old German shepherd, Peng, because he had nowhere to leave him.

Unlike the other Bar-Lev forts, which were built along the canal bank, Ashkenazi's outpost, code-named Budapest, was ten miles east of the canal on a narrow sandspit between the Mediterranean Sea and a shallow lagoon. The outpost's purpose was to guard against an Egyptian thrust along the sandspit towards the coastal road to Israel. Budapest was the largest of the Bar-Lev Line fortifications, incorporating an artillery battery and a naval signals unit which maintained contact with vessels patrolling off the coast.

Towards evening on the day of his arrival, Ashkenazi, a deputy company commander, climbed the fort's observation tower and looked west along the sandspit towards Port Fuad at the entrance to the Suez Canal. This northwest corner of Sinai was the only part of the peninsula not captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Ashkenazi could make out a string of Egyptian outposts stretching along the sandspit. The one closest to him was only a mile away. Since the canal did not separate them, the only thing that could inhibit an Egyptian raid was a minefield that Budapest's previous commander had pointed out to him during their tour that morning.

As Ashkenazi watched, a pack of wild dogs emerged from the Egyptian lines and trotted down the sand towards the Israeli outpost. They appeared to be heading towards Budapest's garbage dump at the western edge of the position. As they approached the minefield, Ashkenazi braced for explosions. But the dogs passed through unharmed. Tides washing over the sands had dislodged or neutralized the mines. Ashkenazi decided to contact battalion headquarters in the morning to request additional fencing and sandbags.

Maj. Meir Weisel, an affable kibbutznik, was the most senior company commander in the battalion which moved into the Bar-Lev Line. In previous tours of reserve duty, his unit had clashed with Palestinian guerrillas along the Jordan River and taken casualties. "This time," a brigade officer had told him, "I'm sending you to the canal and you can rest." His company took over four forts in the canal's central sector and he positioned himself in Fort Purkan, opposite the city of Isamailiya on the Egyptian-held bank. The officer whom he replaced pointed out a villa across the canal which he said had belonged to the parents of foreign minister Abba Eban's wife, Suzie, who was from a prominent Egyptian Jewish family. It was not clear who lived there now but a gardener watered the plants every day. "As long as you see the gardener working there," said the officer, "everything is OK."

The limited forces Israel deployed on both the Syrian and Egyptian fronts opposite vastly larger enemy armies reflected a self-assurance induced by the country's stunning victory in the Six Day War. Israel believed it had attained a military superiority that no Arab nation or combination of nations could challenge. The euphoria that followed the lightning victory in 1967 over the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies gave Israel a sense of manifest destiny similar to that which impelled the United States westward in the nineteenth century.

Its thin front lines belied a vast increase in military strength. Israel had twice as many tanks and warplanes in 1973 as it had in the Six Day War. Its largest armor formations were no longer brigades with one hundred tanks but divisions with three hundred. Veteran armor officers permitted themselves to fantasize about commanding a full armored division deploying into battle-two brigades forward, one to the rear, as they swept into the attack.

The armies of Egypt and Syria had grown more than Israel's in absolute numbers but the overall ratio in the Arab favor remained 3 to 1. Given the fighting ability of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), this ratio was considered acceptable in Israel. The General Staff, in fact, was preparing to reduce the thirty-six months of service required of its conscript soldiers by three months. Convinced that it could stand up to an Arab world thirty times its size, Israel was waiting for the Arabs to formally recognize the Jewish state and agree to new borders.

The Arabs, however, refused to accept the humiliation of 1967. During the War of Attrition launched by Egypt in March 1969, hundreds of Israeli soldiers died in massive artillery bombardments. Deep penetration raids by Israeli warplanes and commandos forced Cairo to accept a cease-fire in August 1970. Since then, the Suez front had remained quiet. On the Syrian front, there were periodic exchanges of fire-"battle days," Israel termed them-but no serious challenge to Israel's dominance.

The seeming docility of the Arabs encouraged a sense of invulnerability in Israel. In August 1973, defense minister Moshe Dayan, in a speech to army officers, said that Israel's strength was a reflection not only of its military potential but of inherent Arab weakness. "It is a weakness that derives from factors that I don't believe will change quickly: the low level of their soldiers in education, technology, and integrity; and inter-Arab divisiveness which is papered over from time to time but superficially and for short spans."

A Mossad official posted abroad immediately after the Six Day War returned home five years later to find the country transformed. Israel was not just self-assured, he found, but self-satisfied, awash in a good life that seemed as if it would go on forever. Government and military officials traveled now in large cars and wrote off business lunches to expenses, a new practice in Israel. Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza Strip provided the working hands the fast-growing nation needed but were politically invisible. The sense of physical expanse was startling to someone accustomed to the claustrophobia of pre-Six Day War Israel. The border was no longer fifteen minutes from Tel Aviv or on the edge of Jerusalem but out of sight and almost out of mind-on the Jordan River, on the Suez Canal, on the Golan. People went down to Sinai now not to wage war but to holiday on its superb beaches.

The army had grown tremendously and so had its prominence in national life. There was a layer of brigadier generals, a newly created rank required by the expanding army. The Mossad official sensed arrogance in high places. Some generals had their offices redone to reflect their new status; some gave parties with army entertainment troupes singing in the background. All of this was foreign to the spartan ways the official had known as distinguishing features of Israeli public life only five years before. An attitude of disdain for Arab military capability had etched itself insidiously into the national psyche. The official was as yet unaware of the extent to which this disdain had led to distortions in the mind-set of the armed forces.

Sitting in a downtown Jerusalem café a few months before the war, Motti Ashkenazi had told a friend that war was inevitable unless Israel accepted Egypt's demand that it pull back from the canal in order to permit the waterway to be reopened. Now, in command of Budapest, he took his own warning seriously. After two days of badgering battalion headquarters, he was informed that his request for sandbags and barbed-wire concertinas was being met. The supply vehicle that arrived carried only a fraction of the material he had asked for. Nevertheless, he was able to fortify the area around the fort's gate and the vulnerable approach from the beach.

A week before Yom Kippur, Ashkenazi was in a half-track making a routine morning patrol eastward along the sandspit towards his rear base when he saw fresh footprints in the sand on both sides of the road. Whoever made them seemed to have circled the area, as if examining the lay of the land. The road was shut at night because it was vulnerable to commando landings from the sea. If anyone came down the road by day, Budapest was supposed to be informed beforehand, but there had been no such notification. The footprints, thought Ashkenazi, could have been left by Egyptian scouts landing from the sea, on one side of the road, or coming on foot through the lagoon, on the other side. He radioed headquarters and a vehicle with two Bedouin trackers arrived. They examined the footprints and concluded that they had been made by standard Israeli army boots.

"If I were an Egyptian scout, I would use that kind of boot," said Ashkenazi.

The trackers laughed. "Do you think they're that clever?"

"Why not?" asked Ashkenazi.

Twice more in the coming days he would find footprints along the route.

Two

the man in the peasant robe

Civilian clothing did little to mask the military bearing of the six men who descended from the Soviet liner docking in Alexandria on its regular run from the Syrian port of Latakia on August 21. It took a moment before Lt. Gen. Saad el Shazly, chief of staff of the Egyptian army, recognized his Syrian colleagues as they came through customs with their false passports, trying to look like tourists. Shazly, also in civilian clothing, escorted them to the officers' club and left them to settle in. Towards evening, the Syrians were driven to a former palace serving as Egyptian naval headquarters. Eight Egyptian generals joined them, including defense minister Ahmed Ismail. The Syrians included defense minister Mustafa Talas and chief of staff Gen. Yusuf Shakoor. In intensive meetings over the next two days, the fourteen men coordinated their plans for a surprise two-front attack on Israel. When they rose, all was settled except the timing of D-Day. This would be left to the leaders of the two countries.

The humiliation of the Six Day War had cast its debilitating shadow over Egyptian president Anwar Sadat ever since he assumed office in October 1970. The War of Attrition undertaken by his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had not budged Israel from the Suez Canal. Nor had diplomatic efforts by the international community. Israel insisted on achieving border changes in direct negotiations with the Arab countries. The Arabs refused to recognize Israel as a legitimate state, let alone cede territory to it.

Prime Minister Golda Meir, confident that Israel's geopolitical situation had never been better, was content to wait for the Arabs to bow to reality. She rejected defense minister Moshe Dayan's suggestion in December 1970 that Israel pull back twenty miles from the canal in order to enable its reopening and thereby reduce Egyptian motivation for going to war. Two months later, Sadat reshaped Dayan's proposal and adopted it as his own in an address to the Egyptian National Assembly. Unlike Dayan, the Egyptian leader saw a partial Israeli pullback as catalyzing, not indefinitely delaying, a final withdrawal.

Sadat astonished his audience by declaring his readiness to achieve a peace agreement with Israel, the first time an Arab leader had publicly suggested that possibility. But Israel, said Sadat, would have to commit itself to subsequent withdrawal, not only from all of Sinai but from all the other territories captured in the Six Day War-the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. The Palestinian refugee question must be resolved as well. As dire as were Egypt's straits economically and strategically, Sadat was not bidding for a separate settlement with Israel.

As an interim measure, U.S. secretary of state William Rogers attempted to persuade Israel to agree to a limited pullback but found it unyielding. After a fruitless trip to Jerusalem, his assistant, Joseph Sisco, paid a courtesy call on the prime minister and handed her a bouquet of flowers he had stopped to buy on the way. "Joe, you're saying it with flowers," Mrs. Meir said lightheartedly. "It won't do you any good."

A week after the Six Day War, the Israeli government had asked the United States to inform Egypt and Syria of its readiness to evacuate Sinai and the Golan, except for minor border modifications, in return for peace treaties. There was no response, but an Arab summit in Khartoum two months later rejected peace with Israel. The following month, the Israeli government rescinded its offer.

The international community made valiant attempts at a solution. In reply to a questionnaire submitted by UN envoy Gunnar Jarring in February 1971, Egypt declared its readiness to live in peace with Israel if it returned to the prewar border. In a parallel questionnaire submitted to Jerusalem, the reverse question was put-in return for peace, would Israel evacuate all Sinai? The reply was negative. Israel was prepared to withdraw to "mutually determined boundaries," not the prewar boundaries. Any peace achieved by pulling back to the vulnerable prewar borders, said Dayan, would be short-lived, because it would make another war too tempting for the Arabs. "If we really want to honor all the sovereign rights of the past and all the desires of every Arab, we won't be able to have a Jewish state here." The possibility of an interim settlement in Sinai had sunk into the desert sands.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In this 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 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, foot soldiers 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.

SYNOPSIS

A US journalist now living in Jerusalem who has written several books on Israel chronicles the 1973 war that dramatically altered the regional map and politics. Based on interviews with Israeli Army commanders and other sources, this account also discusses Arab perspectives and the war's legacy, and includes photos and maps. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Rabinovich's book is the best available on the war to date … Rabinovich's [prose] is both compelling and intelligent. He combines a wealth of published and archival material with dozens of oral history interviews in a seamless, riveting narrative reminiscent of the books of Rick Atkinson or Stephen Ambrose. — Michael B. Oren

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. (Jan. 20) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

This big, informative book offers objective, clear-eyed analysis interlaced with the stories of statesmen and soldiers major and minor. Rabinovich's readable narrative presents the war mostly from the Israeli perspective, but he provides a fair, even sympathetic, account of the Egyptian and Syrian sides as well. His story fits with the generally accepted interpretation of the war: a successful surprise attack by the Egyptians and Syrians, early military gains for the aggressors, a reeling Israel that gained the initiative only slowly and at great cost, and finally superpower intervention that prevented a clear Israeli military victory but set in motion a political process that resulted in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty six years later. Rabinovich's "boots on the ground" details of this terrible, short war — which included the second-largest tank battle in history, fought in the barren sands of the Sinai — is a worthy account.

Kirkus Reviews