October 6, 2023, marks the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, also known as the Ramadan War, but it didn’t emerge out of nowhere. For decades leading up to the war, Israel and its Arab neighbors had been embroiled in a series of conflicts that began in 1948, sparked by the announcement of independence by the state of Israel. After three wars in 1949, 1956, and 1967, Israel had expanded its territory, leading to heightened tensions with the Arab states. On October 6, 1973, an Arab coalition of Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the Jewish holy day of atonement. This strategic attack launched a three-week-long conflict that would become the final and bloodiest conflict of the Arab-Israeli wars and shape the state of relations in the region for years to come. To help explain why this war occurred and how its influence is still felt today, we asked SIS professor Boaz Atzili a few questions.

The Yom Kippur War was just one in a series of Arab-Israeli wars dating back to the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. How did previous conflicts influence the Yom Kippur War?

Previous Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1956, 1967) influenced the Yom Kippur War as they set the tone of the bitter rivalry between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The 1967 war was the most important in that respect in two ways: first, it humiliated the Arab neighbors of Israel—Egypt and Syria in particular—because of the level of their defeat. Second, both countries—and Jordan—suffered a significant loss of territory during this war.

Arab coalition forces initiated their surprise attack on Israel on October 6, 1973. What was the lead-up to this attack, and what was the reasoning for initiating another Arab-Israeli war?

In 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt and the leader of the Pan-Arabic movement, died of a heart attack. His successor, Anwar Sadat, was determined to erase the disgrace of the 1967 defeat and to regain the Egyptian territory lost in that war. Sadat put these goals, and what he perceived as Egyptian interests, ahead of the interests of the Arabs (and Palestinians) as a whole. Saadat knew that Egypt, even with a coalition with other Arab forces, would not be able to gain its territory back by force, but in order to get those territories back, he needed two conditions to be true: first, he needed a domestic legitimacy which would allow him to embark on bold diplomatic initiatives; and second, he needed to change Israel’s arrogant position.

Early attempts to send “trial balloons” to Israel to suggest a negotiated peace were turned down. At that time, Israel saw itself as invincible and as being able to negotiate from a position of power. Only defeat in war, or even a tie, might change that. With those conditions in mind, Saadat tightened his relations with the Soviet Union to prepare for that war, allied with Syria, and planned a coordinated attack on Israel, from both the north and the south.

The Yom Kippur War began on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, which also happened to fall during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan. Why is it significant that this war began during religious observances for both sides?

Both holy days served to increase the magnitude of the Israeli’s surprise at the war, which Arabs call the Ramadan War or the October War. Large Egyptian and Syrian forces were concentrated in close proximity to their respective borders with Israel. Even with these forces amassing on their borders, Israeli leadership discounted the possibility that the Arab states were planning to initiate an attack because the Israelis believed that they were unlikely to do so during the month of Ramadan.

Choosing to attack on Yom Kippur allowed enormous tactical advantages to Egypt and Syria. Israel had a fairly small standing army whose main goal in wartime was to hold the line until the quantitative bulk of the military, the IDF’s Reserve Forces, were able to reach the front lines. This structure is dependent on a very quick and efficient system of reserve mobilization. That system of mobilization relied on public media like radio, TV, and phones. During Yom Kippur, the media in Israel is shut down, and people do not answer their phones, all of which made the Israeli mobilization much slower, less efficient, and more confusing than it otherwise would have been. Tactically, that was a brilliant choice of timing for Egypt and Syria.

Prior to the war and amid heightened tensions, Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir chose not to initiate a preemptive strike against Arab coalition forces. Why was this decision so controversial?

Until 1967, Israel always had a very offensive, though unofficial, military doctrine based on the assumption that the country was too small and vulnerable to risk a war to be fought on its own territory. That unofficial doctrine changed with the acquisition of the Sinai Peninsula’s territory in 1967, which served as a buffer between Egyptian forces and Israel’s main centers of population. Hence, even when there was some evidence of an impending attack in 1973, Prime Minister Meir could afford not to order a preemptive attack due to that buffer zone. The more substantial critique, in my mind, is why she did not order a defensive mobilization of the Israeli forces, rather than why she didn’t order a preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria.

The war was primarily fought in the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, and the Suez Canal. Why were these sites chosen, and what significance did they hold for either side

The main sites of the war were not so much a choice as a dictation of geography. The Golan Heights was taken from Syria in 1967, and the Sinai Peninsula was taken from Egypt in the same war, with Israeli troops stationed on the East Bank of the Suez Canal. Because of Israel’s occupation of these areas, these were the key locations of the Arab attack. A major part of the Egyptian and Syrian ability to surprise Israel in 1973 was the Israeli’s conception that the Arabs would never attack and try to regain control of these territories before they achieved parity in terms of military power. Even though Israel had its own conceptions of the Arab states, Saadat and Assad’s forces did attack, despite knowing they were still weaker than Israel. They attacked because they had limited aims and were predominantly politically and diplomatically oriented, not because they thought they could defeat Israel militarily.

The conflict raged for over three weeks before a UN-backed ceasefire took effect on October 24, with most fighting ending by October 26. How was this ceasefire enforced, and what was the result for each side?

The ceasefire was maintained because it was in the interest of both sides. Egypt and Syria did not win the war militarily, but they got what they needed out of it in terms of domestic and regional legitimation and cracking Israel’s veneer of invincibility. If fighting continued, the Arab states likely faced the prospect of another defeat.

For Israel, even though they controlled more territories than at the start of the war, it was nevertheless a major political defeat, and the country was reeling from the loss of life on a scale it had not experienced since 1948. In the aftermath of the ceasefire, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger embarked on a diplomatic initiative that brought later interim agreements and ultimately led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement.

The Yom Kippur War was not the official end of the conflict between Israel and Arab states, as an official peace treaty did not come until the Camp David Accords were signed by Israel and Egypt in 1979. What was the impact of this treaty, and how has it shaped the state of relations in the region today?

First, without the war, Israel would not have agreed to give back the Sinai territory to Egypt, and a peace agreement was unlikely to happen. Second, the peace agreement nevertheless would not have happened without some courageous political decisions.

First of all, Egypt’s President Saadat was brave enough to come to speak at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem—and eventually paid for it with his life. Second, it also took brave political decisions from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was willing to forgo his party’s ideology for peace. And third, it took a clever and persistent diplomacy of US President Jimmy Carter as the mediator.

The good news is that the bilateral peace between Egypt and Israel—the strongest two powers in the region, which fought four wars before—still holds today, 50 years later. It’s often a “cold peace,” but it’s still a peace. The bad news is that Camp David was never developed into the comprehensive regional peace that Saadat envisioned and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the core of the Middle East problem was just kicked down the road at Camp David—and is still simmering today.

What were some of the key lessons that were learned from the Yom Kippur War, and how are its effects being felt today?

For both Egypt and Israel, the key lesson drawn from the war is that another war between them is just too costly in both treasure and blood and should never be fought. This realization led Egypt to risk ostracism by its Arab neighbors and led Israel to give back a territory it once thought essential for its security. Unfortunately, this lesson about the value of peace between sworn enemies did not expand as much as it could across the region, especially to the Palestinians. It seems to me that the key lesson of the Yom Kippur War—the lesson of humility and understanding of the limitation of power—is perhaps lost on the current leadership of Israel.