Asaf Siniver, editor, The October 1973 War: Politics, Diplomacy, Legacy, London: Hurst

and Company, 2013.

Reviewed by William B. Quandt, Professor Emeritus, Department of Politics,

University of Virginia

Forty years is a good period of time from which to look back on major historical
events with a sense of perspective and access to a large volume of declassified material.
The memoirs have all been written, many participants in the events have been
interviewed, and once-sensitive issues can now be discussed with a high degree of
objectivity. Thus it is no surprise that Asaf Siniver has been able to assemble an
impressive group of scholars to bring new light to bear on the October 1973 Arab-Israeli
war. Without significant exceptions, the chapters are well researched and present largely
convincing pictures of aspects of this major crisis.

Siniver wants to avoid two types of scholarship – one that engages in the “blame
game”, prominent in Israel among those who ask who bore the responsibility for a war
that may have been avoidable; and a second that lumps the October war into generic
categories of conflict, without paying enough attention to its unique features.

While each of the contributions to this volume deserves attention, several stand
out. Siniver contributes a useful introduction and a chapter on Kissinger. He focuses on
Kissinger’s role before the war, the airlift decision, Kissinger’s trip to Moscow, and the
alert at the end of the war. The American archives are now largely available, and Siniver
has made good use of them. On the controversy surrounding the airlift, where Kissinger
himself is less than fully reliable as a source in his memoirs, Siniver does a good job of
relating the delay in the airlift to the surrounding diplomacy, a point that I have tried to
make in my own writing on the topic, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (Brookings 2005, third edition).

Since Siniver completed his study, one new source has appeared that forces a
reassessment of the pre-war diplomacy. In 2012, Yigal Kipnis wrote a book in Hebrew
that made use of the recently declassified Israeli war cabinet files. It was published in
english as 1973: The Road to War (Just World Books). Kipnis adds considerably to the
story of the stalemated diplomacy before the war, Henry Kissinger’s growing realization
that Egypt was genuinely interested in a diplomatic move, and the complete intransigence
that he encountered on the part of Golda Meir. Anyone reading The October War should
also read 1973: The Road to War.

Other chapters of note are by Yoram Meital on Egypt, Galia Golan on the Soviet
Union, and Ahron Bregman on the role of Ashraf Marwan. Meital works at something of
a disadvantage, since the Egyptian archives have not been opened. He has, however,
made good use of memoirs and puts together a convincing picture of Egyptian President
Anwar al-Sadat’s move toward war. He leaves unanswered the question of whether or
not robust American diplomacy in spring 1973 might have dissuaded Sadat from going to
war. There is probably no way now of knowing, but my impression is that Sadat did not
make his final decision on war until after the US-Soviet summit in the summer of 1973.
That, combined with the results of Kissinger’s second meeting with Hafiz Ismail in Paris
in May 1973, seems to have convinced Sadat that war was his only good choice. Once he
was sure in August that he had Saudi backing, it was just a matter of coordinating the
plan with Syria and getting his own forces ready for a surprise attack.

Galia Golan, a veteran Israeli scholar of Soviet policy in the Middle East, argues
strongly that the Soviet leadership did not want war to take place. They saw it coming
and warned President Richard Nixon and Kissinger, but to no avail. In Golan’s view, the
Soviets did not want to put the policy of détente at risk by encouraging adventurism in
the Middle East. And yet in the midst of the war, they did initiate an airlift of military
equipment to their Arab clients on October 10 (not October 8, as Siniver claims on p. 91).
And at the end of the war, Brezhnev did make a threat to take unspecified action if Israel
continued to violate the ceasefire. This led to the stage three “nuclear alert” ordered by
Kissinger (probably without explicit authorization from Nixon).

One of the understated aspects of the various analyses in this book is the nuclear
dimension. The Arabs were certainly aware that Israel possessed nuclear weapons in
1973. And yet we have no idea how this fact may have influenced their war planning. It
did not prevent their decision to attack, obviously, but it may have influenced the way
they conducted the war, especially on the Egyptian front. The authors of these chapters
largely ignore the other hints of a nuclear shadow over the crisis. A recent report from
the Center for Naval Analysis has reviewed in detail the evidence and published a
valuable report available here: http://www.cna.org/research/2013/israeli-nuclear-alert-
1973.

Attentive students of this crisis may know the name Ashraf Marwan, but mostly
this is a name missing from the standard accounts. The chapter by Ahron Bregman helps
to remedy this omission, but also leaves some intriguing issues unanswered. Marwan
was Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s son in law and was closely involved in
sensitive intelligence work for him and for Sadat. In 1969, he offered his services to the
Israeli Mossad, and, after providing a remarkable amount of high-quality sensitive
information, convinced the senior Israeli leadership that he was working for them.
Indeed, we know from the Kipnis book mentioned above that the Israeli war cabinet gave
great importance to his reports, and Israelis are still unsure whether he was their super
spy, or a double agent really working for Egypt. Bregman tells the story of how he
“outed” Marwan in 2002, then met with him on numerous occasions, and recounts the
odd circumstances of his death. In previous accounts, Bregman has maintained that
Marwan was a double agent, loyal to Egypt. Now he seems to be less sure and thinks that
it is less important to answer the question of who Marwan was working for than to note
the extraordinary reliance that top Israeli officials came to place on the information he
provided. I personally think the question of who Marwan was serving is still a
fascinating question to ponder, but we will probably never know with certainty.

While the other chapters in this book are mostly of a similar high quality to the
ones mentioned here, there are points about the book that disappointed me. First, there
are a number of minor errors in otherwise well-researched contributions. Dates are
sometimes wrong – the backchannel between Sdat and the White House began in April
1972, not late 1972 (p. 89) -- and the editor does not always manage to get all of his
authors to work from an agreed chronology of events. In addition, almost all the authors
are based at either British or Israeli institution and Israeli nationals make up a large
percentage of the authors. While these authors are quite good academics, it would have
been worth trying to get some Arab scholars to address these issues. And while the editor
is explicit in not wanting to overdo theorizing about the crisis, it would have nonetheless
been interesting to see how an international relations scholar would look at the crisis and
its lessons for the discipline. And for a book that represents so much solid research, a
good bibliography might have been expected. With these few caveats, this a very
important book for anyone interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict at one of its seminal
moments.