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The Yom Kippur War
On October 6, 1973—the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur—Egyptian and Syrian forces staged a surprise attack on Israeli forces situated on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. Israeli confidence in its early warning systems and air superiority was misplaced, and Egyptian missiles were soon taking a heavy toll of Israeli warplanes. The intensity of the Egyptian and Syrian assault, so unlike the situation in 1967, rapidly began to exhaust Israel’s reserve stocks of munitions.
With Israel threatened by catastrophe, Prime Minister Meir turned to the United States for aid, while the Israeli general staff hastily improvised a battle strategy. Washington’s reluctance to help Israel changed rapidly when the Soviet Union launched its own resupply effort to Egypt and Syria. President Nixon countered by establishing an emergency supply line to Israel, even though the Arab nations imposed a costly oil embargo, and various American allies refused to facilitate the arms shipments.
With reinforcements on the way, the IDF rapidly turned the tide. A daring Israeli helicopter assault disabled portions of the Egyptian air defenses, which allowed Israeli forces commanded by General Ariel Sharon to cross the Suez Canal and threaten to destroy the Egyptian Third Army. On the Golan, Israeli troops, at heavy cost, repulsed the Syrians and advanced to the edge of the Golan plateau on the road to Damascus. At this point, the United States, alarmed by Soviet threats of direct military intervention and on nuclear alert, secured a cease-fire in place.
Political and social repercussions of the war
Egyptian President Sadat persuaded U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that his country was ready to abandon both its Soviet and Syrian allies for a fresh start with the United States; only Washington, in Sadat’s view, could effectively influence Israel to return the Sinai without further bloodshed. Kissinger, supported by Nixon, successfully pressured Israel to end the war short of a complete Egyptian military defeat and then, through intensive travel between the various capitals—what soon was being called shuttle diplomacy—achieved disengagement agreements on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts during 1974. This became known as the “step by step” process, which was intended to fulfill the intent of Security Council Resolution 242 that territory be exchanged for peace.
Golda Meir’s government resigned in April 1974, exhausted and discredited by the war. Still, the Labour Party won a narrow election victory in June by selecting Yitzhak Rabin, hero of the 1967 war and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, to lead its list. The first native-born Israeli to become prime minister, Rabin predicted a period of “seven lean years” until the West, including the United States, would end its heavy dependence on Arab oil. He argued that Israel therefore needed to trade space for time, to coordinate closely with Washington, and to encourage Egypt’s new pro-American policy.
Rabin reached a second disengagement agreement with Egypt in September 1975, but little progress was made with Syria. On what had been the “quiet” front—the West Bank and Gaza—the Labour government’s preferred strategy of negotiations with the more amenable King Hussein of Jordan (the so-called “Jordanian option”) was threatened in October 1974, when an Arab summit conference in Rabat, Morocco, declared Arafat’s PLO to be the sole representative of the Palestinians. A year later, Rabin obtained secret assurances from Kissinger that the United States would not recognize the PLO as an entity representing the Palestinians unless that organization first ceased terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist.
Meanwhile, the Gush Emunim movement on the West Bank gathered force after the Yom Kippur War and between 1974 and 1987 planted small communities near large Arab populations, greatly complicating Israeli policy and arousing international opposition. The secular Israeli government opposed such efforts but rarely used force to dislodge the settlers, who invoked Zionist rights to the homeland in their defense. Still, they numbered fewer than 4,000 when the opposition Likud government of Menachem Begin came to power in 1977.
Diplomatic impasse
The Yom Kippur War left the country in bad economic shape. An accelerating rate of inflation just before the conflict was suddenly combined with a stagnant economy; prices continued to rise even as demand and production fell. The international recession reduced demand for Israeli exports, and, for the first time in years, unemployment became a problem. On top of this, Israel became heavily indebted by arms purchases—partially offset by U.S. aid—and the country’s international status suffered. One by one, most of Israel’s carefully cultivated African friends broke relations under the threat of Arab oil sanctions, leaving the Jewish state alone with an equally isolated South Africa. Further complicating the situation for Israel, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 in 1975, which equated Zionism with racism, and the PLO gained increasing European and Asian support. Meanwhile, Rabin was losing political ground at home, harmed by infighting and corruption. Even the remarkable success of Israel’s July 1976 raid at the Entebbe, Uganda, airport—in which commandos rescued the Israeli passengers of an Air France plane hijacked by German and Palestinian terrorists—was of little help. The former general, new to politics, found it difficult to dominate a cabinet in which his chief rival, Shimon Peres, was defense minister, and few others owed him any political allegiance.
A further blow to Rabin fell when he visited Washington in March 1977 to meet with the new American president, Jimmy Carter, who advocated a "comprehensive approach" to Middle East peace instead of the Kissinger step-by-step plan. Carter sought an international conference to resolve all the major issues between Israel and the Arabs and advocated a “homeland” for the Palestinians. For Israelis, this notion (and its similarity to the wording of the Balfour Declaration) was a code word for a Palestinian state, and they hotly opposed it—not least because it also implied a leadership role for the PLO. Rabin, facing a major quarrel with the United States and beset by a personal scandal (his wife had maintained an illegal bank account in Washington from his days as ambassador), resigned in April, and Shimon Peres became Labour’s new party leader.
Israel under Likud
To general surprise, the Likud Party, led by Menachem Begin, won the May 1977 election, inaugurating the first non-Labour-led government in Israel’s history. Begin’s campaign benefited immensely from Sephardic resentment over the patronizing attitude of the Labour establishment and its treatment of non-European Jewish immigrants as second-class citizens. The Sephardim supported Likud in large numbers. In addition, a new “clean government” party drew votes from Labour, and its leader, Yigael Yadin, an eminent archaeologist and a hero of the 1948 war, joined the cabinet. Also included in Begin’s cabinet were Ezer Weizman, an air force commander in 1967 and architect of the Likud political strategy, and, to the shock of many Labourites, Moshe Dayan, who agreed to become foreign minister. Begin also attracted the National Religious Party to his coalition.
The beginning of the peace process
Begin strongly opposed any territorial compromise on the West Bank, which, like many Israelis, he felt to be an inalienable part of Israel—the historic Samaria and Judaea. He also argued that Resolution 242 did not require withdrawal from this area. The new Israeli leader put off a crisis with Washington by discarding Rabin’s notion of “coordination” and declared simply that Israel wanted to sit down with its neighbors to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, Begin inaugurated a policy to strengthen Israel’s hold on the West Bank through an extensive settlement program overseen by Ariel Sharon, the minister of agriculture.
Carter spent the summer in futile efforts to convene an international conference, finally approving a Soviet-American communiqué in October 1977 that was intended to stimulate diplomacy; instead, it outraged both Israel and the U.S. Congress, many of whose members condemned Carter for concessions to Moscow. These mishaps convinced Sadat that American tactics were giving his erstwhile Soviet and Syrian allies a veto over any diplomacy, which could lead to a new war in which Egypt would likely pay the highest price. Secret negotiations were held between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Sadat’s personal representatives, after which the Egyptian president surprised the world by flying to a delighted Israel in November 1977, where he and Begin addressed the Israeli Knesset.
The two leaders could not agree, however, on the details of a comprehensive peace, and the negotiations were complicated by events in Lebanon. Following its eviction from Jordan in 1971, the PLO had established itself there, exacerbating the volatile political situation in that country and contributing to its collapse into civil war in 1975. Both Israel and the United States had reluctantly consented to Syria’s military intervention in Lebanon that same year, but the result was a partitioned state with the PLO dominating the south of the country, which was now a launching point for terror attacks against Israelis living in the Upper Galilee. In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO away from the border but succeeded only partially in this goal before withdrawing from that country, under international pressure, in June. This episode strengthened Israel’s ties with a Lebanese Christian militia known as the Phalange, who benefited from Israeli weapons and training.
Camp David
The faltering Egyptian-Israeli negotiations were finally rescued when Carter convened a summit at the presidential retreat of Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. In this secluded site—an “elegant jail,” Begin called it—Carter shuttled between the two leaders over a 12-day period, and out of these negotiations emerged the Camp David Accords. The accords were a framework for a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab states based on Resolution 242 and called for all the parties to complete peace treaties under its principles. Rather than giving the Palestinians full independence, the accords offered them Begin’s concept of autonomy, which provided for five years of limited Palestinian self-government to be followed by talks on final status between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian joint negotiating team.
The Camp David Accords earned Sadat and Begin each a share of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace, but the subsequent peace process proved far more difficult than the parties expected. It took seven more months for Egypt and Israel to reach a final agreement, which was signed on March 26, 1979, and called for a three-year phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, limited-force zones, a multinational observer force, full diplomatic relations between the two countries, and special provisions for Israeli access to the Sinai’s oil fields. The United States also agreed to provide large amounts of financial aid to both Israel and Egypt, part of which paid for the relocation of Israeli military installations. Israel’s settlements in the Sinai were also evacuated, despite public Israeli protests.
Syria, Iraq, and the PLO were outraged by Egypt’s actions and joined diplomatic forces to suspend Cairo from the Arab League and prevent any other Arab state from supporting the accords. Nearly all the Arab states subsequently severed ties with Egypt. Jordan and the Palestinians refused to negotiate autonomy, and a three-year attempt by Israel, Egypt, and the United States to develop the plan on their own came to naught. Meanwhile, Begin refused to halt the building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A cold peace
Thus, “seven lean years” after the Yom Kippur War and three decades after independence, Israel had reached peace with Egypt, the Soviets were sidelined, and the Jewish state’s alliance with the United States was consolidated. However, trouble loomed, as a civil war in Lebanon allowed an increasingly well-armed PLO to raid Israel’s northern border. Israel had also begun to fear a military buildup in Iraq, especially its potential for producing nuclear weapons. Nor was the cabinet happy. Both Weizman and Dayan resigned from it, charging that the prime minister did not want to settle the Palestinian issue. The Begin government had also been much less successful in its domestic policies, and the economy, after a brief recovery in 1978–79, entered another inflationary spiral.
Israel faced a complex agenda in dealing with the United States when Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter as president in 1981. Reagan and his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, both strong supporters of Israel, promoted a strategic alliance with the Jewish state, but the effort was soon beset by quarrels over the U.S. sale of sophisticated air surveillance aircraft, known as AWACS, to Saudi Arabia. When Israel destroyed Iraq’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in a daring raid in June, Washington reluctantly supported a UN condemnation of Israel’s action.
Begin’s policies aroused strong international opposition but aided his victory over Shimon Peres in the June 1981 elections. His new government contained more Likud appointees, including Yitzhak Shamir as foreign minister and Ariel Sharon as defense minister. Then, on October 6, 1981, Sadat was murdered by Muslim extremists. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, reaffirmed the 1979 treaty but was prepared only for a "cold" peace with Israel, and few of the bright hopes for trade and tourism promised by the Camp David agreements materialized—even after Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai in April 1982.
