Eighteen Days in October

May 22, 2023
If the 1967 Six Day War was an unmitigated triumph for Israel, the 1973 Yom Kippur War was very nearly a total disaster, argues real estate developer Kaufman in his deeply researched debut. Israeli forces initially were surprised both by the Egyptian army on the east side of the Suez Canal and by the Syrian one in the Golan Heights, despite advance warnings about the attack. After enormous losses of men and military equipment, Israel triumphed, yet the country’s national self-confidence, so inflated after the earlier war, was seriously shaken, while that of those in the Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria rose dramatically, making possible, Kaufman contends, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking 1977 trip to Israel and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty two years later. Less convincing, however, is Kaufman’s contention that the Yom Kippur War paved the way for the 2020 Abraham Accords. Kaufman, who spent more than 20 years researching this book, using both English and Hebrew sources, devotes most of his narrative to a lucid recounting of military engagements, while his political analysis is less developed. Still, this is a well-paced and informative account of a consequential conflict.

June 15, 2023
A clinical dissection of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, published in time for the 50th anniversary. In a book he has been researching for 20 years, visiting battle sites and poring over archival documents, Kaufman clearly delineates the conflict, both the immediate aftermath and the long-term effects. He examines the military buildup in terms of Israel's use of aerial power to destroy Egyptian and Syrian forces and how Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria's Hafez el-Assad calculated their revenge. Despite intelligence reports, the Israeli military high command, led by Moshe Dayan, under the auspices of Golda Meir, dismissed alarms of imminent attack and was completely unprepared for a Syrian commando attack on Oct. 6. As Kaufman recounts in a play-by-play narrative, there were no tanks on the ground and few planes in the sky, and everything relied on quick improvisation. "Prior to the war," writes the author, "the dictionaries of the world defined the Hebrew word mikhdal as a 'failure to carry out something important.' After the war, the word took on a new meaning, one that survives to this day: 'a fiasco as monumental as the IDF's failures in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War.' " Although each side claimed victory, Kaufman underscores that Israel had achieved its primary goal: "Egypt's days of waging war against Israel were over." Moreover, on March 18, 1974, the Arab oil embargo was lifted. This subject has been covered from a variety of historical and cultural perspectives, perhaps most memorably by Michael Oren in Six Days of War, but Kaufman's contribution is a valuable addition to the literature. The book should prove useful for students of modern Middle East history as well as anyone interested in the mechanics of how the Arab-Israeli conflict has remained seemingly intractable for decades. Engaging, evenhanded account of a major Middle East conflict that still resonates today.

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