Damascus<\/i><\/p>\n
In\u00a0Damascus and many other areas of Syria\u00a0this weekend, citizens will celebrate the accomplishments of the October 6, 1973 – \u00a019 day war jointly launched by Syrian and Egyptian armies to regain Arab land illegally occupied since 1967.<\/p>\n
Syrians will honor\u00a0the 6,000 (Syrians) who died during battle. Many events are planned including special television broadcasts which will revisit the conflict; also numerous art exhibits, plays, films, concerts, rallies, and wreath-laying ceremonies. Public and government officials will appear at the monument, located\u00a0atop\u00a0Qasioun Mountain in Damascus,\u00a0mindful\u00a0of the many sacrifices being made today. \u00a0In Egypt, October 6 is Armed Forces Day, commemorating the Egyptians’ role in that October War.<\/p>\n
For both peoples, breaking Israel\u2019s sense of invincibility<\/a>\u00a0after its 1967 aggression was victory enough. \u00a0The results of the battle were mixed as history records, but the political and military effects are still indelible, as Zionist leaders exhibit a certain bi-polarization. Many analysts and pro-Zionist \u201cthink tanks\u201d are holding seminars on the subject in occupied Palestine and some in the US as well, with many attendees still gnashing their teeth over what went wrong forty years ago. \u00a0For many Israelis, the surprise battle that killed nearly 3000 Israeli soldiers threatened to destroy the so-called \u2018Third Temple\u2019 thus eliminating the last 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century\u00a0colonial enterprise.\u00a0\u00a0“Academic” seminars, in “professional” strategic forums \u2013 even IDF and intelligence fora are planned just as they have been organized every year since 1973.<\/p>\n Many Israelis are still condemning their political leaders at the time, particularly then Prime Minister\u00a0\u00a0Golda Meir and military \u2018heroes\u2019 from the 1967 aggression as incompetents derelict in their military duties including lack of preparedness. The adulation for General Moshi Dayan resulting from 1967 turned ugly in October of 1973 as many families picketed and chanted \u201cmurderer\u201d for the killing of their sons and daughters. The repentance appears to intensify each year over the \u201cYom Kippur fiasco,\u201d the outcome of the \u201cblindness\u201d and the \u201csmugness and arrogance following the conquests of the Six-Day War,\u201d as many claim.<\/p>\n The Israeli military has never denied that General Dayan urged the use of Chemical weapons during the October war. But chemical weapons are not all that Dayan wanted permission to use.\u00a0\u00a0Writing in the 10\/3\/13 issue of the New York Times, Avner Cohen, a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies discusses an interview he had in 2008 with\u00a0\u00a0Mr.\u00a0\u00a0Arnan Azaryahu who was a senior political insider and trusted aide and confidant to Yisrael Galili, a minister without portfolio and Golda Meir\u2019s closest political ally.\u00a0\u00a0Writes Cohen, \u201cMr. Azaryahu was privy to some of Israel\u2019s most fateful decisions. In the early afternoon of\u00a0Oct. 7, as a fierce battle with Syrian forces raged and the Israeli Army appeared to be losing its grasp on the Golan Heights.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Mr. Azaryahu further reported that\u00a0\u00a0Dayan sought from Golda Meir, during the cabinet meeting which Mr. Azaryahu attended, \u201can immediate authorization of preparatory steps for a nuclear blast that he claimed would save precious time and allow the order to detonate a bomb to be executed rapidly should the need arise.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohen continues, \u201cSiding with her two senior ministers, the prime minister told Mr. Dayan to \u201cforget it.\u201d He responded by saying that he remained unconvinced but that he respected the prime minister\u2019s decision.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Dayan sought but was refused authority to use either chemical or nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n One of the lessons from that October war still being discussed is that the hubris from the 1967 aggression concerning the \u201cinvincible Israeli army” was simple propaganda for domestic<\/i> consumption – as were the many battles in South Lebanon during 22 years of occupation and the 33 day\u00a02006 war illustrate. \u00a0That war clearly established beyond peradventure that the\u00a0<\/b>Israeli\u00a0army cannot defend the Zionist colony unless it has massive American military supplies and blank check funding. \u00a0During the Tishri battle, the American government, without input from Pentagon or public, provided the Israeli military with planeloads of weaponry, including 9 types of US cluster bombs that were taken from supplies at Subic Bay, Philippines, causing the local US commander to resign claiming that \u201cemptying those warehouses put thousands of US troops in Vietnam at risk.\u201d \u00a0Yet, President Nixon caved to pressure from PM Golda Meir so that many hundreds of those old cluster bombs, thirty years past their shelf life were used as recently as during the July 2006 war in Lebanon.<\/p>\n The Nixon administration also provided Israel with something far more important \u2013 intelligence. Documents relating to the American spy-plane, the \u2018SR-71 Blackbird\u2019, show that the Israelis knew where major concentrations of Arab forces were as they were supplied with this information as a result of SR-71 overflights of that war zone. With such knowledge, \u00a0Israelis knew where to deploy their forces for maximum effect.\u00a0\u00a0Whatever dreams of self-sufficiency in weapon development and production were entertained in Israel before the war, were abandoned. Tel Aviv learned that it needs close support, strategic weapons and funding from Washington to survive.<\/p>\n Following the October war,\u00a0the Arab\u00a0oil boycott turned Israel into a pariah; fewer countries had diplomatic relations with the Jewish state than with the PLO, which didn\u2019t pretend to seek anything but Palestine\u2019s liberation and the full right of Return. The UN General Assembly gave a standing ovation to Yasser Arafat and shortly thereafter the UN passed the Zionism is Racism resolution. \u00a0 Last month\u2019s embarrassing Netanyahu spectacle at the UN General Assembly where he presented himself as some sort of sociopathic racist, led reportedly, to one European delegate saying after that speech \u2018if a snap vote was held on the 1975 Zionism is Racism Resolution (GAR 3379) it would pass again–but by a larger margin than the 11\/10\/75 vote of 72 to 35.’<\/p>\n Ehud Barak, Israel\u2019s former defense minister claims at pep rallies and AIPAC type gatherings that \u201cstates much larger than ours and supposedly much stronger collapsed within weeks under surprise attack and we were totally victorious in 1973.\u201d<\/p>\n Think tanks, such as the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and the Begin-Sadat Center (BESA) for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, have become bolder participants in the national security debates and have offered alternatives to Netanyahu-Lieberman governmental policies. \u00a0\u00a0Gen. Isaac Ben Israel<\/a>,\u00a0a specialist on strategic affairs, wrote recently in the small right-wing publication Ha-Umma that \u201cIsrael\u2019s achievement was great for revealing to its enemies their\u00a0inability to overwhelm Israel\u2019s Defense Forces<\/a>\u201d even in the most favorable circumstances.<\/p>\n Both gentlemen delude themselves and fail to understand the growing global resistance to the occupation of Palestine and\u00a0opposition to confiscation of Jerusalem by misstating what happened forty years ago this month. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0More realistic is the statement made last week by Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon at a meeting with top defense officials: \u201cOne of the causes of our failure at the beginning of the conflict came from a feeling of superiority that we held after the 1967 victory. Israel had “too much confidence, arrogance and lack of caution.\u201d<\/p>\n Every October, bereavement becomes a major element of the Israeli ethos, and a dominant national\u00a0display of\u00a0trauma. \u00a0It is to\u00a0blame,\u00a0some claim, for Zionist doubts about facing the future of their enterprise in Palestine. \u00a0 And\u00a0even\u00a0among many Israelis\u00a0awareness\u00a0about the very right of the Apartheid Jewish state to exist.\u00a0Israel once again feels vulnerable to surprise attack.<\/p>\n The shock of the October War left deep scars on the national psyche that affect Israelis even today. Foremost among them, according to the Jaffee Center, is a gnawing anxiety that the national leadership is so locked into a \u201cconceptzia\u201d \u2014 a shared strategic concept that determines the leaders\u2019 worldview \u2014 that they may be misreading reality and ignoring opportunities for peace.<\/p>\n Commenting on the report\u2019s claim that Israel is now better off strategically than at any time in its history, the military analyst for the Ma\u2019ariv newspaper, Amir Rapaport, observed wryly that \u201cthe last time we boasted that things were never better was in the autumn of 1973.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n ________________________<\/i><\/p>\n Franklin Lamb<\/i>\u00a0volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (SSSP) in Shatila Camp (www.sssp-lb.com<\/a>) and is reachable c\/o\u00a0fplamb@gmail.com<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Damascus and many other areas of Syria this weekend, citizens will celebrate the accomplishments of the October 6, 1973 – 19 day war jointly launched by Syrian and Egyptian armies to regain Arab land illegally occupied since 1967.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}