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.