Arabs (77 page)

Sadat’s next objective was to prepare his military for war. He called the heads of the Egyptian armed forces to a meeting at his home on October 24, 1972, to confront them with his decision to initiate a war against Israel. “This is not a matter about which I’m taking your advice,” he warned the Egyptian top brass.

The generals were aghast. They believed Israel was much better prepared for a war than the Arab states. Egypt was entirely dependent on the Soviet Union for advanced weaponry, and the Soviets still lagged well behind the Americans in supplying their allies in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As far as the generals were concerned, this was no time to be talking of war. General El-Gamasy, who attended the meeting, described the atmosphere as “exceptionally stormy and agitated,” with Sadat growing increasingly angry with his generals’ rebuttals. “By the end of the meeting, it was clear that President Sadat was not pleased with what had taken place—not with the reports presented, the opinions expressed, or the forecasts.”
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Nor had he changed
his mind. Following the meeting, Sadat reshuffled his military to relieve the doubters of their commands. El-Gamasy was named chief of operations and tasked with planning the war.

General el-Gamasy was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Six Day War. He knew from firsthand experience how unprepared Egypt was in 1967 and how poorly the Arab armies had coordinated their war efforts. The first priority for the Egyptian war planners was to conclude a deal with Syria to launch a two-front attack on the Israelis. The Syrians were as determined to redeem their losses in the Golan Heights as the Egyptians were in the Sinai, and they struck a top secret agreement to unify the command of their armed forces with the Egyptians in January 1973.

Next, the planners had to decide on the ideal date to launch their attack to achieve the greatest degree of surprise. El-Gamasy and his colleagues pored over their almanacs to find the ideal moonlight and tidal conditions for crossing the Suez Canal. They considered the Jewish religious holidays, as well as the political calendar, to find a time when the military and the general public might be distracted. “We discovered that Yom Kippur fell on a Saturday and, what was more important, that it was the only day throughout the year in which radio and television stopped broadcasting as part of the religious observance and traditions of that feast. In other words, a speedy recall of the reserve forces using public means could not be made.”
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Taking all these factors into consideration, el-Gamasy and his officers recommended beginning operations on Saturday, October 6, 1973.

While the general prepared Egypt’s military for war, Sadat traveled to Riyadh to persuade the Saudis to deploy an entirely different weapon: oil. Sadat made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia in late August 1973 to brief King Faysal on his secret war plans and to ask for Saudi support and cooperation. Sadat needed to be persuasive, for the Saudis had consistently refused Arab requests to deploy the oil weapon since the disastrous experience of 1967.

Fortunately for Sadat, the world was far more dependent on Arab oil in 1973 than it had been in 1967. American oil production had reached its peak in 1970 and was now falling each year. Saudi Arabia had replaced Texas as the swing producer that could fill shortfalls in global supplies simply by pumping more oil. As a result, the United States and the industrial powers were more vulnerable to the oil weapon than ever before. Arab analysts estimated in 1973 that the United States imported some 28 percent, Japan some 44 percent, and the European states as much as 70–75 percent of their oil from the Arab world.
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The Saudi king, a committed Arab nationalist, believed his country could use its oil resources effectively and promised Sadat his support if Egypt went to war against Israel. “But give us time,” Faysal reportedly told Sadat. “We don’t want to use our oil as a weapon in a battle which only goes on for two or three days, and then stops. We want to see a battle which goes on for long
enough time for world opinion to be mobilized.”
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There was no point in deploying a weapon after war was over, as the Saudis learned in 1967. The Saudi king wanted to be sure the next war would last long enough for the oil weapon to be effective.

 

War broke out minutes past two on the afternoon of Saturday, October 6, 1973, as the Syrian and Egyptian armies simultaneously attacked Israel to the north and south. In spite of Egyptian precautions to maintain secrecy, Israeli intelligence was convinced that an attack was imminent, though they assumed that a more limited assault would come toward sunset. An all-out, two-front war was but the first surprise for the Israeli military.

Under a blistering artillery attack—el-Gamasy claimed the Egyptians fired over 10,000 rounds in the first minutes of conflict—waves of Egyptian commandoes crossed the Suez Canal in dinghies and stormed the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”). The Egyptian troops suffered very light casualties in overcoming what were widely believed impregnable Israeli positions. “At five minutes past two the first news of the battle started coming in to Centre Number Ten [central command],” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “President Sadat and [Commander-in-Chief] Ahmad Ismail listened with astonishment. It seemed as though what they were watching was a training exercise: ‘Mission accomplished . . . mission accomplished.’ It all sounded too good to be true.”
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Israeli commanders listened with no less disbelief as their soldiers in the Bar-Lev fortifications, their guard down during Yom Kippur observances, sounded the alert and declared their positions untenable in the face of superior enemy forces. Syrian tanks overran Israeli positions and pressed deeply into the Golan Heights. Both the Egyptian and Syrian air forces swept deep inside Israel to attack key military positions.

When the Israelis scrambled their own air force, their fighter jets were intercepted by Soviet SAM 6 missiles as soon as they reached the fronts. Gone was the air supremacy of the 1967 War, as the Israelis lost twenty-seven planes over the Egyptian front alone in the opening hours of the war and were forced to hold their aircraft fifteen miles behind the Canal Zone. Israeli tanks sent to relieve their troops along the Bar-Lev Line faced a similar shock, encountering Egyptian infantrymen armed with Soviet wire-guided antitank missiles that knocked out scores of Israeli armor.

With both the Israeli ground and air forces held in check, Egyptian military engineers set up high-pressure water pumps and literally washed away the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, opening the way for Egyptian forces to pass through Israeli front lines into the Sinai Peninsula beyond. Pontoon bridges were laid across the canal for Egyptian troops and armor to cross over to the east bank and into the Sinai.

At the end of the first day of fighting, some 80,000 Egyptian soldiers had crossed through the Bar-Lev Line and were dug into positions up to 4 kilometers (about
2.5 miles) inside the Sinai Peninsula. On the northern front, Syrian troops broke through Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights, inflicting heavy losses on Israeli tanks and aircraft in a concerted press toward Lake Tiberias. With the benefit of near total surprise, the initiative was squarely in the hands of Egypt and Syria in the opening hours of the war, as the Israelis scrambled to respond to the gravest threat the Jewish state had ever faced.

The Israeli military regrouped and went on the offensive. Within forty-eight hours reserves were called and deployed, holding positions in the Sinai and concentrating their offensive on the Golan, in the hopes of defeating Syria first before concentrating on the larger Egyptian army. In response, Iraqi, Saudi, and Jordanian infantry and armor units were dispatched to Syria to resist the Israeli counterattack in the Golan. Israel and the Arabs were suffering heavy casualties and running down their reserves of arms and ammunition in the fiercest fighting yet witnessed in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By the end of the first week of the war, both sides were in need of resupply.
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On October 10 the Soviets began airlifting weapons to Syria and Egypt, and on October 14 the Americans initiated their own secret airlift of arms and ammunition to the Israelis. Armed with new American tanks and artillery, the Israelis mounted a successful counterattack that by October 16 had overwhelmed the Syrian front and led to the encirclement of Egyptian forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. The military situation was grinding to a stalemate with Israeli troops consolidating their advantage over their Arab adversaries.

It was at this point that the Arab states decided to deploy the oil weapon. On October 16, Arab oil ministers gathered in Kuwait. They had a new sense of confidence and self-respect in light of Egyptian and Syrian gains in the first days of the war. The leaders of the Arab oil states were also buoyed by the knowledge that the industrial world was dependent on them. This meant that when the Arabs raised the price of their oil, they were able to inflict immediate punishment on those industrial countries that supported Israel.

On the first day of their meeting in Kuwait, the Arab oil ministers imposed a 17 percent price hike without so much as a phone call to the now powerless Western oil companies. “This is a moment for which I have been waiting a long time,” Saudi oil minister Shaykh Ahmad Zaki Yamani told one of the delegates. “The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.”
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The impact on oil markets was immediate and provoked widespread panic. By the end of the day, oil traders had raised the posted price of a barrel of oil to $5.11, up 70 percent over the trading price of $2.90 in June 1973.

The price hike was but the first crack of the whip to get the world’s attention. The following day the Arab oil ministers released a communiqué outlining a series
of production cuts and embargoes to force the industrial powers to modify their policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. “All Arab oil exporting countries shall forthwith cut their production respectively by no less than five percent of the September production,” it read, “and maintain the same rate of reduction each month thereafter until the Israeli forces are fully withdrawn from all Arab territories occupied during the June 1967 War, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are restored.”
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The oil ministers reassured friendly states that they would not be affected by these measures. Only “countries which demonstrate moral and material support to the Israeli enemy,” the oil ministers explained, “will be subjected to severe and progressive reduction in Arab oil supplies, leading to a complete halt.” The United States and the Netherlands, given their traditional friendship for Israel, were threatened with a complete embargo “until such time as the Governments of the USA and Holland or any other country that takes a stand of active support to the Israeli aggressors reverse their positions and add their weight behind the world community’s consensus to end the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and bring about the full restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

After demonstrating their strength on the battlefield and over the oil markets, the Arab states opened a diplomatic front. The very day that the Arab oil states sent out their communiqué, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria met with President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in the White House. The Arab ministers found the American administration amenable to the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory occupied in June 1967 in return for full peace between Israel and the Arab states. The Algerian foreign minister asked why the resolution had never been implemented in the first place. “Kissinger said that, quite frankly, the reason was the complete military superiority of Israel. The weak, he said, don’t negotiate. The Arabs had been weak; now they were strong. The Arabs had achieved more than anyone, including themselves, had believed possible.”
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To the Arabs, it seemed that the Americans only understood force.

The Nixon administration found itself in an unusually difficult position. It wanted to placate the Arab world but not at the expense of Israel’s security. This went beyond American loyalty to the Jewish state. In Cold War terms, the Americans were determined that Israel, with its American-supplied arms, should prevail over the Arabs with their Soviet weapons. When Israel turned to the United States with an emergency request to restore its depleted arsenal, President Nixon approved legislation on October 18 for a $2.2 billion arms package for the Jewish state.

The blatant U.S. support for Israel’s war effort outraged the Arab world. One by one, the Arab oil states imposed a complete embargo on the United States. Arab oil output dropped by 25 percent, and oil prices spiked, eventually reaching a peak of
$11.65 a barrel by December 1973. In six months, the price of oil had quadrupled, radically unsettling Western economies and hurting consumers. As reserves diminished, drivers faced long lines at the gas pumps and rationing of scarce petroleum resources.

Western governments faced growing pressure from their citizens to bring the oil embargo to a close. The only way to resolve the oil crisis was to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sadat had fulfilled his strategic objectives and forced the United States to reengage with regional diplomacy. With Egyptian forces still dug in on the east bank of the Suez Canal, there was no longer any question of the international community coming to accept the canal as the de facto border between Egypt and Israel. The Egyptian leader now looked for the opportune moment to end the war and consolidate his gains.

Sadat’s military position was growing weaker the longer the war went on. By the third week of October, Israel had gone on the offensive, its troops surging deep into Arab territory to within 60 miles of Cairo and only 20 miles of Damascus. These gains had come at a tremendous cost, with over 2,800 Israelis killed and 8,800 wounded—much higher casualties in proportion to Israel’s population than the 8,500 Arab soldiers killed and nearly 20,000 wounded in the war.
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