My Take | This is not the Yom Kippur war 2.0
- The Joe Biden White House goes along all the way with Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist cabinet – to which Hamas sees terrorism as the only answer
Golda Meir once told Henry Kissinger that all she wanted was absolute security for Israel. To that, he supposedly quipped, “Absolute security for Israel means absolute insecurity for everyone else.”
Kissinger was frustrated with Meir’s intransigence. More specifically, Meir preferred to have another war with the Arab states rather than explore overtures from Egypt. Contrary to Israeli-American propaganda up to this day, she could not escape responsibility for the war of 1973. For the latest reiteration of the propaganda, watch the new movie, Golda, starring the ever-convincing Helen Mirren.
By the time Anwar Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt, he was ready to talk to Washington. So months before war broke in October, Kissinger was having his famous “backchanneling” with his Egyptian counterpart, the very able Hafiz Ismail. As a soldier, spy, diplomat and courtier, Ismail had an even more brilliant and versatile intellect than Kissinger’s. So much for Arabs being savages or barbarians!
Together, the two men came up with a formula: so long as Israel recognised Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai, taken by the Israelis during the six-day war of 1967, Cairo was willing to wait for its full return in phases, over an extended period. Meanwhile, it was willing to pursue a separate peace with the Jewish state based on the UN resolution that recognised Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Egypt would do so without the need to coordinate with the other Arab states and the Palestinians; so much for that professed Arab unity!
That was a promising start, something to build on.
“Was the Yom Kippur war … inevitable?” asked Yigal Kipnis, historian and author of 1973: The Road to War.