The 1973 War and the 1973 Peace

A more hopeful precedent than 9/11.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, 1980.

The Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israeli response have led commenters to a couple of historical comparisons. The first is 9/11. The second is the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

The parallels here are clear; the Hamas attacks, 9/11, and the 1973 war all involved devastating, traumatic surprise attacks, frightening death tolls, and a subsequent military escalation. The outcome of 9/11 and 1973 were very different though, and it’s worth outlining those differences briefly, because they offer some hope—or alternately, the differences reiterate that endless war is not an inevitability, but a choice.

After 9/11, President George W. Bush used the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center to curtail civil liberties at home, especially for Muslims, and to launch wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and (via drone war) in other countries like Pakistan and Yemen. Exact figures are difficult to come by, but over the next twenty years as the conflicts dragged on, the wars the US provoked killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized multiple regions, fueled further anti US sentiment in the region, and left no one safer or better off. I think most people on every part of the political spectrum agree that the US response to the 9/11 attacks was an unmitigated disaster.

The 1973 war looked like it could lead to even more dire consequences. Russia urged Egypt and Syria not to go to war and the US did the same with Israel because both superpowers feared that the conflict in the Middle East could escalate to a superpower war, or worse a nuclear exchange.  

Egypt ignored its Soviet advisors though (even ejecting them from the country at one point). Thanks to multiple catastrophic Israeli intelligence failures, Egypt and Syria managed to launch a surprise attack with virtually no notice. Advances in weaponry—especially anti tank weapons that could be carried by infantry and improved anti-aircraft arrays—negated much of the Israeli hardware advantage that had proved decisive in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Israel really feared, at least for a moment, that it was going to be wiped out.

It was not, though; Israel belatedly called up army reserves and managed to regain technological superiority with aid supplies from the US. And thanks to diplomatic pressure from the US, Israel did not escalate when it had pushed Egypt and Syria back to their borders. Instead, the war created a diplomatic opening.

Relations with Egypt had frozen following the 1967 war, during which Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt’s leader, Anwar Sadat, had made some gestures towards opening negotiations with Israel but had been rebuffed. Israel had good reason not to trust Arab leaders, and, moreover, also felt that the status quo was sustainable. Sadat, most accounts agree (including Abraham Rabinovich’s The Yom Kippur War, on which my discussion is based), didn’t really launch the war in order to conquer Israel, but in hopes that a show of strength would make negotiation more palatable to both the Egyptian public and Israeli leadership.

And his hopes paid off. The end of the war, with Israel victorious, opened a peace process. Israel realized that the status quo was not stable or secure; Egypt was a credible threat, which couldn’t be simply ignored. The process of de-escalation and prisoner exchange created a basis for trust. The negotiations eventually led Egypt to recover the whole of Sinai, and opened peace negotiations with the rest of the Arab world. Who won the war? Rabinowitz asks in his book. “Egypt did. So did Israel.”

There were a great many losses too. Israeli deaths numbered 2,656; Arab casualties were somewhere between 8500 and 15,000 killed. Nor did the peace solve everything. Israel continued to control the West Bank and Palestine, an occupation which would generate conflict, violence, and war for another half century, and more.

There are a number of obvious differences between 1973 and now. Sadat was sincerely interested in peace  and was willing to take personal and political risks to attain it—he was murdered by a fundamentalist assassin in 1981. Hamas, in contrast, seems completely indifferent to the deaths not only of Israelis, but of Palestinians, and has no plan moving forward but chaos. Netanyahu is also a much less trustworthy leader than Golda Meir.

In short, the chances for pulling peace out of the current nightmare seem bleak. But in 1973, the outlook for peace seemed dismal too. Sadat, who spoke approvingly of Hitler on more than one occasion, didn’t seem like a very hopeful diplomatic partner, to say the least. War is inevitable until it isn’t.

1973 suggests that there is, or should be, one major incentive for peace—without it, security is a myth. Israel in 1973 thought it didn’t need peace because it was unassailable; it thought the same thing in 2023. It was wrong both times.

Peace with Egypt, in contrast, has lasted for 50 years, through a range of changing governments and leaders. Israel didn’t end hostilities with Egypt by bombing it to rubble or by turning everyone in the country into refugees. It ended hostilities with Egypt by agreeing to a settlement both sides could live with. It’s become a shibboleth that Israel has a right to self-defense. But endless war is not security for anyone, Israeli or Palestinian. The only lasting defense is peace.