It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old.
It began over 75 years ago, in 1944 long before the last shots of
the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern
Europe with the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no
longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict
zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced
AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was the Middle East On the
afternoon of 6 October, 1973, the colossus of the Israeli Defence
Forces was awakened by a wave of airstrikes, followed by an
artillery bombardment along the Suez Canal that preceded a
meticulously planned Egyptian invasion of the Israeli-held Sinai.
Simultaneously, a massive Syrian armoured assault bore down on
Israeli positions on the Golan Heights. The day was Yom Kippur, the
most holy day on the Jewish religious calendar, and the
commencement of a war that would bring the young state of Israel to
the very brink of defeat.In the aftermath of the Six-Day War of
1967, a stunning Arab reversal at the hands of the untested Israeli
Defence Forces, Israel occupied and held Arab territory on the West
Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. These were for the
most part territorial buffer zones, retained to protect Israel
against an inevitable future war, but their ongoing occupation
remained an open diplomatic wound. In the meanwhile, a mood of
complacency came to affect the Israeli military machine, in the
belief that air and armoured dominance of the battlefield would, as
had been the case in 1967, guarantee a quick victory in any future
war. The Yom Kippur War proved the fallacy of this belief,
revealing critical weaknesses in Israeli intelligence capability
and battlefield strategy. The ferocity and effectiveness of the
combined invasion pushed the much-storied Israeli armed forces
almost to the point of collapse. Only the rapid resupply of arms
and equipment by the United States, and a display of extraordinary
reliance and determination by the fighting forces of Israel,
rescued the young state from annihilation.The story of the Yom
Kippur War is an object lesson in the dynamism of military
thinking, the evolution of battlefield technology and the uneasy
alliance of east and west during the Cold War era of d tente.Yom
Kippur was both a military and political manoeuvre that adjusted
the balance of power in the Middle East, and set the tone for the
ideological stand-off that continues in the region to this day
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