The Agranat Committee, established a year ago to investigate the conduct of the Yom Kippur War, will submit its final report to the Cabinet shortly. Unlike the committee’s two interim reports which deal with the behavior of the government and the military high command during the days immediately preceding the surprise attacks by Egypt and Syria on Oct. 6, 1974 the final report will evaluate the performance of Israel’s defense forces during the first three days of battle.
The report is expected to concentrate on the events of Oct. 8, by all accounts one of the most crucial days of the war, when the Israeli army, having fully mobilized, launched its first counter attack against the Egyptian army in Sinai–and failed with severe losses in dead and wounded. That failure has been pondered for more than a year by military experts, politicians and analysis.
NO INDICATIONS YET OF VERDICT
There have been no indications yet of what verdict the Agranat Committee has reached after thousands of hours of investigation, testimony and study. It is doubtful, in fact, whether the full verdict will ever be made known to the public. But the tenor of the final report may be deduced from the open discussions in the public media so far–the battlefield accounts, analyses and recriminations by some of the top commanders involved–which point to serious weaknesses, by no means general, but not altogether unique, in the fighting qualities of the Israeli army at the time of the Yom Kippur War.
The Agranat Committee is a highly respected, non-partisan body. Its chairman is Supreme Court Chief Justice Shimon Agranat and the rest of the panel consists of Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau; State Controller Yitzhak Nebenzahl; and former Army Chiefs of Staff Yigal Yadin and Haim Laskov, all men of unquestioned competence and integrity.
The committee’s first interim report precipitated the resignation of the Cabinet of former Premier Golda Meir and forced the resignation of the Yom Kippur War Chief of Staff, Gen. David Elazar. At the committee’s recommendation, Gen. Shmuel Gonen, commander of the southern front, was suspended from his command and several other high ranking officers were demoted or forced to resign, among them the former head of army intelligence Gen. Eliahu Zeira.
It remains to be seen whether the final report precipitates a further shake-up of Israel’s military establishment. Although the Egyptian army as eventually defeated and Israeli forces succeeded in gaining a large wedge on the western bank of the Suez Canal putting Israel in a superior military position when the cease-fire was declared, the defeat of Oct. 8 was a bitter pill and tragic in terms of the Israeli casualties.
SOME ELEMENTS IN REPORT
Accounts made public so far indicated several cases of poor tactical planning; several cases of false or misleadingly optimistic battlefield reports that caused the political leadership to make wrong decisions; cases in which senior commanders stayed too far behind the front; instances of open hostility between officers and privates in certain units; some cases in which the standing tradition of the Israeli army to retrieve all wounded men from the battlefield was not carried out.
The accounts also indicated that while the nation’s political leadership showed high sensitivity to the possibility of heavy casualties in the direction of military operations, certain officers did not demonstrate the same consideration in planning some specific operations.
A common denominator running through all of the accounts reflected an abandonment of traditional values such as integrity and a high level. of morale. Some analysts have attributed this to the fact that after the brilliant victory of the Six-Day War, the Israeli army lost its elite qualities, became too representative of civilian society and was thus influenced by the corruptive processes that affected the country in the euphoria of the 1967 victory and the “seven fat years” of prosperity that followed.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
