Behind the Headlines Agranat Report Seen As Whitewash of the Political Establishment

A wholly unexpected reaction to the Agranat Committee’s final report on the Yom Kippur War–public resentment and indignation against the committee itself–appeared to emerge today. Most Israelis, including the leading political and military commentators, are hard put to compose an intelligible picture of the panel’s overall findings and recommendations from the tiny segment made public last week–42 pages out of a document more than 1500 pages long.

The feeling here is that the committee underestimated the public’s intelligence and its ability to absorb unpleasant facts about shortcomings of the political as well as military leadership during the war.

The portions of the report made public only feed a cynical belief that the Agranat panel was out to whitewash the political establishment at the expense of the military; that it cracked down too harshly on Gen. Shmuel Gonen, commander of the Sinai front when the war broke out and other military leaders while conferring absolution on then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan by omitting any reference to his activities at the time.

QUESTION OF IMPLEMENTING RECOMMENDATIONS

While the public understands that “security reasons” may have precluded the publication of parts of the final report, commentators can’t help wondering how the public can be assured that the Agranat Committee’s recommendations will be implemented. If the public doesn’t know what the findings were, how can it be sure that the right conclusions were drawn and the correct remedies prescribed, one source asked today. How can it know that the tragic mistakes and misunderstandings of the Yom Kippur War will not be repeated?

When the Agranat Committee was first appointed by Premier Golda Meir at the end of Nov. 1973, it enjoyed universal respect. The Cabinet asked Dr. Shimon Agranat, president of the Supreme Court, to form an investigative panel and he chose widely respected figures Justice Moshe Landau; State Controller Dr. Yitzhak Nebenzahl; and two former chiefs of staff, Haim Laskov and Prof. Yigael Yadin, an eminent archaeologist and scholar. Public confidence in the committee was high.

Its first interim report, published last April, stated that no Cabinet Minister–including Day-an–was responsible for the failure to correctly interpret the intentions of Egypt and Syria to go to war. The blame for misreading intelligence or failing to act on correct intelligence was laid squarely on the then-Chief of Staff, Gen. David Elazar, and four senior officers of army intelligence, leading to their resignations or demotions. The interim report recommended the suspension of Gonen pending further investigation.

FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS NOT ANSWERED

What can be gathered from the minute portion made public is that the final report does not go beyond confirming the findings and recommendations of the interim report, No hint of blame has been laid on the political leadership.

But the Israeli public cannot help but believe that there was a close connection between the army’s incompetence in the initial days of the war–thoroughly documented by the committee–and its civilian administrator, namely the Minister of Defense, Moreover, people are still asking themselves whether the adverse political consequences of the war were not the bitter fruit of a wholly mistaken conception maintained by Premier Meir and Dayan.

None of these fundamental questions appear to be answered by the final report. Premier Meir decided, rightly at the time, that a full dress inquiry was necessary if only to relieve the bitterness and tension that built up in the country after the Yom Kippur War, The committee’s efforts in that respect have been a failure.