Behind the Headlines Reminders of Past Hostilities

Nearly a decade has passed since the cities of Egypt’s Suez Canal zone saw fighting, but reminders of the six years of hostilities that once turned them into virtual ghost towns are still apparent.

Half-demolished buildings peering through the rows of beach-white villas that now line the water-way in Suez, tax the imagination with suggestions of a time when this resort area was a battle zone and the banks of its placid waters a mass of minefields.

Just a swim’s distance across the canal are yet more poignant reminders of those years, and a collective monument to what has become one of the greatest sources of national pride in contemporary Egypt — the surprise attack against Israeli forces on Yom Kippur in October, 1973.

Marking the battlefront today are the scattered remains of the Barlev Line — a mammoth array of Israeli fortifications that lined the east bank of the canal from the Mediterranean Sea in the north, down to the canal’s outlet at the Gulf of Suez.

PAUSING AT A SYMBOLIC LINKAGE

It was at a spot on this site, where some of the old bunkers are still relatively intact, that a group of students from Cairo University’s Commerce College recently paused after taking a detour on a one-day organized excursion to Suez.

The driver had swung off the main road, some 17 miles north of the canal town, into a tunnel built by the late President Anwar Sadat as a symbolic linkage, between the Egyptian mainland and the territory restored to it by Israel in accordance with the peace treaty of 1979.

Climbing down from the bus, some five miles inland from the tunnel’s exit, the students found themselves opposite a low but imposing fortress with a large gun barrel peering out the entrance. It carried the weight of thick concrete blocks and metal slabs that had fallen from the roof.

Layers of rock-filled net sacks covered what remained of the bunker, and a maze of trenches leading to and around a line of similar bunkers appeared from a distance to be part of a neat geometrical design that bordered the surface of the desert.

PRIME TARGET OF THE WAR OF ATTRITION

The fortifications — erected by the Israelis in response to persistent shelling and commando raids by Egypt following the June 1967 Six-Day War and the resulting occupation of the Sinai — were, together with the soldiers who manned them, the prime target of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s War of Attrition, launched in March 1969. Some half a million residents were evacuated from the canal towns of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez in preparation for the expected reprisals.

By May, Nasser claimed he had destroyed 60 percent of the Barlev Line. Casualties were heavy and the fortifications themselves did indeed take a beating. But the massive artillery bombardment of the Israeli positions across the waterway, and the repeated Egyptian raids into the east bank, succeeded more conspicuously in bringing the canal zone cities, as well as targets deep within Egyptian territory, some of the same and stronger.

By August 1970, when a U.S.-sponsored ceasefire temporarily ended the fighting, Israel had demonstrated its continued military superiority by hitting at strategic targets putatively protected by Soviet ground-to-air missiles, and the fortifications across the canal remained more or less intact. The expulsion of Soviet military personnel by the still novice President Sadat made the chances of an Egyptian attack appear yet slimmer.

Consequently, Egypt stunned the world, not least of all the Israel Defense Force, when, together with the Syrians on the Golan Heights, it launched the Yom Kippur War, with its surprise crossing of the canal and the penetration of what had come to be called “the impregnable Barlev Line.”

NEVER ACKNOWLEDGED MILITARY UPSET

Egypt has never acknowledged that by the war’s end the military tables had almost entirely turned and its Third Army was completely surrounded by Israeli forces, cut off from its sources of supply. Many of those familiar with Western accounts of the war still maintain that Egypt nevertheless emerged victorious because it shattered the “myth of Israeli invincibility,” creating an atmosphere in which it could negotiate with Israel from a position of strength.

Consequently, Sadat is honored on October 6th, the day of the canal crossing and of his assassination eight years later, as much for the crossing of the canal as for the peace which, Egyptians stress, the war was designed to achieve. As relations between the two countries continue to deteriorate, the October 6th achievement seems to play a for more prominent part in memorializing Sadat than does the peace with Israel.

The sentiment which the tone of this official panegyric to Sadat appears to be addressing, became unsettlingly clear before the remains of the Barlev fortifications. Hearing the Egyptian guide describe the engineering of the Israeli bunkers — each of which had been replete with a large ammunition and supply store and wired up for electricity and air conditioning — could force even the most cynical observer of Egyptian public relations tactics to concede that if Egypt was defeated in the war, she lost, to some extent, triumphantly.

A FEELING OF DEJA VU

The spectacle of students clamoring to be photographed at the entrance of the bunker or by the charred remains of an Israeli tank sitting not far from it, brought a strange feeling of deja vu to one whose travels in Israel have included the routine tours of Arab bunkers and trenches on the Golan Heights and other sites in the Jewish State where vestiges of war have become not only a source of awe, mourning and national pride, but a catchy setting for tourist snapshots as well.

Adding to the strangeness was the presence of two Egyptian Hebrew language students whose acquaintance with this writer made possible her participation in the excursion and the unexpected detour. They, too, hastened to be photographed, calling out their request in a competent Hebrew that made more than a few heads turn inquisitively at the foreigner with the camera who was being addressed. They had situated themselves directly beneath a sign painted over one of the metal slabs that bore a quotation attributed to the late General Moshe Dayan and translated into English and Arabic. “The waters of the Suez,” the inscription read, “will be turned into a lake of Egyptian blood if they consider launching an assault on the canal.”

The inside walls of the bunkers offered testimony of another kind — the graffiti of Egyptian soldiers who had taken the place. Looking at the clutter of names, most of which were identified as “fighter in October,” a student could be heard commenting that Egypt would “never allow Sinai to be taken again.”

One of the Hebrew students, who had grown up in Suez and been evacuated with his co-inhabitants after the 1967 war, remarked in Hebrew, “These bunkers caused us a lot of suffering, you know.” There was little hostility in the tone of his comment, and the reactions of other students, who by this time had surmised that the incongruous foreigner among them was Jewish, indicated neither resentment nor the delight of a victor confronting the vanquished with his defeat.