The Agranat Committee’s findings on the conduct of the Yom Kippur War have come under renewed attack from the former commander of the Sinai front who the committee held in large measure responsible for Israel’s initial setbacks in October, 1973. Gen. (res.) Shmuel Gonen, who resigned from active duty as a direct result of the Agranat report declared on a Kol Israel broadcast that he was determined to clear his name.
He went about it by seeking to discredit the two former chiefs of staff who were members of the panel headed by Supreme Court Justice Shimon Agranat–Haim Laskov and Yigael Yadin. Gonen claimed that each of them, who held commands in Israel’s 1948 war for independence, were two decades behind the times and simply did not understand the military situation of the Yom Kippur War. He recalled that Gen. Laskov who was a battalion commander during the fighting in the Latrun region in 1948 had been forced to abandon a captured position. It is not too late to have an investigation of what happened there, Gonen said. As for Yadin, the former Sinai commander claimed he conducted the 1948 war from a headquarters office and never saw combat.
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