this wider goal. In the West, the Egyptians and
other Arabs had been regarded as a lesser species
of humanity, servile and incompetent. All that
changed in 1956 when Nasser nationalised the
Suez Canal and humiliated Britain and France.
He served notice on the feudal royals left in the
Arab world that the time was coming to an end
when they could rule without the participation of
the people, but half a century later they are still
there. All of this boosted Arab self-esteem,
without which there can be no peace between
Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East.
Nasser’s attitude to the Cold War, too, can now
be judged in a new perspective. He manipulated
Moscow and Washington to supply him with
arms and aid but supported the neutrality of the
Third World, the poorer countries, which could
only lose and not gain by becoming involved in
the conflicts of the superpowers.
Egypt’s next president Anwar Sadat, after the fail-
ure of the US to bring the two sides together,
believed he was faced either with accepting Israel’s
conditions of peace or with fighting once more.
He chose the latter. On 6 October 1973, the
Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, Syrian
and Egyptian forces attacked Israel. Until hours
before the attack was launched, the Israelis had
not expected an all-out war and the Cabinet had
rejected another pre-emptive strike. Mobilisation
of reserves was ordered too late. The initial attacks
broke through the much smaller Israeli forces, and
it was not until the civilians were mobilised that
the Syrians could be halted in the north. The
fighting against the Egyptians, whose tanks had
successfully crossed into the Sinai, proved far more
difficult. Only when General Sharon daringly
crossed to the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal
with Israel’s armour on 15 October and so cut off
the 100,000-strong Egyptian Third Army in the
Sinai were the Israelis able to take the offensive.
But the Israelis, after suffering early losses of their
fighters, brought down by Soviet-supplied mis-
siles, had succeeded in turning the tables on Syria
and Egypt only after receiving replacement fight-
ers and large quantities of arms flown in from the
US. The unwritten Israeli–French alliance had
ended after 1967, the French being now more
concerned to get on better terms with the Arab
states; and neither Britain nor West Germany was
prepared to supply the arms the Israelis desper-
ately needed. This reticence did not help the
Western Europeans much. The Arab oil states
expressed their solidarity with Egypt and Syria by
imposing an oil embargo on the US and on all the
other countries that did not support the Arab
cause. Western Europe was hit by an oil shortage
and large price rises.
Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, was
masterminding US policy. President Nixon was in
the grip of the Watergate crisis but he gave his
full backing to Kissinger’s policy of working for a
durable Arab–Israeli peace, ready to assist Israel
only to the extent of enabling it to defend itself
effectively but not so much as to produce an Israeli
victory as overwhelming as that in 1967. In that
respect the US and the Soviet Union held the same
views, and Brezhnev and Kissinger and Nixon
cooperated well during the first few days of the
Yom Kippur War to bring about a ceasefire. On 20
October, Kissinger flew to Moscow at Brezhnev’s
invitation. The two superpowers agreed to present
a ceasefire resolution to the Security Council on
the 22nd, which Syria, Egypt and Israel accepted
after some Soviet and US arm-twisting. Yet two
days later, during the night of 24–5 October, the
US placed its forces in readiness for war. After such
fruitful cooperation with the Kremlin, how had
events taken this turn? It seemed like the Cuban
missile crisis over again. Was the world on the
brink of the Third World War?
The Israelis were the culprits initially, in that
they failed to observe the truce completely; in an
attempt to improve their military position they
tightened the noose around the Egyptian Third
Army. Brezhnev responded with a proposal to the
US that a Soviet–American peacekeeping force be
sent. Kissinger did not wish to see Soviet troops in
the Middle East, but the forceful US reaction was
to the latter part of Brezhnev’s proposal, a threat
that if the US did not agree then ‘we should be
faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking
appropriate steps unilaterally. Israel cannot be
allowed to get away with the violations.’ US
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