“YELLOW ARAB HELMET, BLUE RUSSIAN EYES”wave of domestic unrest ... especially [among ] students ... the government made an urgent
decision to raise a home guard, and the students were called to enlist. We soon saw a
company of young men in uniform with shovels digging trenches. Three days later, after
experiencing life at the front, they were sent back to Cairo.Most Western studies still reflect the Israeli narrative at the time, and credit the IDF
raid with “freezing any Eg yptian military activity” for several months. This inaction is,
in turn, conventionally portrayed as a major failure that enabled the Israelis to con-
struct, almost unhindered, the array of strongpoints (ma’ozim) that would become
known as the Bar-Lev Line. But the Russian aviation historian Mikhail Zhirokhov sees
the Nag Hammadi operation as the first impetus for Kavkaz, even if acting on it took
some time: “it was precisely this raid that faced the Eg yptian military and the Soviet
advisers with the issue of reinforcing air defense of the canal ... Through all of 1968,
[Eg yptian] SAMs had shot down only one Israeli Piper [Cub].”^98