That Israel survived those grim October days when the sirens sounded, the radios blared unit names and young men rushed from synagogues to cars and then tanks and planes on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, had little to do with the nation's government.
The leftists who had ruled the country without interruption until that war (and whose rule would falter a few years later and almost entirely disappear after its disastrous deal with the PLO) had failed badly. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, the subjects of enduring personality cults, had brought the country to the brink of destruction. It was not the political or military leaders who salvaged the situation, but young men fighting desperately and heroically in impossible battles.
The Yom Kippur War was not the first time that Israel was outnumbered or overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers of enemy soldiers and tanks, but it was the first time that the men in the field felt like they had been left on their own by generals and politicians and had no plan to win the war. And so they fought all the more desperately, knowing that there would be nothing else. READ MORE
