October loves us and we love October

Fifty-one years have passed since the October War, which was a turning point in the history of the Arab people, and a decisive moment in our struggle against the Zionist enemy. It was when we crossed from defeat to victory, and from humiliation to pride. Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez Canal, demolished the Bar Lev Line and liberated hundreds of kilometres east of the canal on the way to the complete liberation of Sinai from Israeli occupation.

Israel claimed that the Bar Lev Line — its fortifications on the east bank of the canal in Sinai — could only be destroyed by an atomic bomb. The Egyptian army crossed it in six hours. It was the sort of military action that is still studied in military colleges around the world. Egypt’s soldiers shattered the myth of the invincible Israel Defence Forces (IDF), causing Prime Minister Golda Meir to ask US President Richard Nixon for help before Israel was lost.

“In the course of the night,” wrote Meir in her memoir My Life, “the Egyptians continued to pour their forces across the Canal and the Syrians were able to break through the Golan Heights forward lines.” She said that the question which arose was whether or not the Israeli regime should tell the people about how bad the situation was.

Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan told Israeli newspaper editors that the Zionist state was paying a heavy price every day of the war.

The IDF was losing dozens of aircraft, pilots, equipment and hundreds of tanks every day.

Some of these tanks fell into the hands of the Egyptians, as well as armoured vehicles, artillery and crew. Dayan also said that the Egyptians crossed the canal with more tanks and armoured vehicles than the IDF had in the peninsula. He explained that the Israeli forces had withdrawn from the Bar Lev Line because of the severity of the Egyptian attack, and they do not have the power to expel the Egyptians who destroyed it. Dayan admitted that the most important thing for them and for the world is that it had become clear that the Israeli forces are not stronger than the Egyptians, and that the air of Israeli superiority had ended forever.

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The Israeli theory that if the Arabs declared war on Israel they would be defeated in hours had also been proven wrong, said Dayan. He noted that Israelis must understand that they cannot continue to believe that they are the only military power in the Middle East and must realise that there are new facts on the ground and that they have to live with these new facts.

That was the situation in Sinai at the beginning of the war, based on the battles taking place, according to Zionist leaders themselves. If it were not for America’s direct intervention with aircraft, tanks and other military equipment landed directly in Sinai to reinforce the IDF, Egypt would have regained all of the peninsula and would not have needed peace negotiations to return it to Egyptian sovereignty.

The course of the war changed, as did the enemy, and it became a confrontation with the US, not Israel. “We almost achieved complete victory had it not been for the intervention of the US against us in the war,” said President Anwar Sadat. “I cannot fight the US; I fear for my children.”

The Zionist generals could not, under any circumstance, accept that the war would end with a crushing defeat for their army.

Their arrogance refused to allow that, so they started to build a causeway by filling-in a section of the Suez Canal at Deversoir as payback for the Egyptian army’s achievements in the early days of the war. This is a thorny issue with a lot of ambiguity. The Zionists treated it as if it were a victory for them, while Sadat treated it as a TV propaganda operation and nothing more.

Many analysts saw this as having cost the Zionist army a lot financially and militarily, exposing its troops to danger while gaining little in return except some propaganda value and slightly boosted morale. Others saw it as a major blow against the Egyptian army that cast a shadow on its dazzling victories early in the war.

The subsequent peace conference and UN Resolution 338 dated 22 October 1973 called for a peaceful settlement through negotiations. This was the path that led to the Camp David negotiations in 1978, and the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel signed on 26 March, 1979.

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This changed the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, and saw efforts to liberate Palestine with ink on treaties rather than bullets and blood. The head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, followed by the Wadi Araba agreement between Jordan and Israel on 26 October, 1994. Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad began negotiations with the Zionist Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and the Arab rulers began approaching the occupation state.

I must note here that Sadat invited the Palestinian Authority, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan to attend the Mena House conference in Cairo in December 1977 to discuss and solve the problems of the solution regarding Jerusalem and the issue of Palestinian refugees, but they did not attend. The Palestinian flag was raised, while the Palestinian seat was empty.

Sadat went to Syria and met Hafez Al-Assad and asked him to join the peace conference in Geneva to recover the Golan Heights, but he refused and attacked him and the rest of the Arab rulers. He launched a fierce campaign against Sadat and accused him of treason after his visit to Israel and his speech in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The Arab countries boycotted Egypt and suspended its membership in the Arab League, moving its headquarters to Tunisia.

Now those countries are following the same path that they refused to follow with Sadat to be a strong front in the negotiations against the Zionist entity instead of going to it individually, so that it would isolate each of them from the others. They preferred back then to act as a front of “steadfastness and confrontation” and attack Sadat, but we have not seen signs of this when it came to liberating the land. Decades later, they are still running to the Zionists to gather the crumbs; Jerusalem has been annexed by Israel (in another breach of international law); and the Syrian Golan Heights have also been swallowed by the occupation state.

After the peace treaties, Israel continued to claim that the Egyptian army could not liberate all of Sinai, and Cairo was forced to negotiate and sign peace deals to regain the peninsula. The Israelis boast arrogantly that the Arabs learnt the lesson well that Israel will fight and that they cannot get anything from it except through negotiations.

Unfortunately, the Arab Zionists agree with such claims, and their current position is a crime against the Arab people, their struggle, their heroism, their security and their interests. The self-esteem and confidence of the people have been weakened; morale is low when the strength of the Zionist entity is exaggerated.

Zionist Israel will remain the historical enemy of the Arab people, no matter how much their rulers seek to “normalise” their links with the regime in Tel Aviv. Normalisation will continue to be rejected by the masses.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.