Taken by Surprise

...The head of Israel's Southern Command, he is shown to have been inept at deploying his forces and adapting to the twists and turns of the battlefield...

...The heroics and innovations of Israel's troops and officers in the heat of battle do not blind Rabinovitch to the failings of Israeli commanders and political leaders...

...By the end of the book, the author seems of two minds...

...The details of Israel's intelligence failure—at a time when President George W. Bush's assertions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have proved empty—are particularly poignant...

...The IDF paid a steep price that day: 55 dead and 79 wounded...

...But not Zeira, who tenaciously clung to "the concept": Egypt will not fight until it receives Scud missiles and long-range bombers from the Soviet Union, and Syria will not fight without Egypt...

...How did Israeli intelligence miss the impending attack...

...It was also in the Golan Heights, where Israel suffered a wildly unfavorable balance of forces at the outset, that Lieutenant Zvika Greengold held off and destroyed countless Syrian tanks...

...As the author himself implies, we will probably have to await an in-depth Syrian account of the confrontation for an answer...

...Colonel Danny Matt had asked for a list of Israeli dead in a battle where his son was a tank commander...

...Force Zvika"—referring to a single tank—quickly entered the Israeli lexicon...

...The Yom Kippur War is deep on some questions and shallow on others...

...It is not that Rabinovitch demonizes or caricatures the Arabs...

...Unfortunately, what was being thought and said and felt on the Arab side remains largely a black box in the book...

...IDF operational doctrine was too strongly tied to what had happened in 1967...

...Some 25 years later he decided to revisit the subject after realizing that "what I knew were only disconnected episodes in a fuzzy matrix...

...We watch Israel draw the wrong conclusions from earlier crises, like a near confrontation in May 1973...

...After agonizing for hours, despite pressure by radio from military leaders to head for Israeli lines, a reluctant Lieutenant David Amit led the unit through a darkened Suez City...

...We are given a vivid example of national security takingprecedence over personal safety as we follow Israel's ultimately successful attempt to recapture its observationpost on Mt...

...Moreover, Israel's vaunted fighting machine not only made mistakes in interpreting Arab intentions, but also in preparing for the battle it never expected to come...

...Their peace has been going on for 30 years and counting...

...Except for several references to the diary of an Egyptian soldier, Sergeant Mahmud Nadeh, and a favorable portrayal of Lieutenant General Saad el-Shazly, the Egyptian Chief of Staff, we do not get much on the thinking back then in Cairo and Damascus...

...In a meeting that day which included Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and Chief of Staff David Elazar, Zeira dismissed the idea of a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack as "absolutely unreasonable...

...The problem is that it has had little impact on the core enigma in the region, the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock...

...Could Israel have avoided the war by responding seriously to Egyptian diplomatic feelers...

...when the initial Egyptian-Israeli postwar settlement looks like a Dayan proposal that Meir rejected in 1970, he tells us: "Had she accepted Dayan's suggestion, the war could well have taken a very different course—if, indeed, it broke out at all...

...technological snafus that slowed the collection of information about Egypt's military moves on the eve of war...

...At another point the author underscores the many father-son connections in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), especially as it affected high-level officers...

...On Friday, October 5, others in Israel were picking up more and more signs suggesting that war was imminent...

...Throughout this book, however, we are reminded that armed combat is not pretty...

...Egypt and Israel fought five wars in 25 years, culminating in the 1973 confrontation...

...Israel's Northern Command had begun preparing for a full evacuation of the Golan...

...On one question Rabinovitch has it relatively easy, for by leading to an Egyptian-Israeli peace, the Yom Kippur War did at least partially transform the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...Working what is called Tapline Road, Greengold's tank single-handedly took out enemy armor probably heading for the Israeli military base at Nafakh...

...His objective, he says in his Preface to the Yom Kippur War, has been to produce a "coherent narrative" of a conflict that "could only be grasped by understanding both the decision-making processes of the high commands and the flow of events on the battlefield itself...

...He does what he set out to do admirably...

...Characters are introduced and before long many die...

...Hermon, in the Golan Heights...

...But in the case of the intelligence collapse, after endorsing the conventional wisdom involving "the concept," Rabinovitch gives us much more to think about: Cairo's efforts to lull Jerusalem into a false sense of complacency...

...andpoor channels of communication that prevented crucial data from reaching the highest levels of Israel's military and political leadership...

...Abraham Rabinovitch, a New Yorker and former Newsday reporter who had moved to Israel, covered the '73 hostilities for the Jerusalem Post...

...His access to recently declassified materials notwithstanding, Rabinovitch is less illuminating on whether the war could have been avoided...

...At first, he says this remains "a matter of conjecture" but thinks it "unlikely...

...When a courier arrives at a Ramat Eshkol synagogue and calls out the names of those who must report to their bases for mobilization, a father movingly grips his son, as if through his embrace he could rescind the call-up...

...No one thought to see if improved training of Arab soldiers and technological advances had changed the battlefield...

...On both sides soldiers pay with their lives because of occasional confusion...

...His main target is General Eli Zeira, the head of Israel's military intelligence, who totally misread Egypt's prewar intentions and repeatedly mockedanyone who disagreed with him...

...But instead of pressing ahead, Syria marshaled its forces and held back...

...Later in the book, he wonders if Golda Meir was too dismissive of Egyptian diplomatic probes before the war...

...Reviewed by Jeremy Pressman Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Connecticut On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria jointly attacked Israel while the vast majority of its citizens (and soldiers) were in synagogues observing Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement...

...Zeira and his chief aides, too, were "Explaining away every piece of information that conflicted with their thesis, [while] they embraced any wisp that seemed to confirm it...

...Thus from the key background developments it recounts to the military battles it describes to the humanizing stories it tells, the focus is almost always on Israeli players and policy...

...Partway through the war, Elazar effectively demoted Gonen by bringing back retired Chief of Staff Chaim Bar-Lev to run the southern front...

...It should be noted, though, that the book is mostly based on Israeli sources...

...he simply does not really deal with them...

...Until at least October 8, its tanks could have broken the Israeli line and headed toward the Jordan River...

...The synagogue's rabbi intervenes, explaining to the weeping father, "His place is not here today...

...But the paratroopers reached safety without firing a shot...

...Rabinovitch is not kind to General Shmuel Gonen either...

...As the soldiers walked, "Cigarettes glowing in the dark revealed the presence of [Egyptian] men in surrounding buildings...

...Its material on the U.S.-Soviet role hardly breaks new ground...

...Rabinovitch is adept at re-creating the ramifications and drama of the war...

...Why, for instance, did Syria fail to press its initial advantage in the Golan...

...At the end of the war, as the cease-fire is about to take hold, we learn of a paratrooper unit caught several miles inside Suez City because of a botched Israeli attempt to maximize its position up to the last minute...

...The offensive was of course not expected...

...Yet sure enough Egypt's SAM missile batteries stymied Israel's Air Force, the linchpin of the lightning '67 victory, and Sagger antitank missiles challenged Israeli tanks in the first days of combat...

...Did the war transform the Middle East, as the book's subtitle claims...

...His son was not on the list, but Matt "would never again during the war inquire about his son's status for fear that his own functioning might be impaired by bad news...

...For several days Israel appeared to be in a precarious predicament, although it then gained the upper hand and by October 25 a U.S.-Soviet brokered cease-fire ended the fighting...