The parallels between the recent surprise attack in Israel and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 are strikingly clear. In both cases, Israel was caught off guard by an invading military force on a holy day in early October. However, the recent attack by Hamas, a guerrilla organization controlling the Gaza Strip, has already resulted in more civilian casualties than the 1973 war launched by Egypt and Syria. The scale and complexity of the recent attacks, involving multiple locations and thousands of fighters, indicate that this offensive was planned for several months, if not longer. One would expect Israel’s vast surveillance systems in Gaza to have detected such planning, leaving many wondering how this assault was missed.
Experts and journalists have proposed several explanations for the intelligence failure. It is suggested that Israel may have relied too heavily on signals intelligence and electronic sources, which Hamas managed to evade through the use of drones to disable border systems. Additionally, Israel may have lacked credible human intelligence sources within the inner circle of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, or access to the plans of its military commander, Mohammed Deif.
During the 1973 war, Israel had a valuable human intelligence source in Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a close adviser to President Anwar Sadat. Another theory suggests that Israeli intelligence was preoccupied with various threats, as a significant portion of the military was stationed near the West Bank before the recent attack. It is also possible that Hamas employed deception, leading Jerusalem to believe that the group was willing to accept Israel’s normalization of relations with Arab countries. In 1973, the Egyptians used a scheduled military exercise as a cover for their war preparations.
However, intelligence failures can also stem from a lack of imagination. The disorganized and sluggish response from Israel indicates that the nation’s political and military leaders may harbor the same psychological misconceptions that plagued Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, her advisers, and even some within the U.S. government during the 1973 war.
Prior to the surprise attack during Yom Kippur, Israel received numerous warnings of a possible assault. Initially, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat doubted his military’s ability to uproot Israel from the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, given Israel’s powerful air force. However, by 1972, Sadat’s perspective began to shift.
There is no evidence to suggest that Israel shared its top-secret information from Ashraf Marwan with Washington. However, the Nixon administration closely monitored the situation and had its own sources of information, leading them to sense a crisis.
Following the absence of war after the May scare, those who were skeptical of Egypt’s willingness to initiate a losing conflict felt reassured. Even as signals indicated Egyptian preparations for war in the fall, those who had been labeled alarmists were disregarded.
Just two days before the Yom Kippur invasion on October 4, 1973, Israel received another significant breakthrough. Ashraf Marwan contacted the Mossad requesting an in-person meeting with its director. Marwan’s message, using the codeword “a lot of Chemistry,” indicated an imminent Egyptian attack.
Miles away in Washington, the National Security Agency also discovered indications of an impending invasion, but it failed to convince the analysts at the CIA and the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the United States did not pass on any warning.
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