Tomorrow Egypt and Syria will be commemorating the 47th anniversary of the October War. A war that brought the Arabs together to liberate Arab territories occupied by Israeli forces in June 1967 in which Israel, through American connivance and deceit, had launched a war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In 1967, all great powers— the United States, the former Soviet Union and France under General Charles De Gaulle — had warned the party that would fire the first shot. The fatal mistake of Egypt had been to take this warning seriously. The result of this failure was the occupation of Sinai, of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Despite two peace treaties subsequently signed by both Egypt (in March 1979), and Jordan (in October 1994) with Israel, the strategic fallout of the 1967 War is still haunting the Arabs, the Palestinians and the world at large. And the American connection with Israel is the main reason behind this state of affairs. Both the United States and Israel had worked to use Israeli strategic gains in 1967 to pressure Egypt to sign a peace treaty with Israel, knowing full well that taking Egypt, with all its strategic weight and power, out of the Arab-Israeli balance of power would open the way, wide open, to integrate Israel in the Middle East while paying lip service to Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which stresses, in its preamble, the non-acquisition of territories by force and calls for the withdrawal of Israel from the territories it had usurped by force in June 1967. This resolution has been the basis for the well-known formula of land-for-peace; that is, Israeli withdrawal against the ending of the state of war between Arab countries and Israel. It goes without saying that Resolution 242 has dealt with the Palestinian problem from the perspective of the Palestinians as refugees. From 1967 to 1973, the Middle East had seen several United Nations-sponsored attempts to carry out the land-for-peace formula (the Jarring Mission), as well as efforts by some great powers of the time (the four-powers talks) to implement Resolution 242. But to no avail. The Israelis had never been interested in withdrawing from the entirety of the Arab lands that they conquered by force. They started calling the West Bank by the Biblical name of Judea and Samaria, while insisting that Jerusalem, its western and eastern occupied parts, had become the “eternal capital of Israel”. Not only this, but the Israeli Knesset passed two laws that run counter to international law, that have incorporated both the Syrian Golan Heights and the “unified” city of Jerusalem into the state of Israel. American diplomacy in the Middle East from November 1967 onwards has tried to square the circle. The diplomatic stalemate in the Middle East had left Egypt and Syria no other alternative but to go to war, a war that Israeli politicians and generals ruled out completely. Some Israeli generals falsely believed that the Arabs are not fit to fight. To our advantage, the American CIA had not tried to convince them out of this belief. As far as Egypt is concerned, the use of force to take back Sinai had never been in question. Cairo had never accepted the American-Israeli proposition of negotiating and signing a peace treaty with Israel, either under Israeli-occupied Sinai, nor a unilateral peace treaty, strategically decoupled from the Palestinian problem, nor other Arab fronts. What both the Israelis and the Americans missed months before the outbreak of the October War on 6 October 1973 was the will of the Egyptian people to fight to the death for the recuperation of Sinai. The other extremely important variable that they had utterly overlooked was that the Egyptian army of 5 October 1973 had nothing to do with the forces that failed to stop Israeli aggression in June 1967. A third factor that they completely neglected was the ability and political will of Cairo and Damascus planning jointly, and in complete secrecy, a mount a surprise attack on the southern front (Sinai) and the eastern front (the Golan) at the same time. At 14:00 hours on 6 October 1973, a one million plus Egyptian army launched the long-awaited storming of the Suez Canal, and in the span of less than six hours, the Egyptian divisions that successfully took the Bar-Lev fortifications on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal made five bridgeheads in Sinai. In these few hours, Egypt erased from the history books the unfounded myth that the Israelis had tried to instil of the invincibility of their military might. Had it not been for the Nixon administration and the Kissinger connection and conspiring with Israel at the time of the war, Egyptian forces could have easily reached the international borders with mandated Palestine. The United States had shared highly-sensitive military intelligence information on the deployment of Egyptian forces with Israel that enabled the Israelis, on the night of 15 October 1973, to cross the Suez Canal. The American strategy was to neutralise any military advantage that Egypt gained. Kissinger had told president Anwar Al-Sadat back then that Washington would never allow Soviet weaponry to defeat American-made arms. The United States had provided Israel during the war with $55 billion worth of arms to enable the Israelis to stem the war tide to their advantage, and to the strategic advantage of the United States in its confrontation with the former Soviet Union. In the meantime, Washington had been looking, desperately, for a strategic win in the Middle East to make up for its losses in the Vietnam War. At the height of the Cold War, the White House and the American establishment on the Potomac saw in the Middle East a way to turn the tide against the Soviets and their allies among Arab powers, Egypt being the most important one. For reasons within Egypt, and without, the October War is still an unfulfilled promise from Egyptian and Arab perspectives. The full strategic gains of this war would become true when a state of Palestine will be internationally-recognised and become a fully-fledged member state in the United Nations, when Israel withdraws from the Syrian Golan Heights, and, most importantly, when the world obliges Israel to define its geographic borders according to international law, the Charter of the United Nations, and Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967. In other words, no lasting peace in the Middle East is possible unless the land-for-peace formula is finally respected and implemented. Military conquest will not draw the borders in the Middle East. This is the strategic message of the October War of 1973. A minute of silence, please, for our fallen on the battlefield who gave up their lives so that might does not make right. The writer is former assistant to the foreign minister.
