350. 1973: The Yom Kippur War & The First Oil Crisis (Part 5)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durupol. And today we've got something a little bit different. October 1973, the Yom Kippur War, the day Arabs crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai. The intelligence failure that made this possible, the extraordinary military engineering that made this happen, and the oil embargo that made the whole world feel the consequences.

This is by absolutely any measure one of the great thrillers, if you like, of the twentieth century. I think we should start with one of Avi Schleim's great insights from his book, The Iron Wall. And he very much blames the intelligence failures in 1973, the fact that the Egyptians were able to surprise the Israelis as much as they did, to what he calls ha concepția in Hebrew. It's a set of assumptions that he says are deeply embedded in the Israeli military thinking of the period. And it allows the Israelis completely to underestimate.

all the Arab armies, but particularly the Egyptians. Can you talk us through the assumptions and just m make those clear to us? So if you remember back in the 1967 episode that we did with Eugene, the key Israeli coup was to destroy the Egyptian Air Force, the enormous Egyptian Air Force at that point. on the ground in the first ten minutes of the war. And an idea embedded itself in Israeli military thinking that Egypt will not go to war without first achieving air superiority over Israel.

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