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Israeli historian Yigal Kipnis delves deep into the Israeli and American archives and reveals in this book that the big October 1973 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors could almost certainly have been avoided. Avoided, that is, if in the months preceding October 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was facing elections, had not been so determined to block the ongoing peace negotiations with Egypt, and if US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (despite his misgivings) had not backed up her diplomatic hard line. Kipnis contradicts the conventional wisdom, arguing convincingly that it was Israeli political intransigence, not a failure of Israel’s military intelligence, that set the stage for the 1973 war.
The Hebrew-language original of 1973: The Road to War made great waves when it was published in Israel.
"This pathbreaking work replaces the conventional military paradigm that has dominated analyses of the 1973 Yom Kippur War with a political one which is already significantly altering the narrative of the war and its aftermath. Political blinkers—supplemented by arrogance, suspicion and secretiveness—may have been the key cause of the most traumatic event in Israeli history. The possibility that this war could have been averted if Israel’s leaders had, forty years ago, agreed to pursue a diplomatic option is especially pertinent today, when mistaken preconceptions threaten to stymie the road to a just and lasting accord between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world. Kipnis’s book is a must-read for anyone concerned with understanding past patterns of Israeli-Arab relations and with preventing their repetition today."
—Naomi Chazan, former deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset
—Akiva Eldar, veteran Israeli journalist, and correspondent, Al-Monitor
"Yigal Kipnis knows the Yom Kippur War both as a pilot who flew helicopters in combat and, more importantly, as a scholar who dares once again to go into harm’s way. He challenges the conventional wisdom of the past 40 years, which pinned most of the blame for Israel’s failure to anticipate the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian invasion on intelligence and military officers. Kipnis makes a convincing case for holding the political echelon—Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and a close circle of confidants—accountable for pushing Anwar Sadat into a desperate but limited military move aimed at unleashing a diplomatic process. Rather than realizing that by making the Nixon Administration wait until after elections in Israel to launch a peace offensive, Golda and Co. should expect war and be seriously prepared for it, they were vastly over-confident and complacent. They even kept to themselves, rather than share with their uniformed subordinates planning contingencies, secret undertakings between Washington and Jerusalem which tied Israel’s hands regarding pre-emption. Kipnis flies nap-of-the-earth over this complex terrain. It’s one hell of a ride for whoever is interested in how nations stumble into unnecessary wars, conduct secret diplomacy at the highest levels and watch their Civil-Military relations rip apart at the seams for an entire generation."
—Amir Oren, Defense Correspondent, Ha’aretz
"As one who fought in, studied, and published about the October 1973 War, I felt that nothing could surprise me any more about it. Yigal Kipnis has done that, however. While he confirmed some of my earlier assessments, he put others into question. His mining of the newly available documents made the road to October much more understandable. The 1973 War changed the Middle East, and Kipnis’s book helps us understand that change."
—Abdul Monem Said Aly, chairman and director, Regional Center for Strategic Studies, Cairo
"A gripping read, taut with the tension inside Israel’s inner circle of decision makers in the countdown to war in October 1973. Kipnis provides fascinating new details that have come to light as archives have opened up. Especially intriguing is the enigmatic role of Ashraf Marwan in the unfolding drama."
—Janice Gross Stein, director, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
"Yigal Kipnis’ 1973: The Road to War is a revelatory account of the myopic diplomacy that caused an unnecessary war. Based on extensive research in the US and Israeli archives, Kipnis shows how military overconfidence and erroneous political judgments led US and Israeli leaders to dismiss Egypt’s peace overtures and force Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to launch a war he had tried to avoid. These same errors also led Israel’s leaders to disregard the signs of imminent war in October 1973 and allowed Egypt to achieve near-complete strategic surprise. This gripping narrative will fascinate anyone interested in the history of US Middle East policy or in the long and bitter struggle between Arabs and Israelis."
—Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School