September 25, 2023
What follows is a transcript of a conversation that JWE President Helena Cobban held with the Israeli historian Dr. Yigal Kipnis and the American political scientist (and policy practitioner) Dr William B. Quandt on September 25, 2023. The full video record of the conversation can be viewed here. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. The timestamps are generally close to accurate but become less accurate about halfway through.
Helena Cobban (00:00:03):
Hi, I’m Helena Cobban. I’m the president of Just World Educational and also the publisher of Just World Books, where 10 years ago we were delighted to publish a new book by Dr. Yigal Kipnis, who is with us today. Here’s his book called 1973, The Road to War. The book had a forward from Dr. William Quandt, who is also with us. He’s actually my spouse, and so I will just call him Bill and will call Dr. Kipnis Yigal. So we’ll be quite informal.
It’s been 10 years since the book came out. The book itself had many very important revelations, which we will just revisit a little bit in our conversation. But there have also been some new archival releases and other revelations since then. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today, and I’m very honored to have with us today Dr. Yigal Kipnis and Dr. William Quandt.
So, Yigal, if I may start with you, could you tell people roughly what you were doing during the war of 1973? And then briefly describe the work that you as a historian have done since then into the circumstances of the war?
Yigal Kipnis (00:01:49):
During the war, I was a pilot. I was a pilot for about 31 years, 26 of them as a reservist. And during the Yom Kippur War, I served as a pilot, and I studied civil engineering after the war. And only 25 years later, I became a historian.
Helena Cobban (00:02:26):
Interesting. Well, thank you. So Bill Quandt could you tell us what you were doing during the war and a little bit about the historical work you’ve done since then?
William Quandt (00:02:37):
So, when the war broke out, I happened to be the acting director of the Middle East office of the National Security Council. I had been the number two person in the Middle East office there for the previous year. And normally that would have meant that I saw a lot of paperwork, but I wouldn’t have participated in many meetings. But on the day before the war began, I became the acting director of the office. And for the next three weeks, that meant that, although I by no means played a policymaking role, I was in the room when a lot of policy discussions took place, because one of my jobs was to organize meetings for Henry Kissinger. He had just become Secretary of State, but I worked for him in his role as National Security Advisor at the White House.
So the meetings would take place under his National Security Council advisory role, rather than as Secretary of State. I would prepare the materials, give him an up-to-date intelligence briefing, and I would take notes at the meetings. I was like the fly on the wall for many of the discussions, not at the crucial level where decisions were often made, but I was pretty well informed about the day-to-day deliberations that took place. I subsequently left the NSC just about the same time that President Nixon resigned in 1974 and went to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where I wrote my first book on American foreign policy in the Middle East called Decade of Decisions, based heavily on the experience I had in the 1972 to 74 period. And it was probably one of the first insider accounts of what had happened. Since then, of course, most of the documents that I had seen at the time have been declassified. And some documents that I wasn’t aware of at the time have come out. But I wrote one of the first accounts that was relatively well anchored in the events of the war itself.
Helena Cobban (00:05:04):
Well, thank you. So we have two really good experts. And I want to just draw attention again to Yigal’s book 1973, The Road to War, which I was just looking at again. There’s such a lot of rich new material, primarily about the diplomacy that led up to the war, or maybe we should say, the failures of diplomacy, the absence of diplomacy. I don’t know if you, Yigal, could pick out maybe one or two of the notable failures of Israel’s diplomacy, or anybody else’s diplomacy, during that period leading up to the war.
Yigal Kipnis (00:05:56):
As you know the war was a “culmination of a failure of political analysis.” This was Kissinger’s definition. So I think it is very, very interesting to try to understand why he said it. And it mainly meant the failure of Israeli political analysis. So I think we have to emphasize two questions regarding this topic. The first is to say the war was not inevitable. If the war had been prevented, it’s very interesting to try to understand it. And maybe I will talk more about it. I think it was the main discussion that came after my book was published.
We know that at the beginning of 1973, following the first term of the policies of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the decision makers in Israel had to choose between two alternatives. There was no other: the first to accept Nixon’s and Kissinger’s initiative and Kissinger’s outline for peace negotiation between Israel and Egypt. And I will talk more about it very soon. It was based on Sadat’s proposal. We have to remember it. And the other option was very simply to wait for a war, which would break out during the second half of the summer. It would be a war that Sadat would order the Egyptian army to prepare in order to motivate a political process if Kissinger delayed his initiative. And we have to say Golda and Dayan, opposed by Minister Galili, chose the second alternative.
Helena Cobban (00:08:14):
That was the alternative — not to respond to Sadat’s initiative.
Yigal Kipnis (00:08:20):
Exactly.
Helena Cobban (00:08:21):
I just want to back up a little bit for people watching this who are not so familiar with the topic as you and Bill are, just to remind people that the Egyptian and Syrian decision to go to war was to regain lands that Israel had occupied in 1967. There was a question, would they also try to invade Israel itself? And perhaps many Israelis were afraid of that, but as it happened, they did not. They were just seeking to regain their own national lands in the way that other countries regained their national lands. We recently watched the movie “Golda”, and the movie gave none of this background, and made it seem that the Egyptians just wanted to be aggressive because they are aggressive, not that they had something they wanted to win that was legitimately theirs. So that’s just a little bit of background. And Yigal if you could pick up then from this question of the failure of political analysis in Israel, I guess what you were saying and what you have written is that Golda Meir did not want to give up the whole of Sinai.
Yigal Kipnis (00:10:13):
Yes, there is a difference between the Syrians and the Egyptians. Quite different. It’s very important to understand because Egyptian President Sadat, his direction was to use diplomacy to get a peace negotiation. The Syrians did not agree to it. Since we talk about negotiations, we speak about Egypt and the channel of Egypt and Israel, not Israel and Syria. And Kissinger, in order to open negotiations, asked Golda if she would be willing to delay her demand to change the recognized international border. This is the only thing he wanted to understand. Even before he asked her in the beginning of 1973, he had told her, say that you want peace in stages, and then you will be able to explain the various problems involved.
As a tactical device Golda replied negatively to Kissinger. And we have to understand that she said to Dayan and Galili — and this is one of the new documents was that discovered after my book was published — that regarding Kissinger’s plan, we have to tell him again, that is not our conception. Our conception is a demand to annex a third of Sinai. It is an ultimatum. We may criticize her for her position, and there are a lot doing it. Or we may justify her. There are some who understand it, but you cannot avoid these facts and events and argue that they never occurred because we have all the documents about it. Kissinger was waiting until after elections in Israel for his political initiative.
After the elections, he would have initiated an accelerated political process, but, in between, the war broke out on October 6. The Israel election was planned to be in the end of October 73. So the interpretations that the war was unavoidable and that the Egyptians did not intend to achieve a peace agreement and conditioned negotiations on the acceptance of their position can be attributed to apologetic writing, which appeared after my book was published. The price for preventing war became clear in the chaos that prevailed in the Israeli decision-making process. When the war did break out, we really understand, and nowadays, we talk about these things a lot, during this week, especially.
Helena Cobban (00:13:44):
Yigal, could I just turn to Bill a moment and ask from Kissinger’s point of view or the point of view that you saw, were you aware that Kissinger had proposed a formula after his discussions with the Egyptians that would involve, that Israel would recognize Egypt’s sovereignty over all of Sinai, but there could be a security arrangement for Israel, some security forces to remain in the passes, across the mountains or whatever. What Yigal is saying is that Kissinger was trying to persuade Golda Meir to go along with this plan or these ideas. And she said, no, quite bluntly. She said, no. What was Kissinger’s response when she said, no, why wasn’t he more powerful than Golda Meir? He could persuade her, like, really, Mrs. Meir, you need to go along with this.
William Quandt (00:15:07):
Let me just back up a little bit. Kissinger was relatively new to Middle Eastern affairs, since during his first years as National Security Advisor he concentrated heavily on strategic relations with the major powers, the Soviet Union, the opening toward China, finishing off the Vietnam War, and blocking the State Department from doing very much of anything on the Middle East. By the time I went to work for him, two developments were taking place that affected how he handled the Middle East in 1973. One was that in the middle of 1972, Sadat expelled about 15,000 Soviet military advisors, which was something that Kissinger had wanted the Egyptians to do, to get the Russians out of Egypt. And that led to the opening of a back channel between Sadat and Nixon and Kissinger. And for the first time, there were direct communications, not very intense immediately, but there was a channel open that bypassed the State Department.
The other point was that Nixon, who when running for reelection in 1972 had made it clear that there would be nothing done on the Middle East because it might cost him votes if he did anything serious. But immediately after the election, if he won, he wanted Kissinger to turn his attention to the Middle East. So I was aware that by the end of 1972 Nixon, who still had some influence — he was after all president — was urging Kissinger to get started on Middle East affairs. And so one of my first jobs there was to help prepare a big briefing book for Kissinger for the moment when he would engage. And the engagement involved two meetings in the first half of 1973 with Sadat’s National Security Advisor, Hafiz Ismail. Out of that came a set of general concepts that were very typical of Kissinger, but would also be the basis for an American proposal at some point.
One was to take the single most important Egyptian demand, namely that the Israelis should recognize Egyptian sovereignty over all of Sinai, and say that if Egypt were to get that, would it be possible for Israeli troops to withdraw on a gradual schedule and with security arrangements built in so that there would be a period of testing, rather than everything happening all at once. And the Egyptians said, yes. That was an important idea that the principle of Egyptian sovereignty had to be recognized, but the implementation of the return of the territory could be step-by-step. The second important point from Kissinger’s standpoint was would Egypt be prepared to consider making an agreement with Israel, even if the Syrians and the Palestinians and the Jordanians were reluctant to, or were slower in getting around to it? And the Egyptian answer was, we want a comprehensive peace, but we understand that we may be going at a faster pace. Our (Egypt’s) issues are a bit different from the others, and we will not make our agreement with Israel conditional upon everybody else agreeing. And the third point that had been clarified, a very important one, was Egypt would not negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, although they believed the Palestinian issue had to be resolved. But whatever the Jordanians and the Palestinians would agree upon, Egypt would accept. In other words, it was up to Jordan and the Palestinians to work out whatever they could with the Israelis. Egypt would support it, but they wouldn’t make it a precondition for their own agreement. So with that, Kissinger had, he thought, the makings of an initial set of principles from which negotiations could start.
President Nixon thought it was urgent. He said, if this doesn’t get solved soon, it may blow up. He said, this looks like the Balkans just before World War I. That was his analogy. I don’t think Kissinger believed that, because Kissinger believed that the balance of power was so overwhelmingly in favor of Israel that the Egyptians and the Syrians would be crazy to attack, because they would be defeated once again. So his attitude was, we have the makings of a political initiative, but there’s no great urgency about it because what’s the alternative? The alternative is a few more months of stalemate, and then we’ll start doing something after the Israeli elections. Now, he did try, he gave the Israelis every bit of detail about his talks with Hafiz Ismail. He actually gave the transcripts of two long sessions. I mean, these transcripts went to a hundred pages or so. He gave the whole thing to the Israelis and said, look at what the Egyptians are saying. And I think their ambassador, who was Yitzhak Rabin at the time, was fairly impressed by some of the new elements in the Egyptian position. But Golda Meir was not, because she disagreed with the fundamental principle of returning all of Sinai to Egypt. And at one point she said something like, “You know, if that means war, so be it. That’s going to be their problem, not ours, because we’ll emerge from any future war even stronger than we are today.” And I think that was the attitude that she had. And to some extent, Kissinger agreed that there was no urgency. Although, as we got closer to October 6th, he started to get more active and did begin to worry that a war might break out. And I think he genuinely was opposed to the idea of war as a positive step that might accelerate the search for an eventual Middle East peace. That has been attributed to him, but I don’t think it’s true. He was against the war breaking out, but he didn’t think it would because he thought that Israel had such a strong deterrent capability that the Egyptians simply would not risk going to war.
Helena Cobban (00:22:24):
So the war did break out, as we know. And there’s the matter of Israel’s unpreparedness for the war. I’ll just back up and remind people that during this war, something like 3000 Israelis were killed in the fighting and at least double that number were wounded. And on the Egyptian and Syrian sides probably three or four or five times that number were killed. And again, double that number wounded. So the human costs of the war were huge for all the participants. So Yigal, can you tell us about the unpreparedness of Israel for the war? Because I know you’ve done some work about that.
Yigal Kipnis (00:23:22):
Yes. But before I come to this point, I would like to emphasize one more point regarding what Bill said. I would like to emphasize the turning points at the beginning of 73, because before 73, Nixon and Kissinger had no interest to have a peace agreement in the Middle East. As Nixon told Golda in December 1971. “Don’t worry, it’ll be an appearance of negotiation. We’ll talk with the Soviets, but nothing will happen. We will let the State Department do it. Don’t worry, nothing will happen. What has been called the understanding of December 1971, we will go on to supply the weapons, the Skyhawks, the Phantoms, and nothing will happen.” Why? Because they didn’t want to the Soviets involved. They would like Sadat to come directly to them. On the other side, it was the purpose of Sadat too, he would like to be under the umbrella of the United States, not under the umbrella of the Soviet Union, but he had to prepare it.
He had to establish his situation in Egypt, to push out all the pro-Soviets in his government, et cetera. Then he came directly to the White House, not to the Department of State, to Kissinger, to the United States, not to Soviet Union, and to Kissinger, not to Rogers, the Secretary of State. So this is the turning point. The goals of Sadat meet the interests of Kissinger. This is why Kissinger changes policy and pushes, tries to push to a negotiation. But the [negative] answer of Golda let him do it only after the Israeli election.
Now, regarding your question, and let me put it in this way — what caused Israel not to properly prepare for the war? Or, to put it more precisely, what were the political considerations? Because we speak about the political issue. What was the political dictate that prevented the IDF from preparing properly for the Egyptian and the Syrian attack? This is a second question, and we are discussing a lot in Israel how it happened to us.
So we have to understand that the events of October 1973 inevitably led to investigations in Israel and the preoccupation with the question in Israel, how did this happen to us? The story focused on the military aspect, which is understood that it was a failure of intelligence. This is how the war experience was felt, we were there. That is where the stories came from, the dramas, the tragedies, the picture of dealing with fighting is important for the battle heritage, for memorialization, for nostalgia, even for therapy. And we understand it now much, much more. But not for history. The explanations are developed based on the military aspect.
It was a failure of intelligence, but the failure of the intelligence during the days and preceding the war is not in doubt. So it was convenient to present this explanation for Israeli conduct in the days and hours leading to up to the war. But that interpretation lacks a strong factual basis. Historical research can only be conducted decades after the event. This is what happened to my book only 40 years after the events. Documentation and discussion have eliminated this argument regarding the intelligence. Golda and Dayan preferred to wait for a war, although they knew months, months in advance that in contrast to 1967, and we all remember what happened in 67, a political demand [from the Americans] prevented the IDF from using the advantage of initiating the war. And we understand very well what it means. And the Army would be forced to respond to an attack by Egyptian and Syrian military forces, limited by its inability to prepare in advance. Because of this constraint, the chief of staff in Israel, Elazar, prepared plans for war already in May, in May, not in October. In May, when he presented this plan to Golda and Dayan, he said, “I am operating on the assumption that we cannot open with a preemptive attack.” We can see later, if you want, why it was like that. And regarding mobilization of reserves, he said, we do not want, nor do we propose, to mobilize the reserves on a large scale or do anything else that might lead into war. Prevention of preparation for attack and reserve call up were a political demand. It had been agreed to many months before the war and remained in place during the hours before war broke out. This demand eliminated the advantage of preemptive strike and the main reason that the success of ’67 was not repeated in ’73. In 1967, remember, Eshkol, the Prime Minister created the political conditions that enabled the IDF to act preemptively, dictating the conditions and acting in surprise. This is what happened in June 67. In 1973, Golda and Dayan dictated a political demand to the IDF, which forced the army to lose the preemptive advantage and even prevented the army from calling up the reserves to the necessary extent. This demand, which eliminated the advantage of a preemptive strike, was the main reason that the success 67 did not happen again.
The conduct of Golda and Dayan in the months, days and hours leading up to a war was based on a set of considerations that did not depend on the intelligence assessment. Each of them stood on its own and strengthened the others. The first one, Golda’s commitment in December 1971 to Kissinger “to wait more than two hours”. And it’s this commitment that affected the situation in October 73. The second point is the political conditions and assessment of the low probability of a war due to political considerations that Egypt doesn’t have an interest to have a war now because she will wait for the negotiations very, very soon. So this is the main thing. I will emphasize one more, the third one, the internal political consideration, election time. So now we don’t want to negotiate, for example, or we don’t want to show any concern about the security situation, because Kissinger will leverage it to a negotiation. So it’s better to calm the situation. These are the main political reasons.
Helena Cobban (00:33:47):
Okay. Well, thank you for that explanation of the unpreparedness issue. So I just note here that in the movie about Golda, it’s very unsatisfactory the way this issue is discussed, and none of the political background that you have just presented is present in the movie at all. So the movie is not a historical work in any real sense. I just wanted, on the early warning matter, to note that in your book from 2013 you have a whole section about this character, Ashraf Marwan, who was the son-in-law of Egypt’s historical leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Ashraf Marwan was a businessman in London who approached the Israeli embassy and offered to be a high-level intelligence source. And although the Israeli intelligence was initially very skeptical, he proved himself very accurate and helpful.
And he had actually given some advanced warning about the outbreak of the war on October 6th, although he gave the wrong timing. And it just came two days before, I think on October 4th, he told his handler that there would be an attack on October 6th, but it would be in the late afternoon. So it was a little bit misleading. And I know in Israel there’s been a lot of discussion as to whether Ashraf Marwan was a reliable intelligence source for the Israelis, or whether he was playing a double game. And that’s a very interesting part of your book that I urge people to look at. And you’ve told me that we might know more about Ashraf Marwan sometime soon, but not right now. I wanted to put in another little plug for the book there. Yigal, what are the main new things that you and other Israeli historians have discovered since this book came out 10 years ago? Just briefly.
Yigal Kipnis (00:36:33):
Yes, I will put it together with your last sentences regarding Marwan. It’ll come together, because , as you said, there is a lot of discussion in Israel, and I would like to say there will be a lot of discussion in Israel because very soon I think we will know more. There are a lot of doubts still regarding Ashraf Marwan. So regarding your question I will put it together. One of the documents, Bill, I am quite sure you would like to know about is a document which indicated that even before February 1973, via the British and Ashraf Marwan, Kissinger presented a line of action to Sadat that would open negotiation between Israel and Egypt. And you understand what it means. It was in January before the two days of the meeting of Hafiz Ismail and Kissinger.
And the document lets us understand that the condition of Kissinger was an end to the state of freeze, a partial agreement that would enable the opening of the Suez Canal to ship traffic, after that negotiation for a permanent agreement upon borders. And the last one, the problems of Gaza, the Golan and Jerusalem would not be discussed. This would be the basis to start negotiation at the end of February with a direct communication between Sadat and Kissinger. So this is a new document I found a few months ago, and you cannot find it in my new [Hebrew] edition. So you understand it is new for me. I think it’s new for the researcher too. And it says something regarding Ashraf Marwan, because Marwan was the advisor of Sadat. But if he was an agent of Israel, then Israel should have known about this document.
And another document records a conversation between the British foreign secretary, Sir Alex Douglas-Home, and Dr. Kissinger, May 10, 1973. And the first sentence says, Douglas-Home opened and said that it was very difficult to see any answer to the Middle East problem. There had recently been a tough message from Marwan [to Douglas-Home] to the effect that President Sadat would initiate some attack before long. What did it mean? The questions are why, one, did Marwan tell Douglas-Home that they are going to attack? And did Marwan talk on behalf of Sadat or as a British agent. One option is that Sadat knew Marwan worked not only for Israel, but for the others as well. Maybe I’ll mention one other document. Mohammed Heykal who was very, very close to Sadat, published in Al-Ahram December 7, 1973, a few weeks after the war, that according to the preliminary program, the war was supposed to break out in the evening, but it was brought forward by the army, by the army high command, because on the evening of October 4, Israel had received information about the zero hour. So again, two questions must be asked regarding Marwan. How could Heykal have known two months after the war, and years before Marwan’s story leaked out to the media, that on October 4, Israel had actually received a warning, as we now know happened, about the outbreak of the war. And the other question, the zero hour was changed in October. So we know the Egyptian minister went to Damascus, and they decided about the zero hour. If Heykal’s explanation is accurate, how did the Egyptians know in advance that the Israelis had received information about the outbreak of the war? So, as you can see, 50 years later and still many unanswered questions.
Helena Cobban (00:42:03):
So Yigal, you said you had some questions you wanted to ask Bill about some of these matters.
Yigal Kipnis (00:42:13):
I would like to do it and I prepared some questions. Bill, you as a member of the National Security Council staff at that time, I would appreciate if you could clarify the following: How did Kissinger see the sincerity of Sadat’s peace initiative? Because in Israel, a lot of people said Sadat didn’t want peace. We don’t believe it. Even now.
William Quandt (00:43:13):
You know, Kissinger had never engaged seriously in Middle Eastern affairs until 1973. He had never traveled to the Middle East. He had not met many Arab diplomats or leaders. So 1973 was the beginning of his engagement diplomatically with Middle East issues and with Middle Easterners. I think he was fairly impressed after his meetings with Hafiz Ismail about his professionalism, his degree of seriousness. But of course, Ismail was not a decision maker. So a lot of the questions that Kissinger would put to him, he could not answer. He could say, I’ll report back to President Sadat and so forth.
Kissinger tended to have a fairly low opinion, I think, of Sadat. He didn’t take him seriously until actually after the war when he first met him. And I think in his own memoirs, he says, “I had totally misjudged Sadat”. Kissinger thought he was a lightweight. He didn’t think strategically. He acted emotionally. He didn’t show flexibility. And the moment that he actually met Sadat, he realized that he was wrong on all counts. Actually, Sadat had a lot of broad judgments that were quite shrewd. He wasn’t an intellectual, but he had put together a pretty clear set of ideas about changes going on in the Middle East that he had to react to. And in terms of tactics, he was very flexible, more than most political leaders would prove to be. He was absolutely unyielding on one issue, and that was sovereignty over Sinai; almost everything else he was prepared to be flexible on. So I think Kissinger, until literally after the October war, misread Sadat quite seriously.
I remember on the first day of the war when Kissinger returned to Washington and convened the first meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, WSAG, which I attended, and that was the first time I saw Kissinger that day. He came into the room, and he was angry. He said, something like “Why did the Egyptians do this? I had told them we would start negotiations in November. We had discussed this, they obviously didn’t take me seriously, and they’re going to ruin everything because the Israelis will be on the outskirts of Cairo within a day or two, and this is going to be a real mess. It’s going to damage detente with the Russians.” He was really genuinely very angry that his plan had been disrupted by the war.
Now, the next day, through this back channel, Sadat sent a message and said something like this — I remember it pretty clearly, because it was a remarkable message. Sadat said, just to Kissinger and Nixon, “I know that during the war, we are going to be on opposite sides. That’s inevitable given your relationship with Israel. But I want you to know why I did this. I tried every other means to call your attention to the impossibility of our continuing with the stalemate, and you paid no attention to my sense of urgency and the need to break the stalemate. So the war is to break the stalemate, not to destroy Israel. You’ll notice we are not going to be attacking Israel. We are going to fight over our own territory,” — as Helena mentioned earlier, — “and when the war is over, and I hope it will be soon, we want to work with you” –that is Nixon and Kissinger — “to solve this problem once and for all.”
That came on the second or third day. And I think at that point, Kissinger said something like, “maybe I’ve underestimated Sadat.” And I think he had, and the war was a kind of learning process almost day-by-day. Is this essentially a politically motivated war? Or are the Egyptians overplaying their hand? Of course, Nixon, who normally would have brought some balance into Kissinger’s deliberations, was losing political credibility almost day by day. The Watergate crisis was upon him. So Kissinger had no counterweight within the American government to say, well, have you thought that it might be better to interpret it this way?
You know, Nixon had views on foreign policy that were often fairly shrewd, including his belief that the war was going to happen if nothing was done diplomatically. But Nixon was absent. This was Kissinger’s crisis from beginning to end. And for him, it was a real learning experience.
There was just one last thing I’ll say. At the end of his meeting with Hafiz Ismail outside of Paris in May of 1973, I think Hafiz Ismail was rather depressed and told his American handler there, at the end of the meeting, I don’t think I persuaded Kissinger about the urgency that we feel, and I’m afraid this is going to end badly. And he said, I’ve invited Kissinger to come to Cairo now, like right now, and meet Sadat because I think that would make a difference if he actually saw him. And he turned me down. He said, that will come later in the year, but it’s not convenient now.
And I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he said, yes, that’s a good idea. I’ll take 24 hours, go to Cairo, talk to Sadat directly, and see if there’s some way that we can get through the next few months without a crisis. But he didn’t, it never occurred to him. And I think that was again a missed opportunity. The Egyptians knew that time was running out, that they were beginning to make the war plans concrete. They had already talked to the Syrians, they talked to the Saudis. They were beginning to get their act together. And I think by the fall, Sadat had given up on diplomacy.
Yigal Kipnis (00:50:23):
Yes. So we used to say that it is a Golda failure of political analysis. But let me ask you directly, it is also a Kissinger failure as I understand, because a lot of people ask why he did not press Israel before October 1973, to start a negotiation. But I would like to go on with this point, we all know now that Kissinger often compliments President Sadat, even today. And can you tell me more about the first meeting between Kissinger and Sadat? I think Kissinger by himself said it was the most, one of the most important meetings that he had in his life.
William Quandt (00:51:15):
Yes, in his memoirs, he says that. Unfortunately, there is no record of that meeting because nobody other than Kissinger and Sadat were in the room, and no one took notes. Kissinger sometimes would keep his own notes. And I suppose those may exist, but there is no record in the American archives of that meeting. So we have Sadat’s account in his memoir. We have Kissinger’s account, but that’s all we have. But I think it was a significant meeting.,
Helena Cobban (00:51:52):
When did this meeting occur?
William Quandt (00:51:54):
I think it was November 4th or 5th.
Yigal Kipnis (00:51:58):
Beginning of November.
Helena Cobban (00:52:00):
So Kissinger had gone to Cairo at that time.
William Quandt (00:52:03):
He went to Cairo. Yes, and they met, I think, at Aswan. And it was transformative. I mean, all of a sudden Kissinger became a great advocate of Sadat, the peacemaker. But that is simply based on what he describes as a very interesting and far-reaching discussion they had. Kissinger expected that they would get into haggling about when do the Israelis go back to the October 22nd ceasefire line and this and that. And everybody had prepared him for how to deal with that. Instead, Sadat said, let’s talk about the big issues in the world and your relations with China and the Soviet Union, and changing balances of power and all the rest. And they had that kind of a discussion within which Kissinger says, we could do this one of two ways. We could either talk about the immediate issues on the ground, of the October 22nd lines, on how to deal with that, or we can simply say, let’s just stabilize that and aim for a larger agreement, but it may take a little bit longer to get it done. And Sadat said, the bigger step, even if it takes longer, is the one we should do. So Kissinger thought that’s a sign of statesmanship. He’s not as impatient as I expected, and he is not quibbling over little things. He’s talking about big steps.
So I think it was an important meeting, but we have no record of it.
Helena Cobban (00:53:49):
Fascinating. So I I’m afraid we’re going to have to start to wrap up now. Before we do that, I just would like to ask each of you to give a, a broad but concise picture of what was the impact of the war, Yigal on Israeli society and politics. And then I’ll ask Bill, what It was on American society, politics and detente with the Soviet Union.
Yigal Kipnis (00:54:31):
Okay. A few years later, we have a peace agreement with Egypt. So I think this is the main issue that we can trace to the events of ’73. The Israeli society was prepared for a peace. There are a lot of effects. We are now in the same atmosphere of as it was 50 years ago. I understand it, but the main issue that we have a peace agreement with Egypt, I think this is the most important.
Helena Cobban (00:55:17):
Well, that’s true. But also at the same time the, the people who made the peace, the government, the Israeli government that made the peace with Egypt in 1978-79 was a different government. It was no longer the Labor government. So you had also the shift from Labor’s hegemony over Israeli governance from 1948 until 1977. But since then Labor has been in retreat. How did the war impact that process?
Yigal Kipnis (00:56:05):
You know, one of the effects of the war is we lost trust in our leaders. It happened for us then, as you know, it came again in 1982, And so, and I think since then, we don’t trust our leader. Now, there is no leadership in Israel, and I think in most of the countries of the Western world. But for us in Israel, we lost the trust with the leaders then, in 1982, and later on.
Helena Cobban (00:56:50):
Thank you. That’s important to know.
So Bill what was the impact of the war, in brief, on American politics, but also on US Soviet detente?
William Quandt (00:57:03):
Well, one of the parts of the war that we haven’t talked about — and it perhaps explains why Sadat wanted the war to go on a bit longer than was perhaps necessary — is that toward the latter part of the war, the Arab oil producers, led by Saudi Arabia, announced that they would stop shipments of oil to certain countries, and then began a policy of cutting oil production month by month as pressure on the United States to accelerate its diplomacy to bring about a settlement and a return of Arab territories.
The oil weapon had never effectively been used by the Arabs before. And it had an immediate impact on ordinary Americans because the price of gasoline in the latter part of 1973 quadrupled, it went from 25 cents a gallon to a dollar, which doesn’t sound like much today, but in those days, it was a lot. And if you went with your car to get it filled up with gas, you had to wait for five hours in a line. Now that meant that for ordinary Americans, who probably couldn’t find half the countries in the Middle East on a map, the Middle East crisis was affecting their daily lives and the global economy. So that is one thing, and that has actually not changed. The shift of power toward a few very rich Arab and Middle Eastern oil producers has been a feature of international politics since 1973 in a way that it wasn’t before 1973.
The second long enduring effect on was that the detente policy that Nixon had genuinely believed in — Kissinger less so — began to come apart, especially in the very last days of the October War when the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to a confrontation. And that dramatic but brief and, fortunately, not ultimately militarized moment left a very strong impact on American foreign policy elites. If this is what detente permitted, a near Cuban missile crisis type of confrontation, what’s the use of it? And so detente as a policy goal went out of fashion, even though by the late 1980s, it was actually very much part of Reagan’s and the first President Bush’s repertoire in winding down the longstanding Cold War as the Soviet Union was coming apart. It was done in a context of political engagement and mutual attempts to reduce the risks of war.
But detente for the remainder of the 1970s and early 1980s was discredited and it strengthened a very different point of view during that period. So that was a second point.
And then of course, the war set the stage for Kissinger to engage not only with Egypt, but over the next several years with other Arab leaders, including Assad and of course King Hussein, and the Saudis in a way that was really quite remarkable, because given his background, you wouldn’t expect him to get along terribly well with many of these leaders. But he ended up being, after all of his biases and prejudices and misunderstandings of the Arab world, quite successful in negotiating with Assad and with Sadat, less so with the Saudis. The Saudis just didn’t really want to get very involved.
And of course, he had a blind spot on the Palestinians. He thought that Jordan could substitute for the Palestinians, and he never really got over that blind spot. He knew intellectually that there was a Palestinian issue, but he was not the one who was able to intellectually say something politically has to be done to address this. It’s not just a matter of fitting them in behind a Jordanian initiative. So Kissinger had his limitations, but his role in the next two or three years, 1974-75 — he deserves criticism for not preventing the war itself in 1973, but I think he deserves credit for getting a diplomatic effort started, perhaps a bit more gradualist and slower than necessary, but still with impressive first steps. And it was a process that definitely was built on by Jimmy Carter in 1977. There was no sharp departure in terms of the procedures, although the goal was to try to achieve a more comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, which I think Kissinger didn’t believe was possible.
So, there is a kind of continuity in the American-led peace efforts at least from 1973 to ’79, and briefly again in the early 1990s, that looked like they held some promise. Today, I think it’s in shambles. And so there’s not much enduring legacy except for the durability of the Egyptian-Israeli peace, which is the one part that has survived.
Helena Cobban (01:02:48):
So I really want to thank both of you for this incredibly rich discussion. I know Yigal, you are very busy. It’s Yom Kippur there in Israel today. So it’s really the anniversary of the war for you, for us here in the United States we’ll be having the anniversary of the war on October 6th. But it was a very important event that happened 50 years ago, and I’m just really delighted to have two such excellent historians here to try to explain some of the nuances that went on. Thank you very much indeed.