On the morning of Yom Kippur, or the Jewish Day of Atonement, October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a massive armor attack across highly defended cease-fire lines in the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. It was the start of the fifth and, to date, last war between Israel and the two most formidable Arab “frontline” states. It turns out that the two architects of the October surprise, Egypt’s Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, had conflicting objectives that contributed to a reversal of fortune on the battlefield following their surprising initial success. Assad sought the reconquest of territories he lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, and he thought that Sadat did too. Their victory would alter the strategic balance such that the Israelis would be forced to address Palestinian demands for a state of their own in the occupied West Bank.¹ Sadat, knowing that conquest was out of the question, had hoped instead to compel Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to accept his previously spurned offers of a negotiated settlement, as he secretly informed Richard Nixon’s administration.

The Israelis suffered significant losses on both fronts in the first days, before mounting successful counterattacks in the southern Golan, where they were soon advancing on Damascus, and in the Sinai, where they managed to cross the Suez Canal and threaten Cairo. They were able to do so not only because the Egyptians had fed their Syrian allies a false war plan but also due to the Nixon administration’s rapid resupply of the Israel Defense Forces, which began after Nixon learned that the “poor dumb Egyptians,” as he described them, had not crumbled over the weekend of fighting but had instead destroyed five hundred Israeli tanks and dozens of its advanced fighters. The administration wanted to keep the assistance a secret, first using unmarked Israeli commercial planes, because if news got out it would both lead the Soviet Union to rearm its two allies and “drive the Arabs wild.”²

The subterfuge didn’t work. The Russians, who had feared the consequences of a war and were pushing for an early cease-fire, began resupplying Syrian and Egyptian forces, hoping to stave off a humiliating defeat of, and a loss of influence over, their own clients. On October 17, Saudi Arabia and other (but not all) Arab oil producers announced a 5 percent cutback in production to apply pressure on Western consumer countries and, a few days later, an embargo on the United States as well as Portugal and the Netherlands, the only two European countries that had permitted the Americans access to their facilities as part of the resupply effort. On October 20, the Nixon administration’s celebrity secretary of state Henry Kissinger — who had successfully pursued détente with the Soviet Union, arranged the opening with China, and just won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Paris accords that ostensibly ended the Vietnam War — flew to Moscow to meet Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and hash out the terms of a cease-fire.³