A (18:15)
Back in Haifa, Elisa Ira went to the famous Beetzeffer Reali, a school in the German Realschule tradition, a place to get real knowledge, meaning math and science and modern languages, stuff you can use. It was a revolt against the classical education of the gymnasium. And Elie Zaire excelled at school. But he was a child of his time and he would soon leave all that behind. And when he was 18, in 1946, he joined the Palmach, literally the strike force companies, one of the militias Jews put together. As the idea that a Jewish state might take shape came to seem more realistic. And the idea that Jews in Palestine needed to protect themselves and whatever state might come came to seem more pressing. And Elie Zaire moved forward fast becoming a platoon commander and then a company commander in the War of Independence. And when that war was over, he was the first IDF officer sent to the United States Army Command and General Staff College. At least I think that that is where he studied with the US Army. And then his career in the IDF was off and running, though he did manage on the side to a degree from the Hebrew University in Economics and Statistics. Very reali. Still, his rise in the army looked like this. 1949-1950 Commander of the Non Commissioned Officer School in the Southern Command, 1952 Instructor at the Battalion Commander School, 1953-1954 Department head in the Planning Department of the General Staff, 1954-1955 First Advisor and Chief Aide to Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Dayan, 1956 commander of the 1st Breakthrough Battalion of the Givati Brigade, 1956 to 1957 head of the Operations Branch in the Operations Directorate, 1960 to 1962 commander of the Paratroopers Brigade, 1962 to 1963 head of the Operations Department and the Operations Directorate, 1963 to 1968 head of the Intelligence Collection in the Intelligence Directorate, 1968 to 1970 assistant head of the Intelligence Directorate, 1970 to 1972 IDF military attache in Washington, 1972 to 1974 head of the Intelligence Directorate of the IDF Zaire's promotions from job to job made his the very model of a successful military career. Moshe Dayan went in time from being IDF Chief of Staff to being Minister of Defense, a legend after the Six Day War. And he was Elie Zaire's friend and patron. And after Elie Zaira became the head of IDF Intelligence, few doubted that he would next be appointed as IDF Chief of Staff, an appointment Moshe Dayan would make. Why this did not happen was the Yom Kippur War. Or, depending on how you look at it, what came right after the Yom Kippur War. The Yom Kippur war lasted for 19 days altogether, from October 6 to October 25, 1973. And in those 19 days, 2,691 Israeli soldiers died, many of them right at the beginning, when the standing forces at the border with Egypt in the south and with Syria in the north were overwhelmed and overrun. There'd never been anything like it before or since until October 7th, two years ago. And things would have been different if the reserves had been called up before the attacks. But they weren't. And part of the reason they weren't, though there is no agreement about exactly how big a part was that Elie Zaire, in his capacity as the Head of Army Intelligence, had told Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Arendt and many other members of the Cabinet as late as the morning of Erev Yom Kippur the day before that no attack was coming, at least not soon. This was his professional opinion. And his professional opinion was tragically wrong. Just how Elie Zaira, who was a brilliant and altogether serious man, came to hold his tragically wrong opinion can be explained, at least in part, like this. For one thing, Elie Zaira knew, he just knew that it made no sense for the Egyptians and Syrians to attack. He said as much to the Cabinet on May 24, 1973, four and a half months before the Egyptians and Syrians did what Elie Zaire knew would make no sense for them to do. He said, as long as logic, even with the limitations of it being Arab logic, has any purchase for them. I think that the Arabs, at least in the coming years, do not maintain that they can beat Israel. And when they talk about opening fire, they do not mean conquering Sinai or vanquishing Israel, but rather just creating a situation in which the world has no choice but to address the issue politically. End quote. This idea that the Egyptians and the Syrians did not have the planes and rockets and troops and talent and guts to beat Israel, but they did have the common sense, albeit limited Arab common sense, to know that because of all they lacked, it would be a mistake to attack Israel. This idea became known after the war as ha conceptzia, the conception. And it led Elie Zaire to misinterpret things his people saw and otherwise should have seen as evidence that war was coming. Among the sorts of evidence that Ali Zaira did not give proper weight to was the fact that both the Egyptian and Syrian armies were deployed, beefed up on the border. Other evidence was that on October 4th and 5th, 1973, two days and one day before the war, the families of Russian military advisors in Cairo and Damascus were making a rushed, alarmed exit on planes, landing one after another from Odessa and then going back to Odessa or Moscow. Another piece of evidence was the fact that Ashraf Marwan, a son in law of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the close advisor of the then current Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Ashraf Marwan, who was spying for Israel, warned that war was coming and soon. But Eli Zaira got it in his head that Ashraf Marwan was flat out wrong. Thirty years later, Zaira claimed that Marwan had been a double agent, though historians say there's nothing to this. More evidence that Elie Zaira underestimated or misunderstood was the warning that King Hussein of Jordan flew by helicopter to Mossad headquarters near Gilot Junction to deliver directly to Prime Minister Golda Meir that an attack was coming from both Syria and Egypt, which warning Eliezer Ira interpreted as something more about politics that King Hussein was pursuing than about the possibility of an actual war. And it was not just about interpreting evidence to fit the view that Eli Zaire already had of Israel's then enemies. Eli Zaire, brilliant as he was, also wore down the people who worked under him, pressing them in a way to go along in order to get along. One of his high up intelligence officers told the journalist later that every meeting with him was a test of the professional he was meeting with. He would say, what you are telling me, do you know it or do you just think it? End quote. And when you think hard about what you think you know, you always come to think that what you think you know, you only think you know, you never know that you know it. Elie Zaire always said, I do not want your opinions, I just want facts, just facts. Among some of the officers working under him, there was a feeling that he was arrogant and cutting in a way that made it almost impossible to share hunches. And it turns out that in good intelligence work there is place for hunches. Avraham Digley, his nickname was Digley, who was the head of the Amman IDF Intelligence Research Department's Egypt desk in 1973, told how he called Eliza Iran the intercom on October 2nd or 3rd, a few days before the war, and asked if he, Eliezaira, had seen the two reports just in. One from the Southern Command saying that the Egyptians were moving heavy arms to the border, and one from the Northern Command saying that the Syrians were throwing back the coverings from their artillery. Elie Zaire said he had seen the reports and Digley said, maybe those two reports are connected. And Eliezer Ira's answer was, Digley, you collect data, do not do research for me. Digley fell silent, and that was the end of the matter. When the war broke out, barely a day after, Elie Zaira told Golda Meir and her cabinet that the likelihood of war was extremely low, an evaluation he repeated on the next day too, maybe two hours before the Egyptians and Syrians started shelling and flying sorties. Elie Zaire was straightaway sidelined after the war began, taken out of the loop. After the war, when protests started, a national committee of inquiry was set up, headed by the Chief justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Vauborn, Shlomo Agranath. Interviewing dozens of witnesses in 140 sessions held over four months and a week. The commission put out an interim report on April 1, 1974, finding that of the Very many people who ought to have done better anticipating and fighting the war. There was only one man who had so much responsibility and guilt for what happened that the committee recommended he be removed from his position immediately. And that man obviously was Eliza Ira. The commission found that the head of military intelligence failed to give sufficient warning to the IDF on the matter of the start of the war and likewise failed in their prediction and evaluation of the time the battles would begin. Their stubborn adherence to what they call the conception which may have been accurate for a time but was not re evaluated properly in light of changing diplomatic circumstances and especially in light of additional information that IDF intelligence received about the strengthening of the enemy, which disproved the conception. The head of IDF intelligence promised the IDF warning about the intentions of the enemy to open a full scale war. We find that there was no basis to give so absolute a promise as that the head of IDF intelligence wrongly evaluated the warning indications that were supplied in the days leading up to Yom Kippur by the research arm of IDF intelligence. Even when it received notice on 5 October, which was hard to fit into the conception, the conclusion of IDF intelligence remained that there was a low chance and even lower than low chance that the enemy will start a war. The head of IDF intelligence was revealed to us to be an officer of marked intellectual ability, with great authority, who was well respected by those to whom he reported both in the army and high level diplomats. He served in his position for only a year before the war broke out and found before him patterns of thought that were set in place in IDF intelligence before he occupied the position. But he adopted the conception that in its rigidity killed off the openness needed and the willingness to consider anew the information that flowed into IDF intelligence. Especially salient for us was the commander's tendency toward dogmatic decisiveness, which was a product of his great self confidence and his willingness to make himself final arbiter in matters of state intelligence. Our opinion is in light of his severe failure, General Zaira cannot continue in his post. End quote. That interim report came out on April 1, 1974. Eli Zaire submitted his resignation on April 5, 1974. The report of the Agronat commission infuriated Eliezer Ira. He agreed that there was a conception and that it blinkered him like it had blinkered so many others. And he saw why people thought he ought to resign. But what the Agrenat committee did, he thought was whitewash all the bad decisions the ministers made and all the damage those decisions had caused, shifting all the Blame from the politicians to the generals and especially to him. Elie Zaire was shocked to learn that Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan hid from Shlomo Agranath and his committee how King Hussein had come to warn them personally. He was shocked that the committee ignored the fact that Henry Kissinger had told Golda Meir that Anwar Sadat said flat out, negotiate the return of Sinai to me in exchange for peace or I will launch a war to get Sinai back. And that Golda Meir had told Kissinger that she could not enter negotiations with Anwar Sadat until she and the Labour Party were safely reelected in elections scheduled for October. Eliezer was shocked that the Agronat committee seemed to ignore the evidence that Moshe Dayan had concluded days before the war that that war was about to come. But he did not call up the reserves because he thought that America would be quicker to send Israel boatloads of weapons if it was attacked. And seemingly surprised Eliezer Ira said, Dayan.
