The cluster of extinct volcanoes known as Mount Hermon actually encompasses three mountain peaks, not one: they sit on the border between Lebanon and Syria, as well as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Today, other than the wind, the summits are quiet. The air feels thin and the sunlight diluted; the vast slopes roll away into hazy views of three countries long roiled by war and internal strife.
On the Israeli side of Mount Hermon there is now a ski resort. But in 1973, when 20-year-old Nir Atir was stationed in the southern Golan, the view was very different. The tank platoon sergeant knew that the situation on the ceasefire line agreed six years before was tense, and that the Syrian army might attack. Like the rest of the country, however, he did not expect a full-blown war on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
The events of those bloody 19 days, after the launch of a joint surprise offensive by Syrian forces in the Golan and Egyptian forces in the Sinai peninsula, changed Israel, the region, the trajectory of the cold war, and caused a global oil crisis. The reverberations of the Yom Kippur war, or Ramadan war as it is known in Arabic, are still felt today.
“We were 12 men and three tanks, and in the valley below, there were three Syrian brigades, with 177 tanks,” the veteran said. “The way it turned out, after the attack began, we were the only thing stopping the Syrians from entering the Galilee and the Jordan Valley, to my home, my family.
“The next two days were hell. We lost many brothers, we ran out of ammunition. At one point the enemy was just 350 metres away; I could see the whites of their eyes. We decided we would rather die sitting on a grenade, taking some of them with us, than become prisoners of war. We had no choice … otherwise Israel would have been destroyed.”
Egypt, under the military regime of Anwar Sadat, and Syria, ruled by the Ba’athist autocrat Hafez al-Assad, led a coalition of Arab states in the surprise Yom Kippur offensive, an attempt to undo the Israeli victories of the six-day war in 1967. In that preemptive Israeli attack six years earlier, the young Jewish state surprised itself and the rest of the world by seizing Syria’s Golan Heights, the Egyptian-controlled Sinai peninsula and Gaza Strip, and taking Palestinian East Jerusalem and the West Bank away from Jordan.
The result was a doubling of the territory under Israeli control, an abject humiliation for the Arab world’s armies, and a sense of hubris and complacency among the Israeli security establishment and public. After three rounds of fighting with the surrounding Arab nations in the 25 years since Israel’s birth in 1948, when it rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel appeared to have finally subdued its hostile neighbours. For the first time in millennia, the future of the Jewish people seemed secure.
“After the six-day war Israel was in a state of euphoria. It was a tremendous triumph,” said Dudi Banith, a paratrooper who had finished his military service a few months before the war broke out, and was then called to the Sinai front.
“We felt we were heroes; the fighting went just as we planned, as we were trained, and as we believed it would. Then in 1973 we faced an existential threat and it was a total surprise,” the 72-year-old said. “I don’t have words to describe the feeling that everything could collapse, and you may not have a home to go back to from the battlefield.”
At exactly 2pm on 6 October – that year, the date of Yom Kippur, a day of atonement and fasting – Egypt and Syria simultaneously crossed their respective ceasefire lines with Israel. In the south, Sadat sent five divisions totalling 100,000 soldiers and 1,350 tanks over the Suez canal. In the north, for about an hour, 100 Syrian MiGs launched airstrikes while 600 artillery pieces battered the entire Israeli-occupied Golan, including civilian homes and infrastructure. A battalion of Syrian paratroopers set foot on the Israeli side of Mount Hermon about three hours later, seizing the important Israel Defence Forces (IDF) observation post there.
Israel’s troops were vastly outnumbered on both fronts, and woefully underprepared. But after three days of intense fighting, the Egyptian offensive ground to a stalemate, and in the Golan, the Israelis were able to drive Syria back and then counterattack, pushing deep enough into Syrian territory that the IDF could shell the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. Eventually, the Israeli army also came within 60 miles of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, ratcheting up tensions between the Soviet Union and the US. After two-and-a-half weeks, a second attempt at a UN-brokered ceasefire held, and disengagement talks followed in 1974. The Arab oil embargo also lasted until March the next year.
The Middle East was never the same again. Self-satisfied with its initial military performance, Egypt was able to come to the table for talks that resulted in the Israelis leaving the Sinai peninsula as part of the first Arab peace deal with Israel, finalised in 1979. Though deeply unpopular with the Arab street, establishing relations with the Jewish state nonetheless signalled the beginning of Egypt’s drift away from Moscow, and paved the way for Israel’s 1990s peace deal with Jordan, and today’s Abraham accords.
In Israel, the trauma of the Yom Kippur war transformed the political landscape. The prime minister, Golda Meir, resigned, along with her entire cabinet. The social-democratic Labor party that had governed Israel until then has been in decline ever since, although having taken on board the sobering lesson that Israel cannot solely rely on military superiority, her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, began the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“The understanding of how to ensure Israeli security changed after 1973, and there are still parallels with the current situation,” said Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former Palestinian peace negotiator.
“In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, no matter how hard they try, the Israelis are never going to be able to dish out a lasting military defeat. So the question becomes: at what point are they going to wake up and see ending the occupation is necessary? Settlements in the Sinai were dismantled and removed. It can be done.”
The Golan Heights is still considered occupied Syrian territory under international law, but it was fully annexed in 1981, and the majority Druze population offered Israeli citizenship. Today the region is a strange amalgam of war memorials, abandoned Syrian army positions, ancient temples and castles, and organic farms and vineyards.
This weekend, the area was thronged with tourists celebrating the Jewish high holidays; families enjoyed the autumn weather by apple picking, pony trekking and hiking through the green hills and pine and poplar forests.
“I feel like Israel now is a very different country to 1973. I don’t feel the same level of fear or disaster the way my grandparents did … Maybe Iran is the threat for my generation,” said Ofir Yaffe, 20. The student was visiting a former Syrian military base on Mount Bental that witnessed an important battle in the Yom Kippur war, and now serves as a museum.
For many veterans of the Yom Kippur war, the biggest threat to Israel’s future is now seen as internal, in the form of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. The huge protest movement opposed to the changes includes tens of thousands of IDF veterans and reservists, who say Netanyahu and his new far-right coalition partners are intent on turning Israel into a theological autocracy. Israel’s army chiefs have repeatedly warned that the domestic crisis is affecting operational readiness.
“I never thought something like this could happen, but now it has, all us veterans of ’73 understand we have been called again to defend our nation,” said Atir, the tank platoon sergeant who fought and survived in the Golan against the odds.
“When we went out then, we knew why, and for whom, we were fighting. Nowadays I feel the same. I am fighting for freedom and the future of my country.”
