Yom Kippur War and More

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hampson Show. This is the weekend edition and we're going to look this weekend at the Yom Kippur War and Israel and the relations with the Arab states.

But first let's listen to some messages and be right back to talk to Victor Davis-Hansen.

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Welcome back, Victor.

Let me remind everybody that you are the Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You also have a website, The Blade of Perseus. It's at www.victorhanson.com.

And it has VDH ultra material on it that is exclusive to the website and that we have subscribers for $5 a month or $50

for an annual subscription. It's a great deal and we welcome everybody to the website.
Victor, what's on your mind these days?

I know that you're going to be in Israel when this plays and you may be even giving a talk on the Yom Kippur war. Initially.
I'm excited about going to Israel.

I mean, for someone that has been COVID, not been able to get out, I did go to the East Coast. That didn't quite help, but I think Israel with a bright sun and the air and I love that country.

So I'm very excited about going. And it's been very hectic because, you know, you have a farm and you have an old house and you have people coming and going that were working on it.

And you have to be gone for 12 to 14 days. And it's, you know, you call the airline, you must have a PCR.
You must have. So, and you want to, you want to reassure people if they hear you had COVID.

So I've taken like eight antigen tests on day 14 to 20.

They're all negative, but I wanted to, even though you don't have to apparently get a PCR as of yesterday to get into Israel, I went up to Fresno and I got a PCR, $300 for

two hours. And guess what?

They said,

nothing. I didn't get anything.
Why pay all that money if you don't hear? So I called, but you know, I called and called and they said, oh,

it was inconclusive.

Well, I think sometimes when they put that swab in your nose, they don't want to poke it in and puncture your sinus. So they just do it at the very, that's not the way to do it.

They said, well, we're so sorry. You'll have to drive the 30-something 40, I don't know, all the way back up.
So I had to go all the way back up today

and do it. And of course, it came out negative.
So at least I can, if they do ask for a PCR, I can say it. But I can tell the people on the tour that I'm leading.
I'm perfectly safe.

The other thing is, I'm in a very strange

mindset. I won't tell people how much I weigh, but I was always 6'1 and, you know, between 200 and 210.
Sometimes,

and I weigh 191 and I lost

11 pounds. Bum!

Wow, I think it's because if you can't, I didn't realize if you can't taste and you can't smell, why eat?

Yeah, and you don't have much of an appetite. Well, I'm just laying around, I'm not doing anything.
I got headaches, and then I thought, well, your immune system is going crazy.

It's saying, Hey, give us some food. We're not killing the virus, we're trying to kill you.
So we need food.

So it's so I have all these clothes I can't wear. And

I

remember I'm four pounds less than when I was married. In fact, four pounds less when I was in college.
Well, let's hope you're healthier too. I will be.
I will be.

Not right now, but I am getting better. Yes.
Okay. All right.
So the Yom Kippur War takes place in 1973 during the same period as we have the OPEC oil crisis.

The United States and the Soviet Union are in a period of detente and so trying to relax tensions between the two superpowers. So it does take place in a world of upheaval.

And so with that, I would like to hear your

views or ideas about the importance or significance of the Yon Kippur War.

Remember, Israel had had this stunning six-day victory in June 6th to 10th of 1967, and they got the entire Sinai, they got the Golden High, Gaza Strip, the West Bank.

They lost about 900 troops. That's tragic, but they completely destroyed a Arab coalition that had triple of the assets and almost triple the number of soldiers.

And they probably killed 15,000 or 10 to 15,000 of the Arabs. And it was just a humiliating defeat.
And it had ripples.

So the United States then thought, you know, as I said in the other podcast, why not? Vietnamese are not fighting, the Israelis are. So we came close to Israel.

And at the same time, after that war was over, King Vaisel Saud and the Saudis said they were going to use oil. And this is a time when 40% of our oil came from the Middle East.

So nobody thought there would be another war for a variety of reasons that you couldn't beat the Israeli army. And they had all this strategic depth now.

So the Arabs were who humiliated, would never try it again. And then in 1970, the father of pan-Arabism, Nasser, died of a heart attack.
He was the architect of the aggression against Israel.

Everybody in the Arab world looked toward Nasser.

And who ever heard of Amwar Sadat?

Kind of a crazy subordinate, you know, nobody really knew who he was. So they thought he had weak leadership.

And there's going to be an oil boycott against against the West. So

everybody in Europe, the United States, was telling Israel, you know, don't provoke the Arabs, you've got to give back this land, et cetera. So it was very unlikely.

And the Egyptian economy was ruined. So, and then what we didn't understand was that I think we were baffled by Watergate.
We were had our eye on other domestic matters. We were,

you know, the whole Nixon trauma of all of basically the latter part of

the whole latter part of 72 and all of 73. It was a mess.
I was living in Greece the time

and when that oil boycott hit after the war was over we were freezing we could not we had no heating oil and we would rat out professor that was the students

we would go and we say that that you know what if i go to hell i deserve it there's i won't mention his name there's a very famous plasticist he was 83

and you were not supposed to turn on electric heaters because they were burning lignites all they had basically down in megalopolis but anyway we couldn't have our fuel oil there was no oil you had to

gas was very hard to get we were so cold and we had all our and we'd go at night and every once in a while we'd look at professors down in their little sub-basements in athen and if we saw that little red glow you know

so one time we saw a professor with it you know he's so cold about two of us said he's cheating Well, he's cheating.

I'm glad he was cheating. But then they went and we all went and said, why does Professor X get to have a heater and we don't?

don't and thank god that the director of the school said because he's old and he's cold you're young and you have enough enough of your own body shut up and don't wrap people out

okay

anyway my point

repercussion

from that war but then the war broke out and nobody thought it would break out because they had strategic depth and they had been so adept at intelligence, the idea, and they completely were surprised.

They had no idea that Anwar Sadat, of all people, would cross the Suez Canal with water cannons and knock down sand walls 60 feet high and send 100,000 troops into the Sinai six years after his air force had been wiped out by the Israelis and had air superiority, given the fact they had some of the most sophisticated SAM missile batteries in the world.

They knocked down these huge walls and the Egyptians sent 100,000 men across the suz canal and they had sophisticated the best weapons they had mi g 21s they had uh t-64 russian tanks and from about

oh the first five days i would say somewhere from the 6th of october to the 8th the israelis were so outmanned they were 10 to 1 in the sinai and they lost planes and they lost tanks and they had over a thousand people killed and there was they didn't really know how to stop it they were completely surprised they were so full of confidence after the 67 and at the same time

the assad dynasty in syria attacked the golem heights and they were outnumbered there 10 to 1 i mean just think of the idea that the syrians had night vision tank capabilities and the Israelis didn't.

They were using floodlights. And

maybe the Centurion tanks were better than the T-64s or not, but they were close. And they had Russian anti-tank weapons that were smart weapons and they had smart SAMs.

And for those first three or four days, when you looked at the balance and the Iraqis sent troops, the Jordanians were pretty funny. They basically said to the Israelis.

You already took the West Bank from us. We're not going to be able to take it back.

But if we don't support these guys, King Hussein speaking, they're going to overthrow the Hasharite dynasty and they're going to get rid of me.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of sort of go into your territory and kind of pile on, but don't get mad about it

and don't blame us. I know people get killed, but we're not really, our heart isn't into it.
So, don't counter-attack and go from the West Bank into Jordan.

And so, I was in Athens at the time, and everybody was just shocked. The Israelis were surprised.
Where is Diane? Where is Sharon? Where are the heroes?

And that initial five days has characterized that war ever since, because what happened was

the vaunted Israeli IDF went into full gear and they called up the reserves. And they had about a half a million people.
And they did what they always do. They came up with innovative ideas.
And

right when they were ready to keep going, we stopped supplying them because

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger said they didn't want to escalate. And then the Soviets did a really stupid thing.
They began seeing that we weren't going to resupply.

They started pouring weapons in. I was sitting out in Hanya,

Crete.

Think about this. The Soviets were flying over NATO airspace

into

Egypt to supply the Egyptians with some of the best weapons in the world. And NATO countries were not allowing the United States to use NATO airspace to supply Israel.

So scared were they about an embargo.

And I watched two American carriers, and they had Phantom jets fly in, and they landed on those carriers, and they were refueled, and they went straight to Israel. And it was all night long.

We were just sitting out in the bay in Hanyao. But my point is that they recovered brilliantly.
And within five days,

Sharon took the initiative. And

when we talk about the Sinai, they never got very far into the Sinai, the Egyptians. And pretty soon they were cut off.
And it was bloody, it was like two or three days like Verdun. It was just Somme.

It was killing. And then the Israelis got air supremacy and they wiped out the sand batteries and they crossed the Suez.

Yeah, onto Egyptian soil, huh? They did, and they went south. They were about 45 miles, 50 miles from Cairo.
I went to Egypt in April of 74, just a few months after this.

And there were Phantom jets all parked in front of the Egyptian Museum, the Hilton Hotel, as trophies.

But people still, still were talking about they were terrified that Sharon was going to come into Cairo. There was nothing to stop him.
Didn't he get almost all the way to Damascus?

No,

not Sharon.

That was the Israeli counteroffensive. So when they went, there was about eight hours when

the last redoubt started to crumble. And after all, the Israelis were outnumbered 10 to 1.

And it looked like the Assyrians were going to break through and go down into the Sea of Galilee and be free to just roam.

You know, the IDF took care of their Air Force and the Israelis counterattack, and they went down and they got to within about 30 miles of Damascus, and they started hitting power plants.

So, my point is, very quickly, in Sinai, the Egyptian Third Army was completely encircled with no source of supply.

And there was nothing that was going to stop Damascus from being leveled or at least taken over. And at that point, the Soviets, you know,

Kissinger cut a deal and they had a ceasefire after

about 21 days. And somewhere around, you know, October 25th, so it was 20 days, 21 days.
And then, you know what happened? It was sort of the resurgence of the Palestinian movement.

And then we had a Cold War of terrorism, et cetera, et cetera, that went on and on. And then nobody knew what this Sadat guy was going to do.

Barbara Walters interviewed him. And guess what?

He

didn't care about what people thought about him. He wanted to...

get back to Sinai for Egypt and get a peace with Israel and get the Russians out of his country. He'd expelled them before the war.

That was another reason everybody said, well, there's not going to be a war because Sadat's stupid. He just expelled the Russians.
They won't supply him and the Saudis will embargo Western oil. And so

then we had the big

young people today wouldn't remember the

gasoline lines. Yeah.
Crazy. And we were begging the Saudis and we were so independent.

And it just seems so crazy why we would ever go back to that, begging Venezuela, begging Iran, begging Putin, begging the Saudis when we were so energy independent.

I don't understand anybody was alive at that period. It was so humiliating.
But my point is that

out of that, Sadat cut a separate deal in September of 1978, I think it was, and they cut a separate deal, and

that's what got him killed eventually. But the Palestinian, but we didn't want that.
I mean, Carter,

If you look at some of the transcripts from the Camp David, those four or five days or whatever it was, he was pressuring Sadat to include the Palestinian issue, even though Sadat was saying it's too thorny, they're too radical.

I'm willing to accept the existence of Israel. They're not.
And I'm not going to kill another 15,000 Egyptians for the honor of the Arab world when they don't die. I die.

Yeah, Victor, can we go ahead and take a break for some messages and then come right back? Because you're stepping into some areas that I have questions about for you.

So we'll be right back after these messages.

Welcome back, Victor. You were just talking about the 1978 Camp David Accords that were hosted by Jimmy Carter, of course, and that Sadat and Menachem Begin,

I think they won the Nobel Prize for Peace, right, for their

negotiations.

But

after all was said and done, was much,

what was accomplished in that? I remember vaguely reading something that it really was. What was accomplished was it was

a brilliant display. Menachem Begin was a former hardcore, some people call him, he was a terrorist, and he was a right-wing, difficult guy, but he was also brilliant and he was quite brave.

And then you had a very charismatic anwar sadat

and american people fell in love with anwar sadat so did jimmy carter and the idea was that

israel had caused they claimed the omkipper war by holding on to these lands yeah and israel said if that were true then we're willing to give up a lot of them if you can just have a graduated recognition

of Israel's existence. And Sadat said, okay.

And then they said, okay, we'll start with you. He said,

they just freaked everybody out. He said, okay, I volunteer to start to get the deal.
You give me back the Sinai and

I will recognize Israel and there won't be a war. We'll have a peace.
And Carter and all of his sophisticated, what? When?

Well, how about the Syrian? You got to give back, you can't do that until you get back the golden arm. He said, well, they're not going to recognize Israel.

Well, how about the Palestinians and the West and God they're not going to recognize I'm not going to wait around the hell freeze is over

we've had two wars with the Israelis and 85% of the dead are Egyptians and the people who suffer is Egypt and we're the center of the Arab world and we're not going to be

you know

we're not going to be fugitive ransomed or hostages by the Palestinians and the Americans didn't want that they kept talking about a holistic agreement yeah so they stopped there and they were able to get this this agreement.

And that was very, that was very much in

the Israelis' favor because they did not have that huge Egyptian army to worry about.

And they really,

I mean, the Sinai has a lot of historical and religious importance for the Israelis, but with a peaceful Egypt, they were able to go into the Sinai, at least until radical Islam came along,

reshaped the Middle East into a, not a pan-Arabic conflict anymore, but a Palestinian conflict.

And it was basically after Camp David, Yasser Arafat said, and his supporters and the Hasad said, anybody who makes a deal with Israel is fair game for terrorists, and we're going to wage terrorism all over the world.

And, but we're not going to ever going to have the wherewithal to mount a conventional, multifaceted, multi-front war as we did in 67 and 73. Because when the truth was known,

yes, Israeli intelligence failed. Yes, there were people like Diane and some others who panicked.
Yes, Gold of Myir could have done better.

But the idea that Israel had a draw, or that was an amazing victory.

They lost 3,000 soldiers, three times what they did in 67, but they fought 20 days.

And they utterly humiliated the enemy. Unlike 67, where both sides, had that war gone on, they would have crushed 100,000 people in Sinai.
And

they would have made Damascus a non-functioning city and maybe Cairo. So it was a incredible victory.
It's never been given the credit that it deserves. And it was, I can say one other thing.

So after it was over, they found both in the Golan Heights and in Egypt. I mean, there was just macabre stories of Israelis being blindfolded, handcuffed, and shot,

found in their underwear stripped.

People who survived as prisoners had their fingernails torn out. They were tortured.
There was all kinds of barbaric anti-Geneva convention programs. Electric shocks to their genitalia.
Absolutely.

They were treated terribly. And nobody really talked about that because of a Palestinian issue.
And since then,

you know, we've had the 2006 war, we had the Arafat war, the Lebanon war, but all of these have been in some way involving the Palestinians, but not Egypt, not Egypt.

Egypt, in fact, if you ask people in the Egyptian government, I mean, the Morsi thing failed, that rigged effort on the part of the Obama administration to get a radical pro-Palestinian Islamist government into Egypt failed.

And pretty much Egypt is saying that we're worried about Egyptians and we're worried

about our economy and they're worried about Iran. And so what I think we're seeing today is

there is an Arab world of the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan, and Egypt, and to a lesser extent, probably Morocco, maybe even Algeria. I don't know what's going on in Libya.
And they are aligned roughly,

they won't admit it, but they are aligned with the United States, or at least they used to be, what was the United States before Joe Biden.

And then there is Iran, and the Lebanese government, and Hezbollah, and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority.

And they feel that maybe they may not like Shia because some are not Shia, but they feel that the Persian Shia Iranian bloc has always been treated poorly.

And they got encouragement from that view from the Obama administration. That was the whole keystone of the Obama administration's foreign policy in the Middle East.
Isolate the Gulf monarchies.

isolate Israel, distance yourself from them, tilt toward Iran, get the Iran deal, and let them balance each other off.

And there'll be peace. That was the most bankrupt, crazy idea.
And I thought everybody knew it. And it's back again right now as we speak.
Yeah.

You know, I was going to go there with you: the other Arab states and Israel's relationship. And thank you for talking about Iran.
What about Saudi Arabia?

What is the relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia?

Well, they have to be very careful because they're the keeper of Mecca and Medina, and they are

the purest of all

islamic nations and so essentially officially they have to be against israel but they're also they've got a fundamental existential problem as they did during the first gulf war 1990 91 and that is like kuwait they're defenseless they don't have the population or they're very wealthy and affluent they're not they're not going to i mean saddam hussein went right into kuwait and had we not intervened he would have gone right into riyadh yeah nothing could have stopped that army and battle hardened from iran he got a lot of soviet weapons he had a lot of oil revenues and he would have controlled the whole middle east and saudis have never gotten over that so they have a pragmatic streak and then they look at the contours of the middle east they think you know let's just admit it that Israel is never going to attack Saudi Arabia.

It has 200 to 300 nuclear weapons and we're not afraid of them at all. We are terrified of one

Shia-Persian nuclear weapon because they will use it. It's not the Jews that are a problem.
In fact,

being sophisticated diplomats and Machiavelli of practitioners of real politics, the Saudis are probably saying something like the following.

We want to be allied with Israel. And we want Israel to bell that damn cat because we're all fights and we're we're going to be eaten up by that nuke.

So what we will do is we'll provide airspace, we'll provide extra weapons, we'll provide whatever they want. And they're confident.
We know we fought them before.

So will you just take out those nukes? And then, of course, on the day after, we're going to give a press conference and say we are shocked that Israel would attack a fellow. Islamic nation.

We deplore a preemptive time. And then privately they say, need to have another strike, need more weapons, need some more money.
What do you need? That's how they work. That's how they think.
Yeah,

sure, everything's backdoor. Well, Victor, let's take another moment for some messages and then we'll be right back for the last question, and that is the very existence of the Israeli state.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back. So, Victor, my last question here on Israel is, will Israel continue to exist as a state? It seems so in such a precarious location.

I think about that all the time. I think I'm writing a book.
I'm just starting. I'm so far behind called The End of Everything about states like classical Thebes.
It was renowned in the ancient world.

It's kind of the most hallowed city-state in Greece, Oedipus Myth,

Antigone, et cetera, 7 against Thebes,

wiped out to everything. It didn't exist.
How about the Aztec Empire? Cortez destroyed it in

six months.

There is no, there's not a, there's no Westernism at all in Asia Minor. It was destroyed in 1453 on May 29, Black Tuesday.
So you're telling me that there's a possibility.

When I look at the world today, I look at particular groups of people that are in terrible neighborhoods: the Kurds, the Armenians, the Greeks, the Israelis, and they're surrounded by people like the Arab Middle East or

large Turkish populations vis-a-vis the Armenians or Turkey versus Greece. And they're very brave fighters and they have illustrious cultures.
And they really need

for all of their anger, for all the miscommunications, for all the petty rivalries, when the push comes the shove, they are vulnerable cultures and they're some of the pillars of history.

And so all during the socialist craziness and communist craziness in Greece as a reaction to the American supported dictatorship, I was pro-Greek

because it's Greece. It's a foundation and we have to be pro-Greek.
And Turkey would like to do a lot of bad things to Greece.

75 overflights a month into Greek airspace in the Aegean. Same thing with Armenia, same thing with the Kurds,

same thing with Israel, 12 million people, and it's surrounded by what, 250 million.

And when you get people in Iran talking about they can survive a nuclear holocaust and Israel not, or I'm glad that at least half the Jews in the world,

if he said that, he denies that he did, Rafanjami, that Israel was a one bomb state. So there's two challenges then.
One is this existential threat to these countries, but especially Israel.

And the second is is the Western Malays.

And that is Western countries founded on principles, hallowed principles of free speech, individual liberty, unfettered expression, scientific method, rationalism instead of superstition, a gradual growing atheism or agnosticism that, you know, reason trumps religion and faith.

and free market economics sanctity you create so much wealth and so much freedom and my god i'm glad we are because most of the world's great technologies have coming from a modern Western state.

But you create a,

what's the word? A sort of a sanctimonious, snarky,

privileged citizenry. And it's okay here because we have two oceans and we've got 6,000 nukes and we've got...

some adults in the room still controlling them, I think, at least until Biden administration. But when you're in Israel, you have no margin of error.

You get a big peace movement, or you say that, you know,

we should just dismantle any of the things that go on in Europe or the United States, they have no margin of error and they will be crushed. So they have to be

internally vigilant. They have to be internally

preemptive. They have to watch everything on the horizon because they're in a very beautiful spot and

they have neighbors who are so envious of the civilization they created ex nihilo and they hate them they hate them for their success they hate them for their religion they hate them for their history and they've got to be very very careful they can't let down their guard and they have a lot of internal schisms with orthodoxy and secularism and left they have a that left wing that's as zealous as ours yeah so i

i think everybody, whatever their particular politics, they can disagree about the level of help to Israel.

But my God, when you look at that whole southern Mediterranean area and the Middle East, and then you look at this one country, and I had the same feelings about Greece.

And the idea, this is what really got me angry. It's kind of a weird thing to say, but think of all the things the Cypriots have suffered under the Turkish occupation.
But when you had the Cypriots

and the Greeks, and the Israel, and they were all going to get together with an East Med natural gas pipeline, 10 billion cubic feet, and it was going to go up into through Italy and up into southern Europe and supply Europe with natural gas.

And not a lot compared to Putin, but enough to start a different route. Avenue, yes, exactly.
You're getting natural gas.

Natural gas, liquefied natural gas.

You could get away. And what did we do? Biden.
opposed that and he opposed it to such a degree that it's in it's in limbo. Why would he do that? Those are our closest friends.
They need the money.

Europe needs their gas. It was gas as they clean burning fuel.
That's insane to do that. And we should, anytime you can help those countries that are our natural allies, we should be doing it.

We're getting back to our earlier podcast. We just can't explain the inexplicable.
Yeah, exactly. This president is not a president.
He's just,

I don't know what he is, but I don't know who's running the country. He's John Gill.

He's being propped up. Absolutely.

But somebody at some point has to get an adrenaline shot or an EpiPen and stab him. And John Gill came to life again.

I think somebody will do that, and Joe Biden will wake up and it'll be Joel from the 1970s, right?

Sarcastic son of a gun. Yeah, yeah.

All right, Victor. Why don't we go ahead and call it a day here?

We need to

move on.

So

I'm going to be leaving tomorrow morning very early to drive to SFO and God willing to fly to Israel and then jump for joy that

I went to Israel. I left COVID back in Dalmat.

Absolutely. I'm liberated.
I'm looking forward. There's some wonderful people that go on those trips and I would like to see them.
So I'm very happy. I'm looking forward to it.

So we'll end the weekend edition here. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and thank you, Victor, for all of your interesting commentary on the Yom Kippur War.

Thank you.

All right.

See you next time, everybody. Yep, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

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