Israel’s eternal dilemma
On October 7 & the Yom Kippur War.
The gruesome massacre of over 1,200 Israelis on Saturday, October 7, 2023, was deliberately timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, a conventional conflict that began when the Israel Defense Forces were similarly surprised on Saturday, October 6, 1973.
The nature of the current conflict—begun by a massive murder spree led by the terrorist gunmen of Hamas—is, of course, quite different from that of the Yom Kippur War. That earlier war broke out with surprise attacks from the armored and air forces of Egypt and Syria, with some additional but marginal support from surrounding Arab nation-states. Moreover, the assaults of 1973 were for the most part aimed at combatants, not civilians, and primarily fought for strategic ground.
In that way, the Yom Kippur War was dissimilar from the October 7 assault on Israeli kibbutz residents and concertgoers. The recent bloodbath of hundreds of civilians was designed by five members of the top terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza—the brothers Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Sinwar (both reportedly still alive, hiding in bunkers beneath Gaza), the notorious military commander Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military council grandee Rawhi Mushtaha, and the now-deceased Ayman Nofal, of the so-called Gaza Brigade, who was killed by the Israelis last October. Their likely aims were to commit unprecedented mass murder on Israeli soil, instill terror among the citizen population, take hostages to mitigate Israeli retaliation, derail ongoing efforts to normalize relations between Israel and moderate Arab regimes, demoralize the West, stir up renewed pro-Hamas protests in the United States and Europe, and by their sheer macabre slaughtering win global awe and even support for their gruesome audacity.
Hamas started the October 7 war with an invading force of a mere 3,000 gunmen, followed by a rag-tag mob of 500 or more civilians, all eager to murder, loot, destroy, and rape unarmed Israeli women, children, and elderly. In comparison, those invading murderers amounted to only a fraction of the million Syrian and Egyptian troops—equipped with over 3,500 tanks and 900 aircraft—that invaded Israel in the first few days of the nineteen-day war of 1973. It is a truism, however, that over the last fifty years it has proven far easier for Arab belligerents to kill en masse unarmed Israeli civilians than to confront the idf.
Indeed, more Jews were killed and wounded in twenty-four hours by the small Hamas force of terrorists than on any single day since the Holocaust—a death toll of some 1,200 individuals, among them nearly 850 known civilians, alongside 4,834 wounded and 243 taken hostage. By contrast, in the three-week Yom Kippur War—still considered Israel’s costliest and most difficult conflict—the huge conventional forces of Syria and Egypt, together with thousands of auxiliary Arab troops, inflicted somewhere around 2,600 total fatalities, with perhaps 8,000 wounded, and likely took over 290 captives. That is, in just a single day, the 3,000 Hamas terrorists killed and wounded nearly half the number of total casualties inflicted by the huge forces of Egypt and Syria over almost three weeks of nonstop conventional fighting.
See Also:
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Palestinian Leaders Have Brought a Nakba to Their People
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US revives policy deeming settlements illegal, pans Israel’s plan for 3,000 new homes
‘Hamas must be finished, there’s no alternative’ says Green Prince on solidarity visit
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