Without any advanced planning, we've been flooded with wrap-ups marking the 50th anniversary of the War of Attrition, mostly in the form of TV specials, like a special broadcast that ran on Channel 11 News on Sunday. The banner: "The Forgotten War." But for anyone who was conscious at the time, a more accurate definition would be "The Unforgotten War."
It seems that since the 1948 War of Independence, the Israeli definition of a "war" means an intensive armed conflict in which the very existence of the state of Israel is in question. The attrition, like other military conflicts that preceded and followed it, caused Israel to bleed and fractured society, causing it to be war weary for the first time. But there was no sense that a defeat means that Israel would surrender and actually cease to exist.
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It was a reality we had never known. On kibbutzim and among the combat elite of the time, the tension and the fear for their soldier sons and brothers were in the very air they breathed.
Back then, as schoolchildren, we knew the names of the fallen. That one was the brother of our friend from Kibbutz Shamir, and that other guy had led our trip to Masada. Another fellow, from a kibbutz on the road to Haifa who was supposed to have been part of the group that would go on to found Kerem Shalom, was killed by enemy shelling.
In his unforgettable film "Late Summer Blues," filmmaker Renan Schorr brilliantly portrays the atmosphere in which young people were enlisting in the IDF at the time. In the summer of 1970, it seemed more like "Late Summer Boos." Most of the high schoolers who signed the "12th-graders' letter" that shocked the public with its implied threat that they would refuse to enlist, wound up joining the most elite combat units. Anyone who missed a chance to be buried between 1967 and August of 1970 got a do-over in October 1973.
The first person to command the IDF's Sinai Division was Shlomo "Cheech" Lahat, who would go on to become mayor of Tel Aviv. He took over the command as a handsome guy with blonde hair. After only a few months, friends who met him were amazed to discover a thin man with an emaciated face and gray hair. When they would ask him, surprised, what had happened, he would tell them in Yiddish – I was so scared.
Today's rewritten memories do wrong by the military and political leadership of the time. Ever since someone invented a story about a missed chance for peace with Egypt that could have prevented the 1973 Yom Kippur War, history has been revised to portray the conflicts Israel has fought as a choice.
That is the handicap of the people who were soldiers at the time and who are now vying to govern the country. The truth is that no nation has ever faced such a complex, intense battle as the one that was forced on Israel in those years. The country faced combined forces that comprised the former-Soviet Union; Arab powers; and Palestinian terrorist organizations; not to mention the international radical Left. What no one really knows is that the Israeli Air Force, which won the 1967 Six-Day War, had difficulty getting back on its feet, and the government and the IDF chief of staff were hesitant to put the country's few aircraft on the front lines – meaning that Israel lacked deterrent capabilities.
