The Yom Kippur war: what has changed in 50 years?

By Colin Smith

Fifty years ago this weekend I was in Israel covering for the Observer the second week of what became known as the Yom Kippur or Ramadam war depending whether you supported the American equipped Israelis or a predominantly Egyptian-Syrian Arab coalition mostly armed by the Soviet Union. Those who preferred a more neutral stance sometimes called it the Fourth Arab-Israeli war.

Whatever, it was a conventional conflict. Each side had tanks, artillery and aircraft and relatively well trained infantry. Both took prisoners. Some of the Israelis garrisoning the ferro-concrete bunkers along the Suez Canal they called their Bar-Lev line came out with their hands up. So did Egyptian soldiers who, after these initial successes, were cut off in the Sinai when Arik Sharon’s forces landed on the other side of the bank behind them.

I watched exhausted looking Egyptians staggering out of the desert being offered water from the American canteens of their captors. It all seemed perfectly natural. They had fought, they had surrendered, they were thirsty and were given water. It was something like the gentlemanly conduct that sometimes existed between the German Afrika Corps and the British on World War Two’s North African battlefields. What in the intervening half century since I watched those Egyptian prisoners drink their water has changed so much in Israel and Gaza?

Is it really nothing more than Paul Valery’s celebrated definition of war? ‘A massacre of people who don’t know each other for the benefit of people who do know each other but don’t massacre each other.’