David Elazar

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David Elazar bigraphy, stories - Generals

David Elazar : biography

27 August 1925 – 15 April 1976

David "Dado" Elazar (27 August 1925 – 15 April 1976) was the ninth Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), serving in that capacity from 1972 to 1974. He was forced to resign in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.

The Yom Kippur War

Events leading up to the war

In 1957, Israel was forced, under American pressure, to withdraw from the Sinai which it had occupied since attacking Egypt the previous year. Closing the Tiran strait to Israeli ships by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967 was one of the major causes for the 1967 war, during which Israel re-occupied the Sinai peninsula. Despite UN resolutions to withdraw, Israel refused to do so without Egyptian commitment to peace.

On 1 October 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria were placed on alert. Due to an erroneous intelligence assessment and poor decisions by the Israeli military, the IDF responded with only limited measures, few reserve units were called up, and it was determined that war was "unlikely." In the early hours of 6 October (on Yom Kippur, the holiest of the Jewish holidays), Elazar finally became convinced that war would indeed break out that same day, even though the Chief of Military Intelligence Major General Eli Zeira and the Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan still believed that this was highly unlikely. Dayan’s conviction had two major consequences:

  1. Dayan refused to approve Elazar’s request for a general call-up of the reserves (Elazar nevertheless eventually decided independently on a limited call-up, beginning on 5 October).
  2. Dayan refused to approve Elazar’s recommendation that the IDF engage in a pre-emptive air strike, planned for 11:00 a.m. on Yom Kippur (the airforce was ready for the strike, but its jets never took off).

The war

At 2:00 p.m. on Yom Kippur, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated attack against Israel. In many ways, this came as a surprise to the IDF and its command.

After a series of fierce battles to block the invading armies, a failed counter-offensive in the Sinai, and heavy losses to Israel’s airforce and ground troops alike, the incursion was finally halted. On 11 October, fighting in the north was pushed back across the Syrian frontier, and on 16 October, Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal under the command of General Ariel Sharon.

In the early days of the fighting, Elazar was one of very few Israeli commanders who managed to keep his cool and even maintain an optimistic view of where events were heading. This was in especially sharp contrast with the political leadership, most notably Moshe Dayan, who spoke of the "destruction of the Third Jewish Commonwealth." At the same time, the war highlighted sharp personal differences among the top military brass, particularly along the Southern Front—some of these differences have yet to be resolved. At one point in the fighting, Elazar was forced to replace the Chief of the Southern Command, Major General Shmuel Gonen (known as "Gorodish") with the former Chief of General Staff Haim Bar-Lev. He also enlisted the help of generals Rehavam Zeevi and Aharon Yariv, both of whom had recently retired from the IDF, as his special advisers.

By the end of the war, the IDF had penetrated deep into Syrian territory. Mount Hermon, which had been taken from Israel at the start of the war, returned to Israeli control. On the Southern Front, the Egyptian Third Army was surrounded in the Sinai, and Israeli troops had occupied the southern sector of the west bank of the Suez Canal fighting with the unconventional tactics of General Ariel Sharon. Nevertheless, despite these military achievements, Israel paid dearly in casualties, and the Egyptians still held some territory east of the canal, and non of the major cities were captured, although Suez was under siege.

The aftermath

The high casualty rate and the fact that Israel was caught unprepared, in terms of both intelligence and operations, led to a wave of public protests throughout the country.