Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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destruction of the Gaza camps was complemented by proposals for two types of construction; both demonstrated Sharon’s ability to mobilize planning as a tactical tool. The first was for Jewish settlements to be built along what he called ‘the five-finger plan’, which positioned settlements as deep wedges into Gaza in order to separate its towns and break the area into manageable sections. The southernmost ‘finger’ was to be built in the Rafah Salient, beyond the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on occupied Egyptian Sinai, and was meant to sever Gaza from the arms-smuggling routes in the Sinai Desert. The other project that Sharon enthusiastically promoted was considered more ‘experimental’ and involved the construction of new neighbourhoods for the refugees. It was designed to bring about the undoing of the refugee camps altogether, and so remove the reasons for dissent that Israel believed was bred there through the immizeration of their Palestinian populations. When, in February 1972, Palestinian resistance appeared to have been suppressed, Dayan, reacting to homegrown and international outrage at Sharon’s excessive military measures, transferred responsibility of the Gaza Strip from Southern to Central Command, taking it out of Sharon’s hands. Sharon had done his job and now Dayan wanted to dissociate him from it. In the summer of 1973 Sharon finally resigned from the military when he realized he had no chance of being awarded the top job.
Egyptian military engineers making openings in the Bar Lev Line and moving across it, October 1973.
Breaking the Line
In 1973 the Bar Lev Line looked so firm that it seemed to justify Dayan’s boast, probably for propaganda purposes, that it ‘would take the American and Soviet engineer corps together to break through [it]’.29 The Egyptian daily Al-Ahram claimed, some thirty years after the war, that some Soviet military experts, themselves wanting to make a point, had argued in 1973 that nothing less than a tactical nuclear explosion would breach it. But, on 6 October 1973, on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, in a surprise Syrian–Egyptian two-front attack, it took only a few hours to break through Israeli fortifications using conventional military strategy. General Shazly recounted the clockwork operation that led to the breaching of Israeli lines on the Egyptian front:
At precisely 1400 hours 200 of our aircraft skimmed low over the canal, their shadows flickering across enemy lines as they headed deep into the Sinai … their overflight was the signal our artillery had been waiting for … The 4,000 men of the first assault group poured over [the Egyptian] ramparts and slithered in disciplined lines down to the water’s edge … a few minutes after 1420 hours, as the canisters began to belch clouds of covering smoke, our first assault wave was paddling furiously across the canal.30
The breached Bar Lev Line, circa 1974. Film stills, IDF film unit (Images courtesy of IP).
Because the attack started with an artillery barrage, the 450 Israeli soldiers manning the strongholds on the canal at the time of the attack were forced to dive into bunkers beneath the surface of the artificial landscape, thereby losing eye-contact with the Egyptian soldiers who were scaling the ramparts. By the time the bombardment stopped and the Israelis were able to resume their battle positions, the line had already been stormed and its strongholds encircled. The ramparts of sand, which had withstood two years of Egyptian artillery fire during the War of Attrition, succumbed to water. Using the Suez Canal, special units of the Egyptian engineering corps used high-pressure water cannons to dissolve the hardened packed sand and open more than seventy breaches within the artificial landscape.31 The water cannons were similar to those that, throughout the late 1960s, had helped clear the banks of the upper Nile in preparation for the Aswan Dam whose construction was inaugurated in 1970; indeed, the idea for breaching the Bar Lev Line came from an Egyptian engineer employed on the Aswan Dam project.32
Once the Bar Lev Line had been breached, two Egyptian armies, about 100,000 soldiers, were transported over pontoon bridges and through the breaches in the earth dyke and onto the eastern, Asian, previously Israeli-controlled bank.33 They advanced through the ravaged landscape a few kilometres into the Sinai. Then, wary of the fortified depth of Israeli defences and at the limit of their anti-aircraft umbrella, they halted and dug themselves in, facing east.34
The dawning of 8 October 1973, two days after the Egyptian army had breached the Israeli line, heralded the most bitter military defeat in IDF history, when, in a counter-offensive, waves of bewildered Israeli tank units broke against an entrenched Egyptian army equipped with the previously little-known Sager anti-tank missiles. The Israeli counter-attack was defeated, and with it Israeli military and civilian moral. The perception that the breaching of the Bar Lev Line was akin to breaching the city walls and storming the homeland was more imaginary than real, considering the hundreds of kilometres Egyptian troops would have had to cross before reaching any Israeli settlement. But this sensation was nevertheless evoked in Dayan’s famous hysterical statement that the ‘Third Temple was falling’. The trauma of the breached line, resonant with a sense of divine punishment, began a shift in national consciousness that helped liberate Israeli religious and messianic sentiment and in four years was to force Labor out of government.
In Israel the political significance of the 1973 war was amplified by the fact that it had started only weeks before the general elections scheduled for 31 October 1973, and a few months after both Sharon and Bar Lev had retired from military service. Both were busy campaigning for opposing political parties but when war broke out they were both called back to service. Since all senior positions were manned, each had to accept a single step down the command ladder. Sharon received command of the 143 armoured division (later known as the Likud Division) and Bar Lev the overall command of the entire southern front. As the war unfolded over the following weeks, old rivalries resurfaced when the glory-hungry generals used the military campaign as an extension of their electoral one. Sharon realized that whoever first crossed the canal to its African side would be crowned the war’s hero. Bar Lev and the other generals associated with Labor understood that if Sharon was allowed to achieve personal success he would ‘turn into a major political headache’ after the war. Sharon himself undoubtedly turned the war to personal political advantage. He used open radio communications so that many of his division’s soldiers could hear him, and he continued to leak secret military information to his large embedded entourage of admiring reporters.35 The battles of 1973 demonstrated that war could be more than simply the continuation of politics by other means; it could itself become electoral politics, conducted within the resonating chamber of mediatized military manoeuvre. It also established different military officers as independent political players.
In his relentless drive towards the canal, Sharon allowed himself a large measure of autonomy, ignoring the desperate restraining orders of Bar Lev, again his direct military superior. The latter complained to Chief of Staff David Elazar that Sharon was ‘out of control’, and was disrupting the entire command hierarchy at the front: ‘I have a divisional commander here who is a politician … who wants to [get the political credit for] crossing the canal.’ Elazar asked Dayan for his opinion on dismissing Sharon. Dayan agreed that ‘Arik can only think “how will this war make [him] look, what can [he] gain from all this” … He is trying to do a Rommel-type breakthrough – if it works, good; if not, the People of Israel lose 200 tanks …’36 Fearful of the impact on army morale that Sharon’s removal might have, they decided for the meantime to leave him in command of his division.
Sharon was indeed deliberately out of control – and out of communication. At times he switched off his radio altogether. When he was available on the radio, it was hard to talk to him because of his wilful misunderstanding of orders; at other times, he was heard snoring into the microphone. Sharon’s attitude to military communications both concealed and emphasized his scramble to achieve those ends that he deemed politically important.
The following is a transcript of one of the rare occasions when contact was made successfully with Sharon. On the night of 17 October Sharon was called to the radio to take orders from Southern Command. The communications officer tried to remind Sharon of a plan for which he