Yom Kippur 1973: Israel's darkest hour, my first war

Coming from Australia, a country whose soldiers had fought in other people’s wars but never on their own soil, my knowledge of war was purely theoretical when the Yom Kippur War erupted less than six months after my arrival in Israel.

As a journalist writing for publications in Australia and the United States, I realized that it was expected of me to cover wartime developments.

Totally ignorant of the procedure, I headed for the Government Press Office, which is a unit of the Prime Minister’s Office. The director at the time was Meron Medzini, who was also the spokesman for prime minister Golda Meir, whom he had known all his life. His mother and Golda had been close friends since the time they were in fifth grade in Milwaukee.

Medzini was also well acquainted with the needs of journalists. His father, Moshe Medzini, was a well-known seasoned journalist who, in November 1947, broadcast from the United Nations building in New York the result of the fateful vote on the partition of Palestine. The broadcast was relayed on Jerusalem Radio, the precursor of Israel Radio.

Meron Medzini himself dabbled in journalism and, over the years, published numerous articles in The Jerusalem Post.

Though businesslike in his manner, he was kind and considerate, especially to journalists who had never experienced war before.

One of the first shocks confronting any new immigrant or tourist from a Western country when coming to Israel is to see armed soldiers in the streets or riding on public transportation like ordinary passengers.

It’s something one doesn’t expect to see under a democratic regime.

But because of the delicate yet complex security situation, armed soldiers and police in the streets of Israel remain the norm until today.

Censorship confusion and the logistics of wartime reporting

During the Yom Kippur War, the GPO was very cooperative, except on one issue – censorship. In Australia, I had never known censorship. Suddenly, everything I or anyone else wrote had to be censored.

It might have been difficult to accept, had I not been Jewish. There was a very high number of Holocaust survivors, including some members of my own family, in Melbourne, which was my home town. Most of my relatives on both my mother’s and my father’s side had been murdered in Treblinka, Auschwitz, and on the Russian border. In Melbourne, most of the survivors were not silent. They told their stories over and over again, teaching the lesson of being careful in all matters related to safety and security.

If censorship was one of the ways of safeguarding Israel’s security, so be it.

For journalists, filing our stories was not always easy. There was no email or mobile phones in those days, and land lines were few and far between. The best land lines were at the GPO, and we could use them free of charge when making international calls to our respective media outlets.

Some journalists evaded the censor by using public phones, which are all but obsolete in Israel these days. To operate a public phone, one needed a large quantity of telephone tokens to keep feeding into the slot to ensure that the call would not be terminated. Happily, people could also call public phones. What usually happened was that journalists called the switchboard operator at their home base, gave their names, country, city and the number of the public phone, and hung up. A minute or two later, there was a return call, which could continue for as long as necessary without the need to use up precious telephone tokens. A telephone token was called an asimon. Although no longer in use for communication purposes, they are still part of the language. The Hebrew equivalent of the term “the penny dropped” is nafal ha’asimon.

Private cars were a luxury in those days, and not too many people – including journalists – owned one. Some journalists hired camouflage cars in dull colors, but demand exceeded supply, and they were not always available.

Sympathetic to the plight of car-less journalists who wanted to be near the action, the GPO provided mini buses for small groups of journalists, taking them as far as the Suez Canal in one direction and close to the Syrian border in the other.

In the battlefield areas, there was no censorship. We were permitted to talk to soldiers, as well as to prisoners of war, some of whom were wounded combatants whom we met in hospitals. Word went out that they were so well treated that they didn’t want to go home after the war.

The GPO was amazingly sensitive to our needs, arranging interviews with military top brass, providing transportation and other services, along with bottomless cups of coffee.

Sometimes, journalists with cars would take other journalists without cars along for the ride and trade stories along the way..

That was my good fortune, though at one stage I was nearly killed by a Syrian bomb.

War is a terrible thing, especially when you come across the sight of blood-spattered or badly burned dead and wounded. On the other hand, it often brings out the most noble strains in people. There is a sense of extended family, of caring, of camaraderie, of helping each other, of putting animosities aside.

What was most impressive was to see the relationship between Israeli soldiers and captured enemy prisoners.

There was a realization on both sides that what it all boiled down to was that they were young men on opposite sides of the fence, doing the bidding of the governments and military networks of their respective countries. They were not there because they wanted to fight each other. They were there on orders. But when the dust settled, each realized that the other was also a human being in a khaki uniform.

Sadly, Israeli soldiers who had been taken prisoner did not fare so well, especially at the hands of the Syrians, who tortured them. The Egyptians were not much better.

When Israeli POWs returned home, they were broken in body and spirit. There were exceptions, of course, but most suffered from PTSD, which at the time was not yet recognized, except by their families who had to live with sudden screams in the night, social withdrawal, phantom pains, trembling bodies, and more.

Some of the former POWs were ashamed and embarrassed to speak of the tribulations they had suffered. Others could not stop talking about what they had undergone. They were like wound-up toy soldiers, repeating the same thing over and over.

Who would have thought that only four years later, in November 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would come on a peace mission to Israel.

In the Knesset, he met Golda Meir, who praised him for his courage, and congratulated him for being the first Arab leader to come to Israel for the sake of future generations. “No mother should have to give birth to a son in the fear that he may fall in battle,” she said.

After making an impassioned address, full of references to peace, Golda said: “Mr. President, as a grandmother to a grandfather, may I give you a little present for your new granddaughter and thank you for the present you have given me.”

To see the warm smiles on both their faces, no one could have imagined that only a brief time earlier, their two armies had fought each other in bitter battles.

But peace has a price, and Sadat paid it. Anwar Sadat was assassinated on October 6, 1981, at an anniversary parade in Cairo celebrating the crossing of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian Army at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. ■