The similarities between what happened to Israel on October 6, 1973 – the start of the Yom Kippur War – and what happened on October 7, 2023, the beginning of the Simchat Torah war, are jaw-dropping.
Separated by a span of 50 years, both surprise attacks unfolded in early October, both on Jewish holidays. Both proved that ostensibly impregnable defensive lines were highly porous, and both were the result of entrenched security doctrines that collapsed, abysmal intelligence failures, and a grievous underestimation of the country’s enemies.
Both also began with Israel very much on its back legs but able to regroup quickly to repel the enemy’s surprise advance and take the battle to enemy territory.
The similarities are more than just a historical curiosity. They also provide a glimpse of how the nation will likely respond the day after. The events of October 7, like those of October 6 a half-century earlier, will significantly alter Israel’s security doctrine, will lead to sweeping changes inside the military, and will trigger a political earthquake.
The seething anger and frustration in the country now at its political leadership – an anger that has not yet boiled over because of an understanding that first the country must defeat its enemy, and only then point fingers and hold various people responsible – is similar to the burning anger that gripped the country following the Yom Kippur War.
And that burning anger had consequences, leading to an end to the Labor Party’s 25-year hegemony in the country and a political realignment. It is reasonable to expect that something similar will happen this time. There will be a political realignment. It might not occur immediately after the war, just as it took nearly four years for the political changes to fully register after the Yom Kippur War, but it will happen.
How the October 7 massacre could end Israel's current political alignment
Now, as in the winter of 1973, the trauma the country suffered, which too many people endured, is of such a magnitude that it cannot but reverberate in the political arena. What was in the realm of politics is not what will be. The polls already show that, even before any new actors are introduced onto the political stage.
THE YOM KIPPUR WAR marked the beginning of the end of Labor Party dominance and paved the way for the rise of Menachem Begin and the Likud’s stunning victory in the 1977 elections. Reservists returning from the front spearheaded a movement that changed the political landscape and led to a political realignment – Likud dominance of Israeli politics – that has held, albeit with a few brief pauses, for nearly half a century.
In the 1969 Knesset election, the last one before the Yom Kippur War, Likud won 26 seats to Labor’s 56. The party catapulted to 39 seats in the elections held in December 1973, just two months after the war, and Labor dropped to 51. And in the watershed May 1977 election, the Likud rose to 43 seats, beating Labor by 11 mandates.
The trauma from the Yom Kippur War – the deep anger and frustration with the political establishment responsible for the fiasco – is largely responsible for that reversal of fortunes.
The Yom Kippur War also did something else that is worth noting: It led to the formation of the centrist Democratic Movement for Change Party (Hebrew acronym DASH) – a short-lived party that captured 15 seats.
That this party quickly burned out is not important here. What is important is that it soared to become the country’s third-largest party, even though – or perhaps precisely because – it was founded and made up of well-known Israeli figures who were not politicians but rather business leaders and academics: people like Yigael Yadin, Amnon Rubinstein, Shmuel Tamir, and Seth Wertheimer.
Back then, there was a sense that the establishment failed the country, and people sought non-establishment candidates with a new perspective. The public was interested in a party that presented new faces.
The same dynamic is likely to come into play this time as well – a yearning for new faces, for people who were neither responsible for the security doctrine that led to the October 7 catastrophe nor for the corrosive divisiveness that has wracked the country for the last five years – especially the previous one – and which all but invited a Hamas attack.
Currently, the masses are not taking to the streets calling for new elections or for the government to resign, as happened in 1973, mainly because the war is still being waged. Then, too, the protests came after the war when one sole reservist – Motti Ashkenazi – camped out in front of prime minister Golda Meir’s office, calling for the resignation of defense minister Moshe Dayan and giving birth to a massive movement that eventually brought down Meir and her government.
This time as well, when the cannons fall silent – or at least quiet down – and people will not feel that they are harming the war effort by taking to the streets, they will likely come out in numbers that could dwarf even those of the protests last year against the proposed judicial reform.
Why? Because the smoldering rage people feel at the country’s lack of preparedness, and the government and the military’s blind misreading of the situation in Gaza, is something that spans both the Right and the Left. The anti-judicial reform protests were, for the most part, the domain of the Center and Left; the protests against the country’s leadership that will emerge the day after will also attract those furious on the Right.
In the meantime, however, politics is continuing here as before. Same parties, same actors, same grievances carrying on with business as always – not yet having internalized that October 7 demands a different approach.
ISRAELIS AWOKE on October 8, the day after the massacre, in a country that seemed paralyzed. The citizens stepped up to fill gaps left by politicians who did not see, ministries that did not hear, and military leaders who were unprepared. One common expression during those early days was that the people, the Israelis, proved so much better, so much more capable, than their leaders.
That being the case, it is likely that a movement will emerge to sweep away those leaders – individuals accountable for a stagnant and misguided security doctrine, for fostering divisions and enmity among sectors – to be replaced by distinguished non-political figures who have made their mark.
Meir did not voluntarily resign in April 1973 – the public’s will forced her out. The Agranat Commission investigating the Yom Kippur War did not hold her responsible in its interim report released that month, but the public did. And Golda listened, reluctantly, to the public.
As she said in her Knesset speech resigning from her position: “Since the recent Knesset elections [in December 1973], I have been watching developments in the country closely, and I have reached the conclusion that there is a public unrest which cannot be avoided, whether it is justified or not.”
Golda didn’t necessarily believe that the public was correct in calling for her head, but she felt she could not avoid the public clamoring – and the clamoring was loud.
Right now, few of the politicians whose decisions and actions helped lead to October 7 – politicians from both the coalition and the opposition – are acknowledging their role in either developing the policies toward Hamas and Gaza over the last 15 years or in leading the country to a societal breaking point. They need to do some reckoning.
Chief among them, but not the only one, is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But that is not going to happen.
Netanyahu will not voluntarily step down, nor will figures such as Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz, Avigdor Liberman, Bezalel Smotrich, Naftali Bennett voluntarily step away from public life – people who have been present at the cabinet table making decisions for much of a decade and have also played a role in stoking the flames of division or not doing enough to prevent it.
Asked at his press conference on Saturday night whether he would resign after the war, Netanyahu said, “The only thing I am going to resign from is Hamas.” But if what happened after the Yom Kippur War is a bellwether – and the numerous similarities between then and now give one every right to believe it is – he may have no choice.
With hundreds of thousands of reservists still in uniform and under arms, the anger of massive swaths of the public, both from the Right and the Left, toward its leaders – especially toward Netanyahu – have not yet begun to boil over. But it will. And when it does, it will scorch the political landscape. ■