What Golda Meir Understood That Her Generals Did Not

When Egypt and Syria launched their coordinated attacks on Yom Kippur of 1973, Israel found itself woefully unready, after two years of assurances from military intelligence that neither country would attack under current circumstances, supposedly deterred by the IDF’s apparent superiority. The high command and the storied military leaders of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir’s cabinet—among them Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon—had been convinced by this faulty assessment. Although Israeli soldiers eventually turned the situation around, the failures of the war’s early days have left an enduring scar on Israel’s collective memory. But Meir, the civilian, knew to be suspicious of complacency, writes Hanan Shai: