Yesterday, Tzvi Zamir, who was the head of the Mossad before and during the Yom Kippur War, passed away. In one of my articles I described how Zvi Zamir personally met on the eve of that war with the most important Arab agent Israel had ever had, Ashraf Marwan, and received from him a precise and unequivocal warning of the imminent outbreak of war the very next day.
The head of the Mossad delivered this immediate warning to the government, but Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan refused to launch a preemptive strike against the Syrian and Egyptian troops crowded at the borders and, moreover, refused to allow the Chief of General Staff to mobilize the reserves. This terrible decision, which cost many Israeli lives, was made by the political leadership solely because of their unwillingness to confront the American administration of Nixon and his secretary Kissinger, who demanded that the Israelis should not launch a preemptive strike against their enemies.
For many years, the Lubavitcher Rebbe SHLITA King Moshiach has spoken about the harmful nature of this fear of the U.S. government, which led to the worst possible war with thousands of deaths. After all, if the IDF had attacked first, the entire future course of the war would have been different. Israel would most likely have won a major victory again, as it did six years earlier, and would have been able to negotiate with its enemies from a position of strength and defeat them. Moreover, the whole notorious airborne weapons train from the U.S. to Israel would simply not have been needed.
Unfortunately, we are now witnessing similar aggressive pressure on the part of the U.S. administration. Sadly, this time our generals managed to miss the enemy attack altogether, simply by failing to put the political leadership on notice. To make matters worse, for decades, the Chiefs of General Staff - first Barak and then his successors, including Ganz and Eisenkot - have lobbied heavily for the idea and promoted the idea that the IDF should rely entirely on the United States. This led us to a heavy dependence on U.S. arms. Now the Biden administration is cynically using this dependence to our disadvantage by forcing us to make concessions to the enemy that are completely contrary to our primary military objectives. For example, fuel supplies to Hamas.
Anyone who disregards the lessons of the past pays the price over and over again....