A special memorial ceremony will be held this evening at the Paratroopers Brigade Memorial in the Tel Nof Air Force Base to mark the 30th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who played a major role in the war as a major-general commanding the 143rd Reserve Armored Division on the Suez Canal, will take part. Similar ceremonies will take place next week, after Yom Kippur.
Rafael (Raful) Eitan, an IDF Northern Command general during the Yom Kippur War who later became Chief of Staff, discussed some of his reflections on the war and the intervening period with Arutz-7 today. "It's clear that after the victory of the Six-Day War, there was a feeling of how great we were, and this led to much over-confidence among both the military and the politicians, and it could be that this led to our mistakes at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War [when Israel was caught unawares by a surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack]."
Asked if Israel won the Yom Kippur War, Eitan said, "Certainly. To go from the position we were in, to a situation where we waged a counter-offensive and threatened the two enemy capitals within a period of days - I don't know many armies that have done that. Russia, in World War II, took three years to launch a counter-offensive..."
Arutz-7's Haggai Segal asked, "When did you know we were going to war [in 1973]?"
Eitan: "Two weeks before."
A-7: "That much?"
Eitan: "Yes."
A-7: [after short silence] "Based on what?"
Eitan: "Based on scout-observations, and on intelligence that reached me as a division commander in the Golan, but mostly on our look-out observations and interpreting that which we saw as preparations for an offensive attack."
A-7: "And those above you - the General Staff, the Chief of Staff - did not get convinced that a war was about to start?"
Eitan: "Some did, some didn't. I wasn't in the General Staff, I was in the Northern Command, and I ... warned, and told, and related the facts - and some reacted positively and some did not... Finally, after the Northern Command insisted that a war was in the offing, the army sent up the Seventh Brigade a day or two before Yom Kippur, and thus saved the entire Galilee and the country."
Asked to re-tell the famous "Just Hold on for Another Ten Minutes!" story, Eitan confirmed the following facts: On the third day of the war, Monday, October 8, a large Syrian offensive was underway to capture the Golan and proceed from there towards the rest of Israel. This was the second attempted Syrian offensive, after Israeli forces had succeeded in stopping an earlier one in the southern Golan. At one point, while Israeli tanks were under terrific enemy fire, Gen. Eitan radioed to the tank crews, "Hold on for just another ten minutes!" - and in fact after ten minutes, "our positions closer to the front radioed to us that they saw the Syrian trucks suddenly turning around and heading back towards Damascus. The level of fire against us didn't stop immediately, but after 20-30 minutes it began to weaken, and then suddenly it stopped, and the Syrian offensive was over. It wasn't that I expected reinforcements to arrive; I just felt that when they hear it's only a few more minutes, the fear of defeat starts to fade away..."
A-7: "And thus the Galilee was saved."
Eitan: "The whole country; what, do you think that if the Syrians would be sitting in the Galilee, in Afula, then things would be running normally...?"