The post-1967 malaise affected Egypt worse than any other Arab state. The crushing defeat of its army and the loss of the entire Sinai Peninsula were compounded by the economic effects of the war. Egypt faced a massive postwar reconstruction bill, exacerbated by the closure of the Suez Canal and the collapse in the tourist trade, Egypt’s two most important sources of external revenue. The prospects for a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict were more remote after the 1967 War than at any point since the creation of the state of Israel. International efforts to broker a resolution between Egypt and Israel were undermined by the positions taken by the two antagonists: Israel wanted to retain all of the Sinai as a bargaining chip to force Egypt to conclude a full peace treaty, whereas the Egyptian government demanded the return of the Sinai as a precondition for any peace talks. For Egypt, the longer Israel remained in the Sinai, the greater the risk of the international community accepting the Israeli occupation of Egyptian territory. President Gamal Abdel Nasser was determined to prevent the Israelis from turning the Suez Canal into a de facto border between the two states, and engaged Israel in an undeclared War of Attrition that lasted from March 1969 to August 1970. The Egyptians used commando raids, heavy artillery, and air attacks in a bid to wear down Israeli positions along the Suez Canal. The Israelis responded by building a series of fortifications along the canal, dubbed the Bar-Lev Line after the serving chief of staff, General Chaim Bar-Lev, and by unleashing air raids deep into Egyptian territory. The Israelis proved their continued military superiority over the Egyptians through the months of the War of Attrition. The Egyptians had no effective air defense, leaving Israeli planes free to strike the suburbs of Cairo and the cities of the Nile Delta. “The aim was to put the Egyptian people under heavy psychological pressure and make the political leadership appear weak, forcing it to halt the War of Attrition,” Egypt’s General Abd al-Ghani El-Gamasy reasoned. “The raids carried the implicit message that since the Egyptian armed forces could not see the futility of fighting, the raids might demonstrate this directly to the Egyptian people.”¹² Although the Israeli raids did not turn the Egyptian public against its government, the War of Attrition was hurting Egypt far more than Israel. Nasser was increasingly open to American mediation, and in August 1970 he agreed to a cease-fire with Israel as part of a still-born peace plan brokered by the U.S. secretary of state, William Rogers. Nasser died the following month, leaving Egypt and Israel no closer to resolving their differences.

Nasser’s successor was his vice president, Anwar Sadat. Though he was one of the founders of the Free Officers movement, had taken part in the 1952 revolution, and was one of the original members of the Revolutionary Command Council, Sadat remained something of an unknown quantity at home and abroad. He had none of Nasser’s charm or public appeal and had to prove himself if he hoped to remain in power. Sadat faced an inauspicious international setting when he took office. The Nixon administration was pursuing a policy of dйtente with Egypt’s ally, the Soviet Union. As tensions between the superpowers diminished, regional disputes such as the Arab-Israeli conflict took on less urgency in Moscow and Washington. The Soviets and the Americans were willing to live with the status quo, a policy of ?no war, no peace? between the Arabs and Israel, until the disputing parties showed a more pragmatic attitude toward resolving their differences. Sadat knew the status quo favored Israel. With each passing year, the international community would come to accept Israel?s hold over Arab territories occupied in 1967. To break the impasse, Sadat had to take the initiative. He needed to force America to reengage with the Arab-Israeli conflict, to push the Soviets to provide high-tech weapons to the Egyptian military, and to present the Israelis with a credible threat to recover the Sinai. In order to achieve his goals, he would need to go to war—a limited war to achieve specific political objectives. Sadat took his first step to war by expelling all of the 21,000 Soviet military advisors in Egypt in July 1972. It was a counterintuitive move, but one designed to force both the Americans and the Soviets to reengage with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Americans began to question Egypt’s ties to the Soviet Union and the possibility of diverting the most powerful Arab state to the pro-Western camp. It was precisely this threat that stirred the Soviets from their complacency toward their Egyptian client. Sadat had pressed the Soviet leadership to reequip Egypt’s devastated armed forces in the years after the Six Day War and the war of attrition. Moscow had prevaricated, delaying delivery of arms and withholding the more sophisticated Soviet arms needed to counter the high-tech arms the United States was providing Israel. Although Sadat expelled the Soviet military advisors, he was careful not to cut relations with the Soviet Union. Instead, he preserved Egypt’s Treaty of Friendship with the USSR and continued to extend base privileges to Soviet forces, thereby demonstrating his alliance. Sadat’s strategy proved brilliantly successful: between December 1972 and June 1973 the Soviets exported more advanced weapons to Egypt than in the previous two years combined. Sadat’s next objective was to prepare his military for war. He called the heads of the Egyptian armed forces to a meeting at his home on October 24, 1972, to confront them with his decision to initiate a war against Israel. “This is not a matter about which I’m taking your advice,” he warned the Egyptian top brass. The generals were aghast. They believed Israel was much better prepared for a war than the Arab states. Egypt was entirely dependent on the Soviet Union for advanced weaponry, and the Soviets still lagged well behind the Americans in supplying their allies in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As far as the generals were concerned, this was no time to be talking of war. General El-Gamasy, who attended the meeting, described the atmosphere as “exceptionally stormy and agitated,” with Sadat growing increasingly angry with his generals’ rebuttals. “By the end of the meeting, it was clear that President Sadat was not pleased with what had taken place—not with the reports presented, the opinions expressed, or the forecasts.”¹³ Nor had he changed his mind. Following the meeting, Sadat reshuffled his military to relieve the doubters of their commands. El-Gamasy was named chief of operations and tasked with planning the war. General el-Gamasy was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Six Day War. He knew from firsthand experience how unprepared Egypt was in 1967 and how poorly the Arab armies had coordinated their war efforts. The first priority for the Egyptian war planners was to conclude a deal with Syria to launch a two-front attack on the Israelis. The Syrians were as determined to redeem their losses in the Golan Heights as the Egyptians were in the Sinai, and they struck a top secret agreement to unify the command of their armed forces with the Egyptians in January 1973. Next, the planners had to decide on the ideal date to launch their attack to achieve the greatest degree of surprise. El-Gamasy and his colleagues pored over their almanacs to find the ideal moonlight and tidal conditions for crossing the Suez Canal. They considered the Jewish religious holidays, as well as the political calendar, to find a time when the military and the general public might be distracted. “We discovered that Yom Kippur fell on a Saturday and, what was more important, that it was the only day throughout the year in which radio and television stopped broadcasting as part of the religious observance and traditions of that feast. In other words, a speedy recall of the reserve forces using public means could not be made.”¹⁴ Taking all these factors into consideration, el-Gamasy and his officers recommended beginning operations on Saturday, October 6, 1973. While the general prepared Egypt’s military for war, Sadat traveled to Riyadh to persuade the Saudis to deploy an entirely different weapon: oil. Sadat made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia in late August 1973 to brief King Faysal on his secret war plans and to ask for Saudi support and cooperation. Sadat needed to be persuasive, for the Saudis had consistently refused Arab requests to deploy the oil weapon since the disastrous experience of 1967. Fortunately for Sadat, the world was far more dependent on Arab oil in 1973 than it had been in 1967. American oil production had reached its peak in 1970 and was now falling each year. Saudi Arabia had replaced Texas as the swing producer that could fill shortfalls in global supplies simply by pumping more oil. As a result, the United States and the industrial powers were more vulnerable to the oil weapon than ever before. Arab analysts estimated in 1973 that the United States imported some 28 percent, Japan some 44 percent, and the European states as much as 70–75 percent of their oil from the Arab world.¹⁵ The Saudi king, a committed Arab nationalist, believed his country could use its oil resources effectively and promised Sadat his support if Egypt went to war against Israel. “But give us time,” Faysal reportedly told Sadat. “We don’t want to use our oil as a weapon in a battle which only goes on for two or three days, and then stops. We want to see a battle which goes on for long enough time for world opinion to be mobilized.?¹⁶ There was no point in deploying a weapon after war was over, as the Saudis learned in 1967. The Saudi king wanted to be sure the next war would last long enough for the oil weapon to be effective.