War broke out minutes past two on the afternoon of Saturday, October 6, 1973, as the Syrian and Egyptian armies simultaneously attacked Israel to the north and south. In spite of Egyptian precautions to maintain secrecy, Israeli intelligence was convinced that an attack was imminent, though they assumed that a more limited assault would come toward sunset. An all-out, two-front war was but the first surprise for the Israeli military. Under a blistering artillery attack—el-Gamasy claimed the Egyptians fired over 10,000 rounds in the first minutes of conflict—waves of Egyptian commandoes crossed the Suez Canal in dinghies and stormed the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”). The Egyptian troops suffered very light casualties in overcoming what were widely believed impregnable Israeli positions. “At five minutes past two the first news of the battle started coming in to Centre Number Ten [central command],” journalist Mohamed Heikal recalled. “President Sadat and [Commander-in-Chief] Ahmad Ismail listened with astonishment. It seemed as though what they were watching was a training exercise: ‘Mission accomplished . . . mission accomplished.’ It all sounded too good to be true.”¹⁷ Israeli commanders listened with no less disbelief as their soldiers in the Bar-Lev fortifications, their guard down during Yom Kippur observances, sounded the alert and declared their positions untenable in the face of superior enemy forces. Syrian tanks overran Israeli positions and pressed deeply into the Golan Heights. Both the Egyptian and Syrian air forces swept deep inside Israel to attack key military positions. When the Israelis scrambled their own air force, their fighter jets were intercepted by Soviet SAM 6 missiles as soon as they reached the fronts. Gone was the air supremacy of the 1967 War, as the Israelis lost twenty-seven planes over the Egyptian front alone in the opening hours of the war and were forced to hold their aircraft fifteen miles behind the Canal Zone. Israeli tanks sent to relieve their troops along the Bar-Lev Line faced a similar shock, encountering Egyptian infantrymen armed with Soviet wire-guided antitank missiles that knocked out scores of Israeli armor. With both the Israeli ground and air forces held in check, Egyptian military engineers set up high-pressure water pumps and literally washed away the sand ramparts of the Bar-Lev Line, opening the way for Egyptian forces to pass through Israeli front lines into the Sinai Peninsula beyond. Pontoon bridges were laid across the canal for Egyptian troops and armor to cross over to the east bank and into the Sinai. At the end of the first day of fighting, some 80,000 Egyptian soldiers had crossed through the Bar-Lev Line and were dug into positions up to 4 kilometers (about 2.5 miles) inside the Sinai Peninsula. On the northern front, Syrian troops broke through Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights, inflicting heavy losses on Israeli tanks and aircraft in a concerted press toward Lake Tiberias. With the benefit of near total surprise, the initiative was squarely in the hands of Egypt and Syria in the opening hours of the war, as the Israelis scrambled to respond to the gravest threat the Jewish state had ever faced. The Israeli military regrouped and went on the offensive. Within forty-eight hours reserves were called and deployed, holding positions in the Sinai and concentrating their offensive on the Golan, in the hopes of defeating Syria first before concentrating on the larger Egyptian army. In response, Iraqi, Saudi, and Jordanian infantry and armor units were dispatched to Syria to resist the Israeli counterattack in the Golan. Israel and the Arabs were suffering heavy casualties and running down their reserves of arms and ammunition in the fiercest fighting yet witnessed in the Arab-Israeli conflict. By the end of the first week of the war, both sides were in need of resupply.¹⁸ On October 10 the Soviets began airlifting weapons to Syria and Egypt, and on October 14 the Americans initiated their own secret airlift of arms and ammunition to the Israelis. Armed with new American tanks and artillery, the Israelis mounted a successful counterattack that by October 16 had overwhelmed the Syrian front and led to the encirclement of Egyptian forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal. The military situation was grinding to a stalemate with Israeli troops consolidating their advantage over their Arab adversaries. It was at this point that the Arab states decided to deploy the oil weapon. On October 16, Arab oil ministers gathered in Kuwait. They had a new sense of confidence and self-respect in light of Egyptian and Syrian gains in the first days of the war. The leaders of the Arab oil states were also buoyed by the knowledge that the industrial world was dependent on them. This meant that when the Arabs raised the price of their oil, they were able to inflict immediate punishment on those industrial countries that supported Israel. On the first day of their meeting in Kuwait, the Arab oil ministers imposed a 17 percent price hike without so much as a phone call to the now powerless Western oil companies. “This is a moment for which I have been waiting a long time,” Saudi oil minister Shaykh Ahmad Zaki Yamani told one of the delegates. “The moment has come. We are masters of our own commodity.”¹⁹ The impact on oil markets was immediate and provoked widespread panic. By the end of the day, oil traders had raised the posted price of a barrel of oil to $5.11, up 70 percent over the trading price of $2.90 in June 1973. The price hike was but the first crack of the whip to get the world’s attention. The following day the Arab oil ministers released a communiquй outlining a series of production cuts and embargoes to force the industrial powers to modify their policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. ?All Arab oil exporting countries shall forthwith cut their production respectively by no less than five percent of the September production,? it read, ?and maintain the same rate of reduction each month thereafter until the Israeli forces are fully withdrawn from all Arab territories occupied during the June 1967 War, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are restored.?²⁰ The oil ministers reassured friendly states that they would not be affected by these measures. Only “countries which demonstrate moral and material support to the Israeli enemy,” the oil ministers explained, “will be subjected to severe and progressive reduction in Arab oil supplies, leading to a complete halt.” The United States and the Netherlands, given their traditional friendship for Israel, were threatened with a complete embargo “until such time as the Governments of the USA and Holland or any other country that takes a stand of active support to the Israeli aggressors reverse their positions and add their weight behind the world community’s consensus to end the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and bring about the full restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” After demonstrating their strength on the battlefield and over the oil markets, the Arab states opened a diplomatic front. The very day that the Arab oil states sent out their communiquй, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria met with President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in the White House. The Arab ministers found the American administration amenable to the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory occupied in June 1967 in return for full peace between Israel and the Arab states. The Algerian foreign minister asked why the resolution had never been implemented in the first place. “Kissinger said that, quite frankly, the reason was the complete military superiority of Israel. The weak, he said, don’t negotiate. The Arabs had been weak; now they were strong. The Arabs had achieved more than anyone, including themselves, had believed possible.”²¹ To the Arabs, it seemed that the Americans only understood force. The Nixon administration found itself in an unusually difficult position. It wanted to placate the Arab world but not at the expense of Israel’s security. This went beyond American loyalty to the Jewish state. In Cold War terms, the Americans were determined that Israel, with its American-supplied arms, should prevail over the Arabs with their Soviet weapons. When Israel turned to the United States with an emergency request to restore its depleted arsenal, President Nixon approved legislation on October 18 for a $2.2 billion arms package for the Jewish state. The blatant U.S. support for Israel’s war effort outraged the Arab world. One by one, the Arab oil states imposed a complete embargo on the United States. Arab oil output dropped by 25 percent, and oil prices spiked, eventually reaching a peak of $11.65 a barrel by December 1973. In six months, the price of oil had quadrupled, radically unsettling Western economies and hurting consumers. As reserves diminished, drivers faced long lines at the gas pumps and rationing of scarce petroleum resources. Western governments faced growing pressure from their citizens to bring the oil embargo to a close. The only way to resolve the oil crisis was to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. Sadat had fulfilled his strategic objectives and forced the United States to reengage with regional diplomacy. With Egyptian forces still dug in on the east bank of the Suez Canal, there was no longer any question of the international community coming to accept the canal as the de facto border between Egypt and Israel. The Egyptian leader now looked for the opportune moment to end the war and consolidate his gains. Sadat’s military position was growing weaker the longer the war went on. By the third week of October, Israel had gone on the offensive, its troops surging deep into Arab territory to within 60 miles of Cairo and only 20 miles of Damascus. These gains had come at a tremendous cost, with over 2,800 Israelis killed and 8,800 wounded—much higher casualties in proportion to Israel’s population than the 8,500 Arab soldiers killed and nearly 20,000 wounded in the war.²² The Israeli counterattack raised new tensions between the superpowers. As the Israelis threatened the encircled Egyptian Third Army on the west bank of the Suez Canal, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev sent a letter to U.S. president Richard Nixon calling for joint diplomatic action. Brezhnev warned that the Soviet Union might otherwise be forced to intervene unilaterally to protect its Egyptian allies. With the Red Army and the Soviet Navy on alert, U.S. intelligence feared the Soviets might introduce a nuclear deterrent in the conflict zone. U.S. security officials responded by placing their military on high nuclear alert for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis. After a few hours of heightened tension, the superpowers agreed to combine forces to seek a diplomatic end to the October War. The Egyptians and the Israelis were also impatient to bring the devastating armed conflict to an end. After sixteen days of intensive warfare, both sides were ready to lay down their arms, and a cease-fire was negotiated through the UN Security Council on October 22. That same day, the Security Council passed Resolution 338, which reaffirmed the earlier Resolution 242 calling for the convening of a peace conference and a resolution of Arab-Israeli differences through an exchange of land for peace. That December the United Nations convened an international conference in Geneva to address the issue of Arab land occupied by Israel in 1967 as a first step toward a just and enduring resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general of the United Nations, opened the conference on December 21, 1973. Cosponsored by the United States and the USSR, the conference was attended by delegations from Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. President Hafiz al-Asad of Syria refused to attend when he could not obtain a guarantee that the conference would restore all occupied territory to the Arab states. There was no Palestinian representation. The Israelis vetoed PLO participation, and the Jordanians were not keen to have a rival representing the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The conference in Geneva proved inconclusive. The Arab delegations failed to coordinate before the conference, and their presentations revealed deep divisions in Arab ranks. The Egyptians referred to the West Bank as Palestinian territory, undermining Jordan’s negotiating position. The Jordanians felt the Egyptians were punishing them for not having taken part in the 1973 War. The Jordanian foreign minister, Samir al-Rifa’i, called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories, including East Jerusalem. Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, insisted Israel would never return to the 1967 lines and declared Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel. The only significant result of the conference was the creation of a joint Egyptian-Israeli military working group to negotiate a disengagement of Egyptian and Israeli forces in the Sinai. In the aftermath of the failed conference, U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger embarked on several rounds of intensive shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Agreements were concluded between Egypt and Israel on January 18, 1974, and between Syria and Israel in May 1974. By these agreements, Egypt regained the whole of the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, with a UN-controlled buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli lines in the Sinai. The Syrians too regained a slice of Golan territory lost in the June 1967 War, again with a UN buffer force between Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan. With the war over and diplomacy in full swing, the Arab oil producers declared their objectives met and brought the oil embargo to a close on March 18, 1974. Yet the events of 1973 were not seen as an unqualified success by all Arab analysts. Mohamed Heikal believed Egypt and the Arab oil states conceded too much, too soon. Having imposed an embargo with specific political objectives—the evacuation of all Arab territories occupied in June 1967—the Arabs had lifted the embargo before any of their objectives had actually been met. “All that can be said on the credit side,” Heikal concluded, “is that the world saw the Arabs acting for once in unison and oil being used, even if clumsily, as a political weapon.”²³ Nevertheless, the Arab world did make significant gains in 1973. The display of discipline and unity of purpose impressed the international community and forced the superpowers to take the Arab world more seriously. On an economic level, the events of 1973 led to full Arab independence from the Western oil companies. In Shaykh Yamani’s words, the Arab oil states had asserted mastery over their own commodity and came out of the oil crisis immensely wealthier. Oil, which had traded at less than $3 a barrel before the 1973 crisis, stabilized at prices ranging from $11–13 for most of the 1970s. If Western cartoonists vilified the oil shaykh as a greedy hook-nosed character holding the world to ransom, Western businessmen were quick to flock to an emerging market of seemingly limitless resources. Even the Western oil companies had reaped enormous profits from the crisis, as their vast oil reserves appreciated with the spike in prices. Yet the events of October 1973 dealt the final blow to the oil concessions that had governed relations between Western companies and the Arab oil-producing states. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia followed Iraq and Libya in buying out the assets of Western oil companies for their national oil industries, bringing the age of the Western influence over Arab oil to a close by 1976. The October War was also a diplomatic success. Sadat had succeeded in using the war to break the deadlock with Israel. Concerted Arab military action had proved a credible threat to Israel, and the war had raised dangerous tensions between the Soviets and Americans. The international community now gave a high priority to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through diplomacy based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Through his bold initiatives in 1973, Anwar Sadat had secured Egypt’s interests—and placed Palestinian national aspirations in dire jeopardy. Although the UN resolutions upheld the territorial integrity of all the states in the region, they made no mention of the stateless Palestinians, other than to promise “a just settlement of the refugee problem.” The Palestine Liberation Organization, the effective government-in-exile of the Palestinian people, faced a stark choice: engage in the new diplomacy, or see Jordan and Egypt regain the West Bank and Gaza Strip through a comprehensive peace deal that would spell the end of Palestinian hopes for an independent state.