William Durupul

And me, William Durupul.

And today we've got something a little bit different.

I think we should start with one of Avi Schleim's great insights from his book, The Iron Wall.

And he very much blames the intelligence failures in 1973, the fact that the Egyptians were able to surprise the Israelis as much as they did, to what he calls ha-conceptia in Hebrew.

It's a set of assumptions that he says are deeply embedded in the Israeli military thinking of the period.

And it allows the Israelis completely to underestimate all the Arab armies, but particularly the Egyptians.

So if you remember back in the 1967 episode that we did with Eugene, the key Israeli coup was to destroy the Egyptian Air Force, the enormous Egyptian Air Force at that point, on the ground in the first 10 minutes of the war.

And an idea embedded itself in Israeli military thinking that Egypt will not go to war without first achieving air superiority of Israel.

And as they'd lost most of their air force in 1967 and had yet to rebuild it, that basically Israel was completely safe.

The other idea is that Syria, which was a smaller power than Egypt, Egypt we don't really think of today as a kind of major military power in the Middle East, but it was in the 1960s.

And the idea that Israel had at this point was that Syria would not attack without Egypt and that a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian assault was therefore impossible if there hadn't been a proper Egyptian rebuilding of its air wing.

It's a very reasonable assumption.

Air power is the key in desert warfare, and Egypt genuinely had not restored its air force to anything like 1967 levels.

But according to Avi's assessment, this had led to such contempt for the Arab armies following this lightning victory in 1967 that we talked about.

They simply thought there was really no possibility of Arab assault on Israel in the early 70s, and therefore there were no countermeasures in place.

He's called the donkey, in fact, initially, by the kind of the grandees in Cairo, yeah.

So no one really wants to sort of break the deadlock.

Israel has got hold of the West Bank and Gaza.

Jordan has lost the West Bank.

Egypt has lost Gaza.