Between Jerusalem and Washington: the war

His part: Throughout the Yom Kippur War Gazit ran the cable line between Jerusalem and Washington: front reports, arms requests and messages to Kissinger.

During the Yom Kippur War and the week after, Gazit, as Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office, stood at the Israeli end of the cable channel between Golda Meir’s office and the embassy in Washington. The cables of Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and Minister Mordechai Shalev were addressed to him, and through him the office sent out positions, instructions and reports.

He was one of the small team at Meir’s side throughout the war, with Minister Israel Galili, military secretary Brig. Gen. Israel Lior and bureau chief Eli Mizrahi. That role can be followed day by day in the cables opened to the public in 2022, as the historian Hagai Tsoref has done.

During the war he also brought the diplomat Yosef Ben-Aharon into the office; Ben-Aharon stayed on under Rabin, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported in 1976.

The work began before the first shot. On 5 October, the eve of Yom Kippur, it was agreed at Golda Meir’s office to inform the United States and ask it to do all it could with Egypt and Syria to prevent war.

According to Meron Medzini, Gazit wrote an urgent cable to the embassy in Washington and ordered that its contents be passed at once to Kissinger: the two armies’ deployment stemmed either from an intention to attack or from fear that Israel would strike first, and Israel had no intention of launching military action.

The message was sent late in the afternoon, and reached Kissinger only the next morning, after war had broken out.

Medzini, who was spokesman of the Prime Minister’s Bureau in 1973‎–‎1974, described the office during the war: in the room next to Meir’s sat Lior, Mizrahi and the secretaries, and in a side room sat Gazit. Everyone chain-smoked, ate sandwiches and drank black coffee, and the noise was unbearable, from phones that never stopped ringing and messengers bringing in cables.

By his account Galili, Allon and Gazit were her key foreign-policy advisers in those days, and they formulated most of the correspondence with the Nixon administration.

His office’s cable file from the war, kept at the State Archives (A-5157/3), shows the work up close, from the first night. On 6 October at 11:50 p.m. he told Minister Mordechai Shalev in Washington that a long cable in English with an updated situation report was on its way — “you may pass it to Naftali”, the code name for Kissinger.

Cables used code names rather than names, so that if they fell into other hands it would not be obvious at once who was meant. From then on he sent situation summaries from the fronts almost daily, including counts of the Soviet airlift planes to Egypt and Syria.

On 15 October at 2 a.m., at Dinitz’s request, he set out the tank arithmetic: 250 tanks destroyed in the first week, and 530 out of service for repairs lasting from a week to more than three months.

With the losses still expected, the total came to about 1,200; less what would be repaired in the coming weeks, it came to the round figure of 1,000 tanks that Israel had requested.

Behind the numbers stood a request from the Prime Minister. The file holds Golda Meir’s letter to President Nixon, in English and undated. She recalled his promise on 9 October to replace all losses, wrote that not a single replacement plane had yet arrived in Israel, and asked for at least 40 Phantoms within two or three days.

On 13 October Dinitz reported to him that Kissinger had told him three giant transport planes were leaving that day, 20 more charter planes were leaving, and the number of Phantoms to arrive by Monday had risen to 14.

On 19 October, as it became clear that a ceasefire was near and Kissinger was about to fly to Moscow, Gazit set out Israel’s position in a cable to Dinitz: “It is vital in our view that this terrible war should not end merely in a dubious ceasefire. We are striving to enter negotiations and to achieve peace treaties”.

According to Tsoref, this was the government’s position, and it held something new: a readiness to speak of full peace, not only of step-by-step arrangements. The fear was of a ceasefire that would stop the fighting and leave the armies facing each other with no commitment to peace talks, the state of “no war, no peace” Israel already knew well.

Three days later the Security Council adopted Resolution 338, which did tie the ceasefire to the opening of negotiations between the parties. The next day he also reported to Dinitz on the developing oil crisis.

On 22 October Kissinger arrived directly from Moscow. After fifteen minutes alone with Golda Meir in Herzliya, Gazit and Kissinger’s aide Peter Rodman joined the conversation, and Gazit later reported to Dinitz on the talks. In the days that followed, as fighting continued despite the ceasefire and the United States demanded a return to the 22 October lines, the cables setting out Israel’s position went through him: the fighting was continuing because of Egyptian violations.

On the evening of 23 October, with fighting around the Third Army still going on, he sent a message through Brig. Gen. Israel Lior and Efraim Halevy to Dinitz, who was sitting with Kissinger at that hour: Israel had made important gains that day in response to Egyptian aggression, and must not lose them.

“There are realities on the ground,” he wrote; “he always says that what counts is the realities on the ground”. “He” is Kissinger. The fighting had gone on after the 22 October ceasefire, the IDF had completed the encirclement of the Third Army, and Washington was demanding that Israel return to that day’s lines.

Gazit handed Kissinger back his own favourite argument, that in the end the situation on the ground decides, to make the case for keeping the gains. On the morning of 24 October, as part of his regular reports, he updated Dinitz on the fronts so that he could brief the Americans.

He wrote that “in general, the night was quiet on the Egyptian front”, with similar conditions on the Syrian front. The fighting had not stopped that day: that evening, at 4:35 p.m. Washington time, Gazit telephoned Dinitz with a message from Military Intelligence that the Egyptians had opened fire along the whole front, with tank movement and artillery fire.

On 25 October Gazit was also following a danger at sea. During the war Egypt had blocked the Bab el-Mandeb strait, at the mouth of the Red Sea, to shipping bound for Israel.

The Israeli tug “Shai”, 900 tons, of the Netivei Neft company, the state company then producing oil in Sinai, had set out on 19 October, and when the ceasefire took effect she was told to stop and wait at sea near Massawa, a port in Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia.

During the night and morning a vessel was picked up on radar closing in on her. At 13:30 Gazit sent Dinitz a top-secret cable: “Please bring urgently to Naftali’s attention”, that is, to Kissinger, that an Egyptian destroyer had apparently set off in pursuit of “Shai”, and that an encounter could happen within the hour.

He added that an American destroyer was nearby, and that in the same area, the day before, an Egyptian destroyer had fired warning shots at the American ship “La Salle”. In a second cable, at 14:45, he reported that “Shai” had managed to move away to a range of 30 kilometres, and “we assume that she managed to evade the Egyptian destroyer”.

In the margin of both cables a handwritten note records that the information was passed to Scowcroft on 25 October at 18:15: “I passed to Scowcroft 1815 25/10”. Brent Scowcroft was the US Deputy National Security Adviser, Kissinger’s deputy in that role. Who wrote the note, and whether Kissinger himself read the cables, is not known.

On 25 October Dinitz told him that a special direct line to Kissinger at the White House and the State Department had been installed in his office. The next evening his office file preserved a harsh message from Kissinger to Dinitz. Kissinger wrote that he had heard heavy fighting had broken out again, and that US intelligence reported Israel had opened fire.

“We have gone to the brink but we shall not be manouvered by you into a war,” he wrote. If it proved that Israel had started the fighting, the United States would go public against the Israeli government. At the foot of the page it is noted that Kissinger expected a reply within thirty minutes, and that Dinitz retorted sharply.

On 29 October Dinitz relayed to him Kissinger’s message that President Nixon would be glad to receive the Prime Minister. The next day, in a single day of discussions, the leadership prepared for the visit.

Gazit summarised in a cable to Dinitz the six issues Israel would raise in Washington: supplies to the encircled Third Army, the exchange of prisoners and the lifting of the naval blockade, the IDF remaining on its current lines, Israel’s proposal for an exchange of territory, clarification of what had been promised to the Soviets, and continued arms supplies.

These were the issues with which the talks at the White House opened on 1 November.

After the war Gazit went back to the cables and wrote twelve summaries of its events: the contacts with the Americans before it broke out, procurement up to the airlift, the negotiations over the ceasefire, the element of time in the talks with Kissinger, and the supplies to the Third Army.

The first is dated 11 November 1973, less than three weeks after the ceasefire; the latest, 7 May 1975. The State Archives published them as an appendix of their own to the war collection, describing such records as “a source of information of inestimable value for understanding the dynamics of the discussions” (site translation). The file, 196 scanned pages, is open to read.

The file also preserves his work during the war itself. The entry for 6 October, 09:00 Washington time, records that Minister Shalev told Kissinger that the Egyptians and Syrians had opened hostilities, and adds in brackets: “This message was given on the basis of a telephone conversation with M. Gazit at 08.25” (site translation).

Between 16 and 21 October about twenty situation cables from the fronts went out under his name. Four of them were written in English, “for Naftali”, and were meant for Kissinger during his talks in Moscow. According to a letter by Professor Yuval Ne’eman kept in the file, the two men worked on them together.

In 1975 he returned to the material once more. “Dr Kissinger keeps raising two claims”, he wrote to Ne’eman on 8 May: that he had thought Israel needed only three days to complete its operations, and that the main battles were in the north, near Ismailia.

Gazit checked the cables and concluded: “From our reports it was clear to K. that the battle was in the south and not in the north.”

On the same page he also set down what the record does not prove: Dinitz named 72 hours once, and “there is no way of discovering the source in Israel that authorised him to ask for that length of time” (site translations).14 sources+

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