The Yom Kippur War’s enduring impact on Israel’s politics 

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Fifty years later, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is still a byword for negligence and incompetence in Israel. Its memory haunts security briefings to this day, and lingers in such phrases as the “pollsters’ Yom Kippur,” used after a big miss on election night. In its 75 years of existence, Israel has yet to experience another fiasco on so colossal a scale.

It took a few years for the memory of that war to affect the Israeli public’s voting patterns. Before 1973, Israelis trusted state institutions, by and large. The Workers’ Party of Israel (Mapai) ruled unchallenged and was seen as a “party with a state.” Then-opposition leader Menachem Begin appeared destined to remain forever “in a mine-strewn wilderness,” as he himself would put it on the night in 1977 when he finally won the premiership.

It took the scarred Israeli public time to internalize that responsibility for the debacle was shared by the military and political echelons. In the elections held right after the war (in December 1973), Mapai — now rebranded as “Alignment” — still won big. After Golda Meir’s resignation in April 1974, Yitzhak Rabin won the party’s leadership vote. The hero of the Six Day War had been abroad during Yom Kippur 1973, serving as ambassador to the US, and was untarnished by the disaster.

Israelis remembered how Golda Meir, Israel’s first (and to date, only) woman prime minister, spoke on the first day of the war about the Arabs’ “act of madness.” Golda wasn’t deliberately misleading the public. At that fateful hour, she herself had absolute faith in the defense establishment.