The Myth of Israeli Self-Reliance
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's statement that Israel relies only on itself contradicts Israel's military history, throughout which Israel has needed American arms shipments.
Exactly 40 years ago, according the Jewish calendar, in the middle of the Yom Kippur fast, the holiest day in Judaism, Israel was caught with its pants down, plunging from the standing of a smug and invincible regional empire to that of a beaten, scared, haunted state fighting for its life against superior forces.
On the occasion of this holy day [Yom Kippur is Sept. 13-14 this year and took place Oct. 5-6 in 1973], the Israeli press has been devoting hundreds of pages to stories about that trauma. More and more protocols have been released from the archives, and a tsunami of nonfiction books floods the bookstores. This is taking place in spite of the fact that more than half of Israel's citizens in 2013 did not take part in that watershed experience. (They had either not yet been born or had not yet immigrated to the country). On that Saturday afternoon of Oct. 6, 1973, at 13:55, when the sirens wailed and the fasting was cut short, thousands of Egyptian and Syrian tanks, along with tens of thousands of soldiers, charged a small contingent of Israeli forces that defended the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. These troops crossed the canal and also nearly conquered the Golan Heights before they were stopped.
After the smoke dissipated and the dead were buried (Israel lost some 2,700 soldiers — an astronomical number compared with the size of the population back then of around 3 million people) and the POWs were exchanged, what has kept reverberating to this day is the statement by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan on the second day of the war: "I'm afraid of the destruction of the Third Temple." That's what Dayan — the epitome of the omnipotent Israeli hero in international eyes — had said. That trauma is still alive and kicking today.
Let's fast-forward to 2013: Just before the holiday, on Sept. 11 — in one of his many speeches shortly after it became apparent that Russia and the US were embracing a diplomatic compromise in connection with Syria's chemical-weapons arsenal — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uttered a sentence that made the headlines across Israel's news outlets: "If I'm not for myself, who is for me, and if we're not for ourselves, who will be for us?"
