Between October 6, 1973 and October 7, 2023

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Two events shook the Arab region and the world, and entered modern Arab history from its widest gates: the first was on October 6, 1973, and the second was on October 7, 2023. But what is the biggest difference between them? With regard to the first event that sister Egypt celebrates on days like these, which is the victory of October 6, 1973, the simple Egyptian soldier performed the great crossing epic that afternoon by destroying the legend of the Bar Lev Line, and was able to liberate part of the lands of the Peninsula. Occupied Sinai. As for the second event, it was a terrifying nightmare for the Palestinians, the Gaza Strip in particular, and the Arabs in general. Hamas, the Palestinian faction that represents the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, and specifically its extremist military wing, led by Yahya Sinwar, carried out at dawn that day under the cover of darkness what it called the “Al-Aqsa Flood.” It captured approximately 251 Israeli people, including women and children, some of whom were brutally treated during the flood in the streets of Gaza. The Israeli retaliatory reactions were extremely violent, as they were also devastating in a way that exceeded all expectations, and that neither Hamas itself nor the Arabs had ever expected. Because it was completely different from the “traditional” retaliatory reactions carried out by Israel in response to the military operations carried out by Hamas inside the occupied Palestinian territories, and the outcome was catastrophic, unprecedented, and unparalleled in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, whether in the 1948 catastrophe or in the 1967 setback.

The total number of Egyptian forces that were able to cross to the eastern bank of the Suez Canal amounted to 800 Egyptian officers and 13,500 soldiers. In less than half an hour, they were able to build bridges from the western bank to the eastern bank of the canal. At three o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, those officers and soldiers opened a breach in the wall of the Bar Lev Line. The number of these officers and soldiers increased with the brilliant success achieved by the crossing plan in its entirety, which was like a thunderbolt that shook its Prime Minister at the time, Golda Meir, as well as its Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, as the surprise occurred as a result of three simultaneous things: the strategic surprise, the speed of crossing the canal in record time, and the failure of the Israeli forces to stop the Egyptian expansion east of it in the first hours. Hence, when crossing the canal, Dayan was not merely a breach of a water fortification, but rather a rapid collapse. Because of the Israeli miscalculation on which the defense of Sinai was based, let alone when the plan was extremely secret and surprising. Those officers and soldiers who crossed the canal were from all sides of the Egyptian spectrum, specifically from Muslims and Coptic Christians, and their voices were all raised in one voice, shaking the mainland of the Sinai Peninsula: “God is Great.” Religious pluralism did not prevent them from giving priority to the national spirit and unifying national identity over any considerations of narrow religious identity. The Egyptians immortalized this victory by sculpting statues of its heroes, and this epic is now taught in the most prestigious military colleges in the world. It is also necessary to acknowledge that this victory would not have been achieved without Soviet weapons.

Personally, I experienced those glorious, immortal days, moment by moment. That year, I happened to travel to Cairo with my colleague, friend Abdul Hamid Hassan, early before the start of the new academic year 1973-1974. Therefore, studies were suspended until after the war, and the three Egyptian newspapers covering the crossing tournaments disappeared early in the morning, but the housemaid reserved them for us by arrangement with one of the newspaper sellers. These were truly glorious, timeless and unforgettable days, while patriotic songs inspired us as well as our Egyptian brothers.