![]() Israel, the conventional narrative goes, was filled with hubris after its stunning victory in 1967. The Yom Kippur War remade both Israel and the wider Middle East. ![]() Kaufman makes use of these records, as well as interviews with participants on all sides, including Syrians, whose accounts have often been neglected in previous studies. It is also the first full-length study to appear since the recent declassification of war-related documents. Importantly, this is the first English-language look at the Yom Kippur War in two decades. This is not a boring tome of military history that leaves the reader lost in the weeds and burdened with unnecessary details and facts. His mastery of the subject is obvious and his writing style is engaging. Kaufman, an attorney turned real estate developer, has evidently spent decades studying the Yom Kippur War. As Uri Kaufman highlights in his new book, Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How it Created the Modern Middle East, this is for good reason. But for many Israelis, it is the Yom Kippur War whose memory is the most prevalent and contentious in the contemporary affairs of their country. “Wars in history,” the historian Michael Oren observed, “invariably become wars of history.” Oren was writing about the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated the combined armies of its Arab opponents in less than a week.
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