The Ramazan war
Unlike Abba Eban’s My People, Howard M. Sachar’s book A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time has a restricted time span. This makes it a current affairs book with greater readability.

The book takes us along familiar lines — Theodore Herzl, his 1896 pamphlet ‘Der Judenstaat’ [The Jewish State], World War I, the Balfour declaration (“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of ….”), the British occupation of Palestine — euphemistically called a ‘mandate’ — the beginning of the ‘return’ of Jews from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states, World War II, the UN’s approval of the Partition plan of Palestine, Britain’s exit, the establishment of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.

Some comments deserve to be enjoyed for their truthfulness. Herzl knew how the British were keen to help Zionists have a Judenstaat but he also knew Neville Chamberlain (not prime minister in 1923) considered “the Jews as talented agents of British imperial policy.”

The Sachar book’s strong point is its exhaustive account of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Also called the Ramazan war, it began on October 6, 1973, when the Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal and into the occupied Golan heights.

In a ninth installment of ‘Evergreens’ from his bookshelf, Muhammad Ali Siddiqi remembers books about wars that defined the spirit of a people and Pakistan’s trailblazing English writers

The author gives credit to President Anwar Sadat for his “brilliant plan of political subterfuge.” In his speeches, he repeated the “moment of decision” so often that the Israelis and the Egyptian people pooh-poohed it as a joke. In fact, such was the secrecy of the Egyptian war plans that, according to the book, “thirty minutes before the scheduled offensive, Egyptian soldiers strolled along the canal banks without weapons or helmets.”

Behind this subterfuge, Sadat and his generals were able to position close to the Suez Canal five infantry divisions, three mixed infantry and tank divisions, and 22 independent infantry, commando, and para-troop brigades. On the whole, Egyptian battle-ready forces along the canal numbered 600,000 men, 2,000 tanks, 2,300 artillery pieces, 160 SAM [surface-to-air missile] batteries, and 550 combat planes.

When the Egyptian offensive finally began at 2pm on October 6, a stunned Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defence minister, said: “The fate of the Third Temple is at stake.” The Third Temple refers to a hypothetical rebuilt temple in Jerusalem that would succeed the two temples destroyed in the 6th century BCE and 1st century CE.

A major logistic challenge for the Egyptian high command was how to put tanks and infantry east of the canal. However, Egyptian engineers prepared in one night 11 pontoon bridges and, within 24 hours, the Egyptians had succeeded in moving five infantry and armoured divisions three miles east of the canal into occupied Sinai.

The Israeli high command had manned the defences along the canal thinly, taken in as it was by Egyptian deception. Relaxing in the post-lunch afternoon nap, Israeli soldiers watched in disbelief as the Egyptian juggernaut moved across the canal to take up positions three miles into occupied territory.

On October 8, at the height of Egyptian successes, chief of staff Mohamed Husseiny Shazly could declare, “the war has retrieved Arab honour.” He had expected 10,000 casualties on the first day; there were only 180.  

Ultimately Israel’s military superiority, backed by emergency US reinforcements, turned the tide of the war, with the Israeli military crossing the Suez canal and advancing on Cairo. However, the political after-effects of the war were immense — the oil embargo, imperial Iran’s crucial role in oil diplomacy, the support from non-Arab oil exporters, the rise in oil prices, and the emergence of Arab oil power as a major factor in international geopolitics.

By any standards, the Sachar book makes fascinating reading. It has been with me for decades, but I have not been able to read all of its over-1,150 pages.

The 1965 War

The late Brig A.A.K. Chaudhry’s September ’65 makes me relive those euphoric September days when the Pakistani people felt as one people, one community and one nation for the first time since Independence.

This was unlike the first war with India on Kashmir. That war didn’t elicit a fervent response because, somehow, the people of Pakistan considered it part of the Partition holocaust. In the 1965 war, however, every Pakistani felt himself to be a soldier of the Pakistan army, and Gen Ayub Khan was never more popular.

As a corps artillery commander, the author took part in all the four major battles of the 1965 war — Chhamb, Jaurian, Sialkot and Chawinda — and is blunt in his opinion of the army high command’s conduct of war. At one stage, there were two infantry companies between Lahore and the Indian army. He says the war ended in a stalemate, with neither side succeeding in capturing “any objective of even the smallest strategic importance.” 

 Pakistan’s English writers

Published about a quarter century ago, Muneeza Shamsie’s A Dragonfly in the Sun is a path-breaking book about Pakistan’s English writers. Even though the number of Pakistanis writing in English has since then grown phenomenally, Dragonfly has a charm of its own, reviving as it does the memories of a number of writers long forgotten — Adrian Hussain, Bapsi Sidhwa, Moeen Faruqi, Zaib-u-Nissa Hamidullah, Maki Kureshi and a fascinating character — Kaleem Omar.

Even though he was not on its payroll, Omar was virtually a Dawn man. Haroon House was his headquarters, where he used to work like a machine in the office of The Star, the Dawn group’s evening paper. He was a prolific writer, co-authored many books, including at least one book of poetry, and wrote for Dawn frequently. He had no middle class pretensions, lived in a hotel, seemed indifferent to food, sat on a stool and kept banging on his typewriter.    

He wrote for British journals and various anthologies, including Pieces of Eight; Pakistani Literature: The Contemporary English Writers and The Worlds of Muslim Imagination. He also edited the much acclaimed Wordfall: Three Pakistani Poets. During the Islamic summit in Lahore in 1974, he took part in a poetry reading, and his work was broadcast in America and India. Space constraints do not allow me to produce some of his widely acclaimed pieces.

While it is difficult to pick and choose out of the 44 poets the book mentions, I would like the reader to know a bit about a brilliant poet and writer, Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah. Besides writing a weekly column for Dawn, she had her own magazine, The Mirror, whose editorials so annoyed the government that it banned it. She went to court and won the case.

She wrote many books of poetry, including Lotus Leaves and The Flute of Memory, but the one that was widely acclaimed was The Young Wife and Other Stories, her collection of short stories. She, however, invited criticism as well as praise for one story contained in that book that no one expected in Pakistan of those days — ‘The Bull and the She Devil’, a short story about sex.

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 15th, 2024