Ravs and Rebbes: Leaders for our time

This week one of modern Israel’s greatest war heroes, Yanosh ben Gal, was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Givat Shaul. To honor his memory, this story is excerpted from a 2011 column:

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 1973, the seventh armored brigade, stationed on the Bar Lev line along the Suez Canal on the border with Egypt, was given a week’s leave for the holidays. As the men of the seventh headed off for R&R all over the country, Yanosh, the brigade commander, stopped off at the General Staff base in Tel Aviv, an ingrained habit to keep abreast of the intelligence reports.

What he saw alarmed him: Egyptian and Syrian troop buildups along the canal and in the Golan Heights, a increase of Arab military radio traffic, and an unusual amount of activity in the Arab airfields. Two weeks before that fateful Yom Kippur, Yanosh became convinced the country was headed for war. He immediately went to the central command radio room and called his division commander, advising him of his opinion, and asking for a first-stage general call up of critical reserves, and the recall of all the troops that had been given leave that very afternoon.

But that is a lot of work, and intelligence reports can be interpreted in different ways, so the division commander disagreed. Convinced as he was that his country was in grave danger, Yanosh went over his commander’s head, eventually appealing to the chief of general staff himself, commander of the entire Israeli army at the time, Dado Elazar. 

But no one wanted to listen. Flushed with the success of the ’67 war, when Israeli forces wiped out much larger Arab armies, no one seemed capable of imagining that these same Arab armies might be poised to destroy the State of Israel.