Warriors Against Israel: How Israel Won the Battle to Become America's Ally

Warriors Against Israel is the concluding volume in Donald Neff's acclaimed trilogy on America's role in Israel's three major wars since its establishment in 1948. This work examines the most violent conflict of all, the 1973 war. It traces how and why the war began, how the superpowers once again nearly came into direct conflict in the Middle East, and how Israel emerged from the war closer than ever to the United States. The events take place between the time Anwar Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 as Egypt's leader to the end of Henry Kissinger's dramatic shuttle diplomacy in 1975. Between these benchmarks of history there occurred the dramatic growth of the Palestinian guerrilla movement, the terrorist actions that led to the disaster of Black September in Jordan, the oil boycott that brought about the greatest peaceful transfer of wealth in history, and the historic disengagement pacts between Israel and its two most powerful Arab neighbors, Egypt and Syria. The war itself was a classic conflict fought with the latest and most sophisticated conventional weapons. The Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal was a stunning military achievement, unanticipated by Israel and thought impossible by much of the world. Equally threatening to Israel was Syria's coordinated attack on the Golan Heights which brought Syrian troops to the edge of Israel's Galilee heartland. Only by tenacious, grueling combat did Israel manage to blunt the two-pronged Arab attack and perform its own historic crossing of the canal.