Peter R. Newman is a retired doctor in Toronto. He is the author of the forthcoming memoir In Harm’s Way: A Doctor Let Loose in the World.
Fifty years ago this weekend, I was looking out at a spectacular view of sea, forests and mountains from Prospect Point in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, but my radio was tuned to the jarring news a world away. I’d biked there on a day off from my busy medical practice.
On Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria unleashed co-ordinated attacks on Israel. Air-raid sirens were sounding throughout Israel, shattering the calm of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews. People in synagogues were turning to each other in disbelief, then hurrying home, scrambling to join their reserve army units.
The announcer spoke rapidly. The forest and mountains faded around me.
The Egyptian army had crossed the Suez Canal under clouds of covering smoke and was overrunning Israel’s defensive Bar Lev Line. Syrian fighter planes were now over the Golan Heights. Israel had been taken by surprise, in part because of misreadings by Israeli intelligence, and was completely unprepared. Casualties were soon heavy on both sides. Having recently worked in Israel in Jewish and Arab communities, I felt an urgent need to go as a medical volunteer, be useful. Enjoying this calm view halfway around the world suddenly felt irrelevant, self-indulgent.
Only 450 Israeli soldiers had been defending the 175-kilometre defensive line along the Suez Canal. They were quickly overrun by 100,000 Egyptian troops with tanks and missiles. The Bar Lev Line had been regarded as impregnable. Yet the Egyptians had not only massive superiority in numbers, but also two game-changers: better surface-to-air missiles, and hand-held anti-tank weapons. With this new Soviet weaponry, a single infantryman could now take out a tank, even a low-flying jet fighter. Considered invincible since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel now faced the most serious threat to its existence in history.
A military analyst came on the air. “The logical next step,” he said, “is for the Syrians and Egyptians to bomb Israel’s airports.” It made strategic sense.
A wrenching thought surfaced, jarring me: If I went to the war and the airports were destroyed – for Israel’s defeat now seemed entirely possible – I would be trapped, unable to return home. How victorious Arab nations might treat the conquered population (and me) was something I didn’t want to think about. I slept fitfully that night, pondering the danger I’d be putting myself into; the risks of leaving my wife, two-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. In the morning, as light came, I knew what I had to do. My fear lessened; I felt calmer, resolved.
There was a nighttime refuelling stop in Paris. French soldiers stood on the rooftops around our floodlit plane, alert, machine guns at the ready, guarding us. The war suddenly felt decidedly less abstract.
The next morning I walked on the eerily quiet streets of Tel Aviv. There were no men; they were all away in the army. All car headlights were painted blue to make the city darker at night, a dimmer target.
The Beersheba Hospital wards were filled with wounded soldiers. Many of them had been badly burned in the Sinai desert when their tanks were hit. Trapped inside as their tanks turned into fiery infernos, impenetrably closed. Now they lay motionless in their beds, heavily bandaged, sustained by intravenous fluids.
I thought of the contrast to back home. What a long way from treating sick children, heart attacks, ulcers, asthma. The patients who would get better.
On the neurosurgery ward, young people lay unconscious, some on life-support machines. At their bedsides, X-rays mounted on screens showed fragments of metal shrapnel in their brains. Some were undergoing neurosurgery to remove shrapnel. My eye caught a number of X-rays showing shrapnel lodged in the brainstem, the vital area that controls the body’s most basic functions: breathing and circulation. Surgery could not be performed in this key area; these people would not recover.
Outside, the war was being portrayed differently. The talk in the media was of battles on land and in the air, territory lost or gained. The statements of generals, presidents and prime ministers. Here, in this muted hospital ward, such talk felt artificial. The surprise attack and the new, deadly weaponry were now personalized, made human in the saddest possible way. Here l had the overwhelming realization that war was about young people, full of promise, full of dreams, struck down.
How, I wondered, do you persuade people on either side to move beyond patriotic rhetoric, feel compassion for the enemy? I carried with me the images of the shockingly burned young men; the kids on respirators, brain-dead, with no hope of recovery.
Israel’s citizen army, with every man in the reserves called up, eventually held off the attackers. When the war ended, 19 days later, Israel was pushing back, deep into Egypt itself. Its airports were not bombed, and five weeks after leaving home, I was back with my family in the calm of distant Canada. I felt relief, but the memories allowed no joy.
In the years that followed, nationalism and new ideologies would change Israel’s political agenda. Israel’s identity as a secular, inclusive society is now being challenged under Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, in which religious extremists have obtained political power.
This summer, 50 years after the war, I returned for a visit. Together with family members, I joined one of the enormous pro-democracy protests in central Tel Aviv. The democracy movement has been rocking Israel with weekly demonstrations, many of them massive, for nine months.
The streets that were deserted on my wartime arrival were now energized, packed with 150,000 demonstrators. They were rallying against the government’s measures to weaken the independent judiciary, by abolishing the “reasonableness” clause that allows Israel’s Supreme Court to overrule government decisions. They also opposed the rising prominence of patriarchal religion in state affairs; government plans to increase the power of rabbinic courts threatened women’s and LGBTQ rights.
I found myself among hundreds of doctors and nurses marching with banners proclaiming “Democracy.” In July, the country’s doctors went on a 24-hour strike to protest the judicial overhaul.
Many were also protesting the continuing occupation of Arab territories captured by Israel in 1967. Six years later, the occupation was the prime cause of the Yom Kippur War, launched by Egypt and Syria to regain those lands.
In 1973, Israel, taken by surprise, was threatened by catastrophe. At the cost of many young lives on both sides, the country was victorious. Yet sadly, the recipe for war remains. The repressive occupation has now been going on for 56 years. It continues to engender terrorist attacks, and cause loss of life on both sides. It also undermines Israel’s democratic founding principles.
There are no signs it will end any time soon. On the contrary, members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition are pushing for expanding Jewish settlement in the occupied territories; some advocate full annexation of the West Bank. It’s a recipe for endless conflict.
As Albert Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
One of the Israeli groups in the mass protest I joined is named Re’acha Kemocha, short for the commandment from Leviticus: “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Ultimately, can we ever get beyond the conflicting ideologies we fervently subscribe to, truly listen, and come to see each other as fully human?
On my return home 50 years ago, people asked me about the events I had seen. I tried to explain. Yet the reality of war seemed to be too distant from most Canadians for me to get it across. The gap between the reach of my words and what I desperately wanted to convey was just too wide. Eventually I gave up trying.
When I looked out again at the panorama of sea and mountains surrounding Vancouver, the vista had altered. Overlaying it was a translucent film of memory. It seemed the eyes of those beleaguered patients were projected onto a gossamer curtain over the patterns of the mountainside forest. Images of faces flickered before me.
A young couple startled me. They were talking, smiling, happily enjoying the view. They stood a few feet away. I felt achingly distant from them, those whose landscape had not been changed.