In the Six-Day War of 1967, the Israelis submitted their Arab enemies to a devastating and lightning-fast defeat. In doing so they confirmed all their preexisting military beliefs: the Arabs were undisciplined, their weaponry was outdated, and their strategies were stale. Six years later the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat exploited these prejudices in signaling that his army was in disarray and still humbled by its defeat in 1967, and that he was squabbling with his Soviet patrons. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the Israelis were caught almost totally by surprise.
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