Eli Zeira, the Israeli major general and military intelligence chief who was forced out of his job after dismissing warnings that Syria and Egypt were on the verge of the attacks in 1973 that started the Yom Kippur War, died on Friday. He was 97.
His death was announced by the Israel Defense Forces, which did not say where he died.
General Zeira had served in the I.D.F. for more than two decades when he was chosen to run the military intelligence directorate in 1972. Resentments in the region had festered after Israel’s victory over an alliance of Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War. As a result of that conflict, Israel came to occupy the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.
A few months after that war ended, General Zeira described Israelis as “tension addicts,” able to live in a state of perpetually charged uncertainty. “We know why we live in Israel,” he said in a speech to a Rotary Club in Houston. “It has always been this way.”
In April 1973, Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and who was believed to be a spy for Israel, told the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, that Egypt and Syria would attack in mid-May.
General Zeira and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Aryeh Shalev, were doubtful. They told the Israeli cabinet that there was a “very low probability of an attack,” according to a 2017 reconstruction of prewar intelligence failures by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.
General Zeira, who had contempt for Egypt and Syria’s military capabilities, said at the time, “A logical analysis of the situation will show that the Egyptians would make a mistake if they went to war.”
Israel nonetheless responded by calling up tens of thousands of reservists and sending brigades to the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. No attack came, which made General Zeira distrust Mr. Marwan’s information and suspect he was a double agent, trying to lure Israel into a trap.
Even when Egypt began a major military exercise on the Suez Canal on Oct. 1, General Zeira still described the likelihood of an attack as “very low.”
At a general staff meeting, he said he had received a report from a Mossad agent at 2:30 a.m. that the exercise would end with an invasion across the canal. The intelligence directorate determined the information was unreliable.
In his 2003 book “The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War,” the journalist and author Howard Blum quoted General Zeira as saying at the time, “Since there’s no war today, I think you will agree that I did the right thing by not awaking anyone in the middle of the night.”
On Oct. 5, Mr. Marwan told Zvi Zamir, the director of the Mossad, that the Egyptians would attack the next day at sunset — right at the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defense minister, was not fully convinced. He told Lt. Gen. David Elazar, the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, “On the basis of messages from Zvika, you do not mobilize a whole army,” referring to Mr. Zamir.
The warning led to a partial mobilization of the I.D.F., but it could not blunt early Israeli setbacks. Egyptian forces easily crossed the Suez Canal, and only 177 Israeli tanks already stationed in the Golan Heights faced 1,400 tanks rolling in from Syria.
Israel prevailed after fewer than three weeks — with help from a massive airlift of tanks, artillery and ammunition from the United States — but the surprise attacks pierced the country’s sense of military invincibility. General Zeira’s time as intelligence chief did not last much longer.
Eliahu Zeira was born on April 4, 1928, in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother ran the home, according to The Daily Telegraph. At 18, he joined the Palmach, an underground Jewish defense force, and continued as a platoon and company commander during the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
He then received a bachelor’s degree in economics and statistics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and served as instructor at the battalion commanders’ school. He rose within the I.D.F., where he worked for General Dayan, then chief of the general staff; was head of the operations department; and served as the I.D.F.’s attaché in the United States.
“He was highly regarded by both his superiors and subordinates and often was mentioned as a future chief of staff,” the journalist Abraham Rabinovich wrote in Newsday in 1974, soon after the release of a report by the Agranat Commission, which was formed by Israel to determine responsibility for the military’s lack of preparedness before the Yom Kippur War.
The commission blamed General Zeira and General Shalev for a “totally insufficient warning” and “grave failures” in interpreting intelligence. It recommended that both men resign from the military intelligence directorate. General Zeira and General Elazar, the I.D.F.’s chief of staff, resigned. General Shalev was moved to a different command.
Yoav Gelber, an Israeli historian who worked for the commission, said in an interview that General Zeira’s role in the failure to predict the war has been inflated at the expense of other culpable military leaders.
General Zeira was “one of those responsible, a leading one,” Mr. Gelber said, but he “took the hit for everyone.”
General Zeira subsequently left the I.D.F. and later became an entrepreneur, The Daily Telegraph reported in its obituary.
His survivors include two daughters, the I.D.F. said.
Mr. Marwan’s role in the Yom Kippur War became the subject of a legal battle between General Zeira and Mr. Zamir, the former Mossad chief.
In 2004, Mr. Zamir accused General Zeira of leaking Mr. Marwan’s name to the press; General Zeira, in turn, accused Mr. Zamir of libel. A judge ruled three years later that General Zeira had, indeed, divulged Mr. Marwan’s name.
Shortly after the ruling became known, Mr. Marwan, who reportedly was working as an arms dealer, fell to his death from the balcony of his apartment in London. A separate criminal case against General Zeira was dismissed in 2012 by Israel’s attorney general in part because of his age.
In a conversation with Aviram Barkai, a historian who wrote “For Heaven’s Sake: Squadron 201 and the Yom Kippur War” (2017), General Zeira said his inaction before the war constituted “my life’s biggest mistake.”
In Mr. Barkai’s latest book, “And the Lightning Struck Twice: October 1973-October 2023,” published earlier this year, General Zeira reflected on the similarities in lack of preparedness between the Yom Kippur War and the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, igniting the Israeli war in Gaza.
“Whoever sought to surprise us succeeded,” he said.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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