The debates around these issues within the Israeli military and government were the first to define the terms, form and the practices of the occupation thereafter. This chapter will follow the debate around the construction (1967–73) and fall (1973) of Israel’s fortification along the Suez Canal. Following military debates and battle analysis, it attempts to trace a process of ‘civilianization’ whereby ideas and organizational systems were transferred from a military to a civilian domain, resulting, in the late 1970s, in the translation of a military occupation into a civilian one.
Shortly after the 1967 war, two Israeli generals of the Labor movement started engaging in attempts to fortify different fronts of the 1967 Occupied Territories. The systems conceived by Yigal Allon (Minister of Agriculture and Director of the government Settlements Committee) and Chief of Staff Chaim Bar Lev, were products of a similar territorial doctrine – one that sought to establish a line of defence along the outermost edge of the territories. The Allon plan, the first draft of which was presented to the government a few weeks after the end of the war, advocated the redrawing of state borders along the main topographical feature of the region, the Great Rift Valley, the deep tectonic crack that formed the eastern edge of the territories occupied by Israel. Allon proposed to annex a strip following the length of the rift, which extended from the Golan Heights in the north, through the Jordan Valley down to the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh. This strip would generate, according to Allon, ‘maximum security and maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs’.3 The fact that this strip was sparsely populated was due to the fact that during the war, wanting to secure its new borderlines, the Israeli military evacuated and destroyed the Palestinian villages of the Jordan Valley (except the city of Jericho), the Syrian towns and villages of the Golan Heights and all Egyptian citizens but the Bedouin in the Sinai. On this generally arid and now sparsely populated strip, remote from Israeli population centres, Allon proposed to establish a string of agricultural Kibbutz and Moshav settlements, as well as several paramilitary outposts of the NAHAL Corps – the settlements arm of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).4 Although never officially endorsed by the government, the Allon plan was gradually put into effect during the first decade of the Israeli occupation under Labor administrations. The settlements in the Jordan Valley in the far eastern edge of the West Bank were to fortify this border along the Jordan River. Their establishment was perceived as the regeneration of Labor Zionism and the revival of its agricultural pioneering spirit. Agriculture in this arid landscape, sustained by over-extraction of water from the mountain aquifer, was seen, according to the common Zionist slogan, as an attempt to ‘make the desert bloom’.5 The Jordan Valley was conceived as a hybrid military/civilian defensive zone, split by four parallel roads that strung together military bases and agricultural settlements. In the event of an armoured invasion from the east, the valley’s cultivated fields would be flooded, and the settlements hardened into fortified positions that would allow the military to organize and channel invading forces into designated zones of Israeli fire. Moreover, the inhabitation of the area by a civilian population, rather than military bases, was to demonstrate, according to Allon, Israel’s political resolve to annex this frontier zone.
Construction of the Bar Lev Line, circa 1971. Film stills, IDF film unit, IP.
The Bar Lev Line was the military counterpart of the Allon plan, attempting to achieve with military strongholds what the Allon plan sought to achieve with a combination of civilian and military ones. Fearing international pressure and a possible replay of the 1956 Suez Crisis, when the US administration forced Israel (as well as France and Britain) to retreat from the areas they had occupied in Egypt, Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan did not want the IDF to reach the Suez Canal at all during the 1967 war. The IDF gained the canal regardless during the third day of the war, out of its own tactical inertia. Immediately after the war, Dayan advocated a retreat from the canal. Following the advice of Allon, however, Dayan’s chief political rival, Prime Minister Levy Eshkol, and later Golda Meir, wanted to keep the canal under Israeli control, and close it to all shipping, in order to pressure the Egyptian government into signing a peace treaty on Israel’s terms. Dayan, on the other hand, did not want an agreement at all, and thought that a tactical retreat from the canal would allow Israel to permanently hold onto the rest of the Sinai Peninsula. Bar Lev was asked to provide a technical solution for fortifying the Canal against Egyptian attack. He set up a team, headed by his loyal divisional commander, Avraham Adan, to design the system of fortifications. Adan approached the design with the enthusiasm of a young architect on his first commission, researching historical examples and building scale models. His main influence, he later claimed in his autobiography, was the architecture of the fortifications of Kibbutz Nirim in the Negev desert, one of the settlements that had become the focus of a Zionist myth after it had successfully resisted the Egyptian army in the war of 1948.6 Adan took a month to design the fortification system, after which construction work immediately began.
Ariel Sharon, Chief of Southern Command (last in line, on left); Chaim Bar Lev, Chief of Staff (centre, on left); and David Ben-Gurion, on the Bar Lev Line, Suez Canal, 1971.
However, the Bar Lev Line was not so much a product of planned construction as the result of incremental evolution – a series of ‘solutions’ based upon Adan’s system to protect military forces under constant artillery fire. During the intense skirmishes of 1968–71, later known as the ‘War of Attrition’, the Line gradually became an immense infrastructural undertaking. Huge quantities of sand were shifted across the desert and piled along the eastern bank of the canal to form an artificial landscape 20 metres high, with a 45-degree incline on the side facing the Canal, and 200 kilometres long. Thirty-five Ma’ozim (strongholds), named after the fortification system in Adan’s Kibbutz, each designed for twenty-five to thirty soldiers, were situated on the sand dyke at 10-kilometre intervals, overlooking the Egyptian line a mere 200 metres away. The strongholds had deep underground bunkers, fortified by crushed rocks in nets and a fencing system made from steel lifted from the Cairo–El-Arish railway and other abandoned Egyptian agricultural equipment, and were surrounded by minefields. The entire length of the line contained emplacements for tanks, artillery pieces, mortars and machine guns. Unlike other systems of fortifications that used concrete and so could always be destroyed with enough explosive, the sand ramparts of the Bar Lev Line were designed to absorb and dissipate the impact of bombardment. The fortification thus seemed complete, and the Israeli government consequently did not feel it had to rush to the negotiating table. Since the balance of power was apparently tilted in Israel’s favour, it was generally thought that Egypt would not risk attacking. This assessment was known in the Israeli security circles as ‘the concept’.
Meanwhile, in 1971, on the other side of the Suez Canal, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat appointed Lieutenant-General Sa’ad El Shazly as Chief of the Egyptian Military Staff. Shazly’s task was to mastermind the storming of the Bar Lev Line. In his book, The Crossing of the Canal,7 Shazly illustrated the Bar-Lev Line with the pride of a person describing an obstacle successfully breached: ‘the Suez canal was unique. Unique in the difficulties its construction presented to an amphibious assault force. Unique in its scale of defences the enemy had erected on top of those natural obstacles … To all that saw it, the Suez Canal seemed an impassable barrier …’ The first and most difficult obstacle was the water in the canal, ‘the second obstacle was a gigantic sand dune built by the enemy along the length of the eastern bank. For six years, Israeli bulldozers had laboriously piled the sand ever higher – their most sustained effort coming, naturally, at likely crossing points … Above this formidable barrier rose the third obstacle: the 35 forts of the Bar Lev line … Hidden from our view, the enemy could manoeuvre its armour to reinforce any sudden weak point …’8
Shazly contended that one of the major aims of the giant earth rampart of the Bar
