Nothing could be more obvious than the fact that Israel was caught unprepared for the attacks launched by Egypt and Syria on 6 October 1973, the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. The question that has been asked ever since is “Why?” and this work is the most recent of many that have attempted to answer that question. Bar-Joseph, a professor of international relations at Haifa University who is best known for his earlier work The Best of Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948, was an army reservist called to active duty in the 1973 war, so his interest in the question was sparked by personal experience. He began exploring the topic as an undergrad at Hebrew University, and this research has culminated in the work currently under review.

The author presents a nuanced explanation of this intelligence failure that includes psychological factors, bureaucratic reasons, and personal decisions. In his final chapter (pp. 235–36) he makes three major points: first, a public atmosphere of complacency and self-assurance “played a significant role in facilitating the intelligence failure since it created the milieu within which the estimation and policy-making processes took place”; second, the failure was not one of lack of accurate information—the intelligence was on the mark but misinterpreted by those in charge; third, this “was not a failure of the intelligence system as a whole but of some of its critical elements” (p. 235). Moreover, in the final analysis, Bar-Joseph places major blame on two Israeli officials: director of military intelligence Eli Zeira and one of his subordinates, Yona Bandman. The author believes that both men received ample evidence that war was about to begin but refused to believe these warnings. Their consistent mantra was that Syria would not go to war without Egypt and that Egypt was not prepared to fight. Had other officers been in their positions receiving this intelligence, Bar-Joseph believes, Israel would have not been caught unaware on the very day of the attack.

In organizing his book, the author uses a strict chronological approach. Part 1 examines the decision made by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad to go to war and part 2 surveys Israel's preparations from the end of the Six Day War in 1967 to the summer of 1973. He gets into serious detail in the third section, in which he presents a day-by-day description of Israeli actions from the end of September to the first week of October, with a separate chapter devoted to each day. It is here where he marshals his evidence that ample warnings of a coming war were received. For example, on 25 September, Jordan's King Hussein warned Prime Minister Golda Meir that Egypt and Syria were planning for war. Four days later the CIA sent a message that Syria was preparing to attack. On 1 October the Mossad reported signs of war preparations, and on 4 October came news that Russian personnel were evacuating both Egypt and Syria. However, despite all these signs, the Israeli military was still caught unprepared when the attack came two days later.

The argument that Bar-Joseph makes flows logically, but the sources of his research are problematic. Many of these sources, both for documents and personal recollections, have asked to remain anonymous. He argues that “these documents have enabled me to present the distorted intelligence picture as it was provided, on the eve of the war, to Israel's military and civilian policymakers” (p. ix). However, they are not listed in his bibliography, thereby creating a problem for other scholars who might wish to verify his conclusions. Moreover, his characterization of Zeira and Bandman as the major villains of the piece relies on psychological interpretations that he admits in a footnote (p. 287) have not yet been recognized in the profession.

Nevertheless, this is a stimulating book that attempts the most detailed analysis yet undertaken of the disastrous failure on Israel's part to prepare for the 1973 war. Because this war is so well known in military annals, Bar-Joseph will have an audience outside the usual coterie of Middle East specialists. Moreover, its lack of jargon will also make it accessible to laymen with an interest in military history and military intelligence.