About half of the State of Israel’s residents were not here during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It is therefore difficult to explain to those who were not here the sense of shock in the first days of the war, which was a surprise that caught us off guard.
I recalled those terrible days recently after reading that the IDF Spokesperson’s Office decided that in case of war, the number of Israeli casualties will be officially announced once a day.
In the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, the number of casualties and their names were only published after the battles ended. After the Yom Kippur War, the list of names seemed endless.
During wartime, Israel draws on all its mental and military strength. For us, war is truly a matter of life and death. An important part, possibly a crucial one, of a war is the morale of the troops as well as the morale of the public.
In order to maintain this morale during the supreme test a person can ever encounter, it is permissible not to share everything – and this includes the number of casualties. The daily publication of the casualty toll would be a blow to both soldiers and civilians, and the growing toll will damage us greatly.
Opponents of this view will say that everything will be published on the Internet, in newspapers, and on the
radio anyway. That’s nonsense. Different casualty figures provided by various media outlets would quickly undermine the credibility of such numbers – this is not at all similar to an official announcement of the casualty toll.
And for those who were living here during the Yom Kippur War - try to imagine what would have happened on that terrible day when the war broke out if, in addition to the shock over the war’s outbreak, the newscaster would have announced: And besides that, 700 soldiers were killed today.
_a.jpg "Photo: GPO")
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