Within weeks of the conclusion of the assault, which became known as the Yom Kippur War, a state commission of inquiry, led by the then chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, Shimon Agranat, questioned witnesses about the miscalculations and oversights that led to the crisis. Today, following the fall of Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in Syria, and the fate of Hamas, and now the attack on the nuclear program in Iran, October 7th looks more like Pearl Harbor—a devastating failure that ends some time later with total victory. Segal also allowed that, when Netanyahu justified the strikes to the public by talking about the imminence of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, it was, “to be honest, more of a literary description than a mathematical one”—meaning that, though Israeli intelligence, according to Segal, had evidence that Iran had enriched uranium to percentages only appropriate for a weapon, the actual weaponization process was hidden from view.
Author: David Remnick
Published at: 2025-06-22 22:27:21
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