That is the new and excellent book by Uri Kaufman, and the subtitle is The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East. Here is one excerpt:
The ordeal of the 314 Israelis who fell into captivity during the 1973 war — 248 in Egypt, 66 in Syria — did not end when they returned home. All were sent to a facility — not to be treated for post-traumatic stress, which was then only thinly understood — but to find out what they had told their captors. The facility was located in the Israeli town of Zichron Yakov; the men sent there nicknamed it “Stalag Zichron.” It was a nice play on words because it literally translated to “Stalag Memory.” Interrogators plumbed the depths of their memories, even giving some “truth serum,” ostensibly to treat shell shock. In interviews of these soldiers years later, the word that comes up again and again is humiliation. Elazar asked the men, “Why didn’t you do what Uri Ilan did? What didn’t you commit suicide?” On a radio program interviewing the survivors of Mezakh, former chief of staff Chaim Laskov said that “falling into captivity, surrendering, these are evasive things. An order to surrender is illegal. The only proper order is ‘every man for himself.'”
And this short bit:
It was Napoleon who famously prayed that if he had to face an enemy, please God let it be a coalition.
Recommended.
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