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 Lev Line was to deny the Egyptian armies a view of Israeli positions in the Sinai, while simultaneously creating the artificial topographical conditions that would allow Israelis to observe Egyptian territory. The rare advantage gained by Soviet anti-aircraft missile technology over Western fighter jets in the early 1970s, led to aerial photography missions becoming precarious, and had the effect of flattening the battlefield into a horizontal, two-dimensional surface in which the ground, eye-level perspective was reinvested with strategic significance. From the Egyptian army’s point of view, the Bar Lev Line was a visual barrier. The dyke created an immediate limit to their observational field, making a ‘blind zone’ that denied them the view of their occupied territories.
From the moment that construction started on the Bar Lev Line, barely three months after the 1967 war, Ariel Sharon, then director of military training, began challenging the strategy of defence it embodied. This initiated the first major debate within the Israeli General Staff concerning Israel’s concept of defence. It was seen as a crucial issue over which Sharon, together with a handful of other officers – Israel Tal, Rafael Eitan and Matitiyahu Peled – were to clash repeatedly with the rest of the General Staff. The argument was polarized in increasingly geometrical terms, until the defence proposals became fully embodied within two spatial models, both derived from existing military vocabulary: linear fortification and a dynamic defence nested in a network of strongpoints in depth.9 Sharon publicly accused his superiors of ignorance and stupidity, blaming them for the mounting war casualties along the construction site of the Line, and demanded that the static defence embodied in what he called ‘the Israeli Maginot Line’ be abandoned and replaced with a flexible system of ‘defence in depth’ comprising independent strongpoints located on hilltops in an area stretching far back from the frontline, in a way that would allow military units to travel between these strongpoints, and, in case of invasion, attack the enemy’s flank and surround it.
This debate, and Sharon’s role in it, corroborated in later accounts of the 1973 war, was to become one of the most controversial chapters in Israeli military history, so much so that the IDF has not yet published an official account of the war – partly because Sharon mobilized all his political weight to suppress it. Among the other reasons for the ambiguous and incomplete historical record is that most of the war’s leading protagonists, Israeli and Egyptian, who physically and politically survived it, continued in political life. Their military autobiographies, as well as other oral and written accounts, contain widely differing interpretations of events that were mobilized in support for or in resistance to the dramatic political transformations of the post-1973 war period. During these processes the military achievements of the various generals as well as the performance of different units acquired immense political significance, with the constantly changing historiographies of the 1973 war tied to the political fates and fortunes of its main players. In the Israeli popular imagination, the linear, static, Bar Lev Line embodied the failing Labor Party, whereas the dynamic, flexible network promoted by Sharon, and especially the concept of ‘depth’ on which it relied, was later associated with a rejuvenated Israeli right and with the opening of Israel’s state frontiers. Accounts that foregrounded Sharon’s role in the war were generally associated with political attacks on the Labour government. After 1973, the decline of the Labour administration and the rise to power four years later of the right-wing Likud retrospectively gave more prominence to Sharon’s military role in 1973, projecting him as a national hero. The US military has itself contributed to the creation of the myth of Sharon as a ‘military genius’, finding in him a model of command according to which they could inspire military transformation after the failures of their armies in Vietnam. Ariel Sharon’s rapid, albeit not untypical, transformation from a popular military general to minister in charge of settlement activity in the first Likud government of 1977 allowed him to translate military doctrine and the principles of a dynamic battlefield into planning practices of civilian settlements and the creation of political ‘facts on the ground’.
Transgressive unit
Throughout his military career, Sharon has become the personification of the Israeli ‘myth of the frontier’,10 which celebrated the transgression of lines and borders of all kinds. Like its American predecessor, the Israeli frontier was understood as a mythical space that shaped the character and institutions of the nation. It was also a laboratory for the emergence of and experimentation with new spatial strategies and territorial forms. According to the Israeli sociologist Adriana Kemp, between 1948 and 1967 the Israeli state created a series of ‘rhetorical and institutional mechanisms’ that presented the frontier region as the symbolic centre of the nation, ‘a laboratory for the creation of a “new Jew”’.11
The