The "October Victory" allowed Egypt to achieve a series of political and military gains, but the 1973 war against Israel became more like a passing stop for a young generation that constitutes the majority of Egyptian society and knows nothing of the war except its memory.
Over the past decades, the October 1973 war was the womb from which the military presidents of the Egyptian Republic were born, starting with Anwar Sadat, who led the war and then concluded a historic peace treaty with Israel, to his successor, Hosni Mubarak, with the exception being the current president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who joined... At the Military College in the year the war broke out.
Cairo turned its field victories, most notably its army’s crossing of the Suez Canal and penetrating the ranks of Israeli forces in Sinai, into political and diplomatic gains.
Tawfiq Aklimandos, an analyst at the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies, believes that what Sadat did during the war and after it gave him “legitimacy” that might replace that enjoyed by his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, the military hero of the 1952 revolution that ended the monarchy in Egypt.
After the assassination of Sadat in 1981 by Islamists, his deputy Mubarak took power.
Reinforced by his pivotal participation in the war as commander of the Air Force, experts expected that the “man who had the first air strike” with the start of the Egyptian offensive in 1973 would gain popularity among his citizens as president of the republic.
The Islamist Mohamed Morsi, who was elected president of Egypt in 2012, was the exception that broke the rule that Egypt was ruled by the military... but he was quickly overthrown by the army led by Sisi in 2013 following popular demonstrations against him.
In 2014, Sisi became the first president of Egypt outside the military club that participated in October 1973.
Despite this, Sisi sought to exploit the war within the interim political framework.
Last year, Sisi named the anniversary of October 6, 1973, “the Day of Pride and Dignity,” and sent several messages to Egyptians, including that “victory will remain proof of the will and steadfastness of the Egyptians and their adherence to the sovereignty and dignity of the nation.”
Al-Sisi thus wanted to raise the resolve of more than 105 million Egyptians to bear the difficult social and economic conditions that worsened during 2022 as a result of the shortage of foreign currency, the decline in the value of the local currency, and the unprecedented rise in prices.
However, relying on the memory of the war seems difficult in the face of the current reality.
“All of this has now become far from the targets of the new generation,” Clementos explained to Agence France-Presse, attributing this to the fact that this generation “does not have access to serious Arabic books on this matter.”
He continued, "Only people who lived through the war remember the fear and restrictions imposed by the war economy."
While Sisi was not on the front lines in 1973 when the Egyptians regained Sinai, he fought another war in the peninsula located in the northeast of the country, but this time against “terrorism,” especially the extremist Islamic groups that were active in this region after the overthrow of Morsi.
Before it was recovered as a result of the field advances in the 1973 war and the Camp David Peace Accords years later, Sinai was under Israeli occupation after the harsh defeat suffered by Egypt and Arab countries in the June 1967 war.
Egypt's recovery of Sinai contributed to the largest Arab country in terms of population regaining its position on the diplomatic arena.
Hisham Hillier, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London, believes that after the war, “Egypt emerged from Soviet influence to join the Western security sphere,” especially with its annual military aid exceeding a billion dollars.
He added to Agence France-Presse that today, in “a world in which there are multiple poles of influence,” Cairo has begun to balance its relations so as not to favor one of its allies in favor of the other, whether in terms of Russia, China, and India, or in terms of the Americans, Europeans, and the Gulf.
Amr Al-Shobaki, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, believes that the 1973 war made the Egyptian army “the army of victory instead of the army of defeat in 1967.”
Fifty years after the war, the facts in the Middle East have changed dramatically. Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, followed by Jordan in 1994. 2020 witnessed the normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.
Although the peace agreement with Cairo is the oldest in time, the Egyptian street is still unable to fully deal with this normalization, as Israel is always viewed as the enemy.
Al-Shoubaki believes that Sadat, who caused widespread surprise by visiting Jerusalem in 1977 and meeting with Israeli officials even before peace was concluded, “would not have been surprised (by the recent normalization agreements).
He continues, "At that time, he was completely convinced that he had made the right decision to sign peace."
