Description:
Examines how Israel was caught by surprise in the opening stages of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Based on many formerly undisclosed intelligence and military documents, the secret protocols of discussions on the eve of the war, and interviews with relevant figures, The Watchman Fell Asleep is a compelling account of Israel's intelligence failure before the 1973 Arab attack known as the Yom Kippur War. The Hebrew version of this book was awarded the Tshetshik Prize for Strategic Studies on Israel's Security in 2001, and the Israeli Political Science Association's Best Book Award in 2002. Available here in English for the first time, Uri Bar-Joseph has crafted an authoritative explanation of the most traumatic event in Israel's stormy history and one of the biggest strategic military surprises of the twentieth century.
Brief description: Uri Bar-Joseph is Professor of International Relations at Haifa University. He is the author of Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: The United States, Israel, and Britain and The Best of Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948.
Review Quotes: "Despite the plethora of both academic and journalistic works about the sources of surprise in October 1973, this book is by far the most impressive--providing a broad complex of hitherto unpublished documents that help portray a novel picture of both the dynamics and the operational code of Israel's military intelligence during the weeks and months preceding the war, and of the cognitive maps of its leadership. The combination of the unusually rich empirical data and the very clear, coherent, and concise theoretical framework makes this book highly readable."