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Eli Zeira, the Israeli major general and military intelligence chief who was forced out of his job after dismissing warnings that Syria and Egypt were on the verge of the attacks in 1973 that started the Yom Kippur War, died on Friday. He was 97.
His death was announced by the Israel Defense Forces, which did not say where he died.
General Zeira (pronounced Zeh-EE-rah) had served in the I.D.F. for more than two decades when he was chosen to run the military intelligence directorate in 1972. Resentments in the region had festered after Israel’s victory over an alliance of Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War. As a result of that conflict, Israel came to occupy the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.
A few months after that war ended, General Zeira described Israelis as “tension addicts,” able to live in a state of perpetually charged uncertainty. “We know why we live in Israel,” he said in a speech to a Rotary Club in Houston. “It has always been this way.”
In April 1973, Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and who was believed to be a spy for Israel, told the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, that Egypt and Syria would attack in mid-May.
General Zeira and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Aryeh Shalev, were doubtful. They told the Israeli cabinet that there was a “very low probability of an attack,” according to a 2017 reconstruction of prewar intelligence failures by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.