Russia’s forceful re-entry into the Middle East highlights the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR’s role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history.
This book covers the peak of the USSR’s direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets’ success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt’s cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that a US–Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to capture the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources—memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves—The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history.