ABSTRACT
Having attributed to Israel difficulty in sustaining protracted wars of attrition, the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular have tried to impose such wars on it.1 According to former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Egyptian officials, Israel, a state whose newspapers publish on their front pages the photograph and biography of each soldier who falls in battle, is unlikely to cope successfully with a war of attrition.2 Nasser’s friend and political ally Al-Ahram editor Mohammed Hassanein Heikal explained the Egyptian president’s rationale:
If the enemy succeeds in inflicting 50,000 casualties in this campaign, we can go on fighting nevertheless, because we have manpower reserves. If we succeed in inflicting 10,000 casualties, he will unavoidably find himself compelled to stop fighting, because he has no manpower reserves.3
