Chaim Bar-Lev

Chaim Bar-Lev

Chaim Bar-Lev, 1948

Chaim Bar-Lev ( Hebrew חיים בר-לב, also Haim Bar-Lev ; born on November 16, 1924 in Vienna as Haim Brotzlewsky ; died May 7, 1994 in Tel Aviv , Israel ) was an Israeli general and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces during the war of attrition between Egypt and Israel from 1968 to 1970.

Life

In 1939 Bar-Lev immigrated from Yugoslavia to Israel and attended the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School there .

Military career

In 1942 he became a member of the Palmach and four years later commander of company "D". Here he was responsible for blowing up the Allenby Bridge . In 1947 he finally became regimental commander of the eighth regiment of the Palmach and the following year operations officer of the Negev brigade. He was then regimental commander during Operation Horew and eventually became chief of the northern command area in 1952 and commander of the Giv'ati Brigade two years later . In 1956, after attending an English officers' school, he became head of training in the Israeli armed forces . In the Sinai campaign of 1956 he was chief of the 27th Reserve Tank Brigade of the northern command area and from 1957 to 1961 commander of the tank corps . He later studied business administration and economics at Columbia University in New York and in 1966 political science at Paris University.

From 1964 to 1966 he was chief of the operations department in the general staff and is then appointed deputy chief of staff. From 1968 to 1972 he was chief of the general staff, which was also the time of the 17-month war of attrition that followed after Nasser's termination of the armistice agreement in March 1969. Under his direction, the Bar Lev line , named after him, was created along the Suez Canal , which western military experts at the time regarded as exemplary and insurmountable. It was considered "the safest fortification in the world", also because it was equipped with a highly developed infrastructure. A sharp critic of the Bar-Lev line at the time was Ariel Sharon , who considered it strategically worthless as it forced Israel into trench warfare. Moshe Dajan , too, was against a fortification so close to the Suez Canal from the start, but although he was politically able to do so, he did nothing to change the situation.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War , in which the Bar Lev Line, held by only a few hundred soldiers, was almost completely overrun by the Egyptian army, he returned to the army as a commander on the Egyptian front.

Political career

On March 5, 1972, he took over without being a member of the Knesset , in the 15th government under Prime Minister Golda Meïr, the office of Minister of Commerce and Industry previously administered by Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir . He held this office until the 17th government. In the 16th government he was also development minister, but this ministry was abolished in the 17th government. The Labor Party lost government power to the Likud in 1977 , but Bar-Lev was elected to the 9th Knesset and was able to maintain his seat three more times until 1992. From 1978 to 1984 he was also general secretary of his party.

He was ambassador to Moscow from 1992 to 1994 , almost until the day he died after a serious illness.

literature

• Chaim Bar-Lev , In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 31/1994 from July 25, 1994, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Chaim Bar-Lev  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Chaim Bar-Lev from the Knesset website. Retrieved June 11, 2011
• Chaim Bar-Lev obituary in The Independent.Retrieved June 11, 2011

predecessor	Office	successor
Yitzhak Rabin	Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces 1968–1972	David Elazar