Shemuel Gonen; Israeli War Hero, Later Disgraced

Shemuel Gonen, 61, a general who was a hero in the 1967 Six Day War but was disgraced in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Gonen moved to Israel with his parents from Lithuania at the age of 3, and was one of the few senior army officers of his generation who attended a yeshiva, a religious seminary. At 17, when Israel became a state, he joined the army. His fame came as a tank brigade commander in the 1967 war when his forces broke through the Egyptian defenses in the northern Sinai Desert. But the Yom Kippur War six years later was his undoing. As chief of the Southern Command, he was one of the generals who paid the price for the army’s complete lack of preparedness for the Egyptian-Syrian onslaught on the Jewish holiday. An official inquiry into the army’s shortcomings recommended that Gonen be suspended. The report said he “did not properly fulfill his duties and he bears a major part of the responsibility for the grave situation in which our forces were caught.” The suspension was later reversed, but Gonen was barred from holding a senior command, and he retired in 1976, vowing to exonerate himself. He became a private businessman with interests in the arms market and diamond prospecting in Africa. In Milan, Italy, on Monday of a heart attack while en route home to Israel.