Twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords on Sept. 13, 1993, at the White House, there is not even a small square or a side alley to be found in Israel bearing the name of the agreement. Few, if any, see fit to celebrate, or just to mark, the anniversary of the Oslo Accords. Palestinian terrorism and the Israeli right wing have since managed to turn the photo of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn into a contemptible memory. This deeply significant event that saw Arafat accept Israel as a legitimate state competes with the Yom Kippur War for a top spot on the list of the country’s greatest national failures.

Gideon Avital-Epstein, in his new book, 1973 – The Battle for Memory (Schocken Books), writes that “anyone who was here in the Yom Kippur War remembers where he was and what he was doing, but there are no streets in the cities named after the Yom Kippur War or the [battle of] the Chinese Farm, as there are after the 1967 Six Day War.” On Yom Kippur 2013 as well, 40 years after the war, it appears that the scar has yet to heal, not just for the thousands of soldiers who watched their friends die in battle, but also in the national psyche. The Yom Kippur War resulted in a collective trauma.

"Yom Kippur" as a term has become synonymous with the failure and malfeasance that ended in a disgraceful defeat. When a senior personality is cleared of wrongdoing in court, the prosecution’s comeuppance is called a “Yom Kippur.” The tragedy of the 2010 Carmel Mountain fires has been dubbed the “Yom Kippur of the fire brigades.” Even a shameful loss by a football champions league team to an inferior club, a hint of the image of the [defeated] Egyptian army, is headlined on sports pages as the “Yom Kippur of Israeli football.”

Nonetheless, there is a difference between national sentiments toward the 1973 October War and the September 1993 accords. Whereas the Yom Kippur War was perceived as a defining step on the way to the peace agreement with Egypt, the Oslo Accords were considered, at best, as a diplomatic move resulting in a dead end, and at worst, [an example of] disastrous feeblemindedness on the part of the country’s political leadership.