Action over inaction: Netanyahu's war decisions support Churchill's ethos - opinion

On April 1, 1941, a group of Iraqi generals toppled a pro-British government in Baghdad and offered to turn valuable oil resources over to the Nazis. This alarming news arrived in London during the darkest days of World War II, when a battered Britain stood alone against the Axis onslaught. 

Gen. Archibald Wavell cabled from Egypt that “no assistance could be given to Iraq,” and warned “in the gravest terms” of what would occur if the British Army even attempted to wrest control back from the enemy. Fortunately, prime minister Winston Churchill would have none of it. He overruled his generals, ordered a counterattack, and quickly returned Iraq to British hands. Churchill noted with wry understatement that one should generally avoid biting off more than one could chew, “but this principle, like others in life and war, has its exceptions.”

I have been reminded of this story many times since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis, took over 250 others hostage, and triggered a multi-front war. In the immediate aftermath, President Joe Biden called for restraint, as did a group of American generals sent to Israel to offer advice.  There were plenty of similar voices in Israel. And there was a popular movement that took to the streets, demanding that the government cave to the demands of the terrorists.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have none of it. 

He declared that Israel would enter Gaza, remove Hamas from power, and bring back the hostages. These lofty goals were met with ridicule. His own defense minister testified before the Knesset that Netanyahu’s talk of “total victory” was “nonsense.”  A retired Israeli general warned that the IDF was unprepared for war and that entering Gaza would end in disaster. 

Both were wrong. The IDF was well prepared. And the ground campaign that Netanyahu ordered in northern Gaza yielded the exact result he predicted. Hamas’s leadership was quickly surrounded. To save itself, it entered into a hostage deal that, together with rescue operations, has so far returned almost two-thirds of Israeli hostages.   

Attention then turned to southern Gaza. Netanyahu insisted on conquering the city of Rafah and the surrounding border area, to block military supplies smuggled into Gaza from Egypt. US Vice President Kamala Harris warned of a humanitarian catastrophe because she “studied the maps, and there’s nowhere for those folks [Rafah civilians] to go.”  On May 6, the Israeli Army entered Rafah and 800,000 Palestinian civilians relocated peacefully, just as Netanyahu predicted. The network of tunnels discovered between Gaza and Sinai – one big enough to drive a truck through – convinced even Netanyahu’s worst critics of the need to hold the border.

All of this success was tempered by an unavoidable problem: The mighty Israeli Army was running out of ammunition. Four thousand desperately needed bombs were held up by the Biden Administration because of the Rafah operation. On June 18, 2024, Netanyahu went public with this dispute, releasing a film in which he said that it was “inconceivable that in the last few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel.” The public showdown caused the Biden Administration to blink. The hold on ammunition was lifted.

Netanyahu stood alone

You would have expected to see the Israeli defense minister, the army chief of staff, and others in the film, standing behind Netanyahu in solidarity. Netanyahu stood alone. Far from supporting their prime minister, Israeli generals leaked on July 3 that they wanted a ceasefire “even if it keeps Hamas in power for the time being.” Netanyahu ignored them. The IDF went on to kill Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack, and practically all of Hamas’s senior leadership.

At last, Israel could turn its attention to Hezbollah, which had been shelling northern Israel since the beginning of the war. We now know that the Israelis had a long-prepared plan to set off explosives planted in Hezbollah pagers. But this operation was placed at risk by a senior Israeli general who warned that the government was planning an “impulsive act” that risked widening the war. 

Netanyahu authorized setting off the pagers. Then he ordered an airstrike in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh that wiped out Hezbollah’s senior leadership. These actions indeed widened the war. But only to the extent that they opened the door for Syrian rebels to rid the region of Bashar Assad’s brutal regime. 

Iran’s proxy army has collapsed. Hamas is surrounded in a tiny part of Gaza, trying to negotiate a hostage deal. Its fondest ambition is to survive.

Netanyahu’s performance supports Churchill’s observation that one should never worry about action, but only inaction. It also supports the idea that history is made not just by great forces, but also by great men.

The writer is a real estate developer and author of the recently published 18 Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How it Created the Modern Middle East.