Sunday, September 20, 2026
From Ian:
Eugene Kontorovich: Israel’s Rivals in a Fight for Survival
Eugene Kontorovich: Israel’s Rivals in a Fight for Survival
REVIEW: ‘In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis’ by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot KaufmanIra Stoll: Take a look inside Israel’s war room on the day Hamas invaded
In the War Room is a detailed reconstruction of how Israel's top officials navigated the three-year series of wars that began with Hamas's invasion of Israel on October 7. The book lets us zoom out, providing structure and narrative coherence to a conflict that is in some ways still ongoing, and that most people know only from daily news stories, many of them deeply inaccurate.
The authors—Elliot Kaufman, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, and Yonah Jeremy Bob, the military correspondent of the Jerusalem Post—had extraordinary access to the central figures directing Israel's war effort. As it happens, those figures were all political rivals. At the top sat Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, whose reputation as a security hawk was profoundly shaken by the catastrophic surprise attack. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a former general turned politician, was a senior member of Netanyahu's Likud party, but one who had very publicly broken ranks with him just before the war over the government's efforts to reform the powers of the judiciary.
Another key member of the war cabinet, the affable Benny Gantz, a former general and IDF chief of staff, had for a time led the main rival political party; he joined Netanyahu's government in a show of national unity after the attacks. He brought with him his political colleague Gadi Eisenkot, another former general—and now Netanyahu's biggest rival in the October election. Finally, Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff—a vastly powerful post in Israel—had not even been appointed by Netanyahu, but by the previous, short-lived government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Likewise, the head of the internal security service, the Shabak, which had jurisdiction over Gaza, was a holdover from the previous government, and Netanyahu's efforts to replace him would lead to a lengthy Supreme Court battle.
This was not just the proverbial "team of rivals." It was a team of political enemies with little personal connection or camaraderie and deep suspicion of one another—cats in a bag. That they managed to lead such a successful multifront war is remarkable. As the authors tell it, the atmosphere in the war room was deeply unpleasant—though certainly better than the one between General Omar Bradley and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who tried not to be in the same room together.
The authors trace the crucial decision points of the wars and the debates that preceded them. At every stage, there were marked disagreements about how to handle an exceedingly complex situation. Drawing on firsthand testimony, the authors paint a picture of the shock and disorientation of the war's first days, as Israel's leaders struggled to grasp a situation for which they bore command responsibility. Throughout, some members of the war cabinet favored offensive pushes while others urged caution—though who played which role changed from battle to battle, and even within a single battle.
For example, Gallant favored an immediate attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon to neutralize what was then its massive missile arsenal, which posed the greater strategic threat—even though Hezbollah had joined Hamas's assault only in a limited way. Netanyahu favored dealing first with Hamas and the hostages, the immediate casus belli. Later, Netanyahu would be cautious about launching the ground operation in Gaza, as well as about taking Rafah in the south of the Strip, while his generals favored both operations. Over time, however, Gantz grew more skittish about the Rafah campaign, and Netanyahu more determined to carry it out.
Even after the fact, the participants' recollections differ—several remember the other participants as shaken in the first weeks of the war, but not themselves. Strategic disagreements are almost certainly inevitable in making such high-stakes decisions, and it is difficult to weigh these internal battles in hindsight. While most of the war room figures were politicians to some extent, there does not appear to be any clear correlation between their political leanings and how aggressively they wanted to prosecute the war. Whatever their failings in anticipating and understanding the enemy, these were patriots determined to defeat a genocidal foe.
The clearest mistake in retrospect was Gantz and Eisenkot's readiness to end the war in early 2024, with the Palestinian Authority brought in to serve as a fig leaf for Hamas control of Gaza. At the time, they faced an increasingly hostile international environment and saw no other prospect for the hostages' release. It is now clear that Netanyahu's insistence on fighting on was wise. It led to the decimation of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad, the establishment of security zones in enemy territory, and the repeated degradation of Iran's nuclear and missile programs.
Alongside the highlight reel of Israeli and American accomplishments, this book provides a kind of supercut of retrospectively ridiculous things that Israeli and American politicians have said along the way. The compilation, in one volume, of all these gems is another public service provided by Bob, who is The Jerusalem Post’s senior military analyst, and by Kaufman, who is an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal.Book Complaining About Israeli Influence Ironically Benefits From Offshore Arab Funding
Israeli politician Benny Gantz bragged to an interviewer in 2018 that as Israel Defense Force chief of staff he had “prioritized cyber and intelligence over infantry and armor,” because “unlike the threat of ground invasion, the threat of cyber is realistic.”
John Kerry, as President Obama’s secretary of state, cited the Afghan army to the Israelis as a model for Palestinian security forces and “an example of how local forces could be trained successfully.”
Kamala Harris, before Israel’s invasion of the southern Gazan city of Rafah: “I have studied the maps,” she said, incorrectly claiming there was nowhere for civilians to evacuate to.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who has since landed at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, had written a Foreign Affairs essay “that went to print just before the October 7 attack and arrived in subscribers’ mailboxes later in the month,” boasting that Biden’s policies made the Middle East “quieter than it has been for decades.” He claimed credit for having “de-escalated crises in Gaza” and having “enhanced deterrence” to discourage Iranian aggression.
The book details differences among Netanyahu, his war cabinet members Gantz and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Israel Defense Force chief of staff Herzi Halevi. Those internal discussions — and the parallel dialogues with the Biden and Trump administrations — shaped the outcomes in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The personalities also reflected the span of public opinion in Israel’s diverse democracy.
The authors are less sure-footed when analyzing US and global sentiment. “Widespread destruction became a key driver of Israel’s diminished global standing,” the authors contend. “Videos of Gazan neighborhoods turned to rubble, with nothing left intact for as far as the eye could see, told a story of their own.” And, “a young generation’s first impression of the Jewish state has been formed by the destruction of Gaza.”
Somehow the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Dresden, didn’t diminish America’s global standing for the young generation during or after World War II. Any erosion can be blamed not on the destruction of Gaza but on a sophisticated social-media and on-the-ground campaign by foreign actors to demonize Israel, coupled with social trends in America such as declining church attendance, a flood of Muslim immigration and biblical illiteracy.
The weakest part of the book is an author’s note from Yonah Jeremy Bob. Here, Bob claims Netanyahu “harmed Israel’s name with US Democrats and other parts of the fair-minded West (Germany is another notable example) by continuing the war for too long.”
He goes on: “Whether the war should have ended in late summer 2024, early 2025 or summer 2025 is hotly debated within the Israeli defense establishment. But close to zero of the Israeli defense establishment supported continuing the war beyond that point, and beyond that point is where Israel’s standing took the largest global walloping.”
This timeline does not cohere. It was only in October of 2025 that Hamas agreed to disarm and to return all the Israeli hostages, dead and alive. Count me as skeptical that Israel’s global standing would have been improved had the Jewish state ended the war prematurely, without getting the hostages back and without a plan to disarm and dislodge Hamas. And the sniping by the “Israeli defense establishment” against Netanyahu, an unfortunate feature of Israel’s domestic political landscape, is the rare Israeli export that America might indeed be better off boycotting.
So skip that section and appreciate the rest of the fast-paced narrative. Rerun the dramatic details of how Israel killed all those terrorists, and laugh along the way at Kerry, Sullivan and Harris. The victory may not be entirely total, but for Israel and America it’s already been quite an impressive win, especially considering how grimly this round began. And the war is not fully over quite yet.
The book claims, "It is Israeli violence against Palestinians that increases antisemitism." That ignores that antisemitism peaked during the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, before there was a modern state of Israel or "Palestinians" with a national identity. It also blames the victims of a hateful bias for a bias that is fundamentally irrational. Israel has tried plenty of nonviolent ways of dealing with the Palestinians—a border fence, unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Iron Dome, the Oslo Accords. Yet when faced with dedicated Islamist fanatical terrorists determined to wipe Israel off the map and rape, kill, or kidnap the Jewish inhabitants, the demand that Israel restrict its responses to nonviolent ones seems more a symptom of antisemitism than an indication of concern about fueling it.
The book accuses Israel of "the obsessive use of 'terrorist' as an adjective." Actually Israel frequently uses "terrorist" as a noun, because, unfortunately, it is fighting a lot of enemies who are terrorists, a fact this book is determined to minimize.
The authors and their editors seem ignorant on foreign policy and national security issues even beyond the Middle East. They claim, "[b]etween Truman and George H.W. Bush, every American adopted containment as their grand geopolitical strategy." That ignores President Reagan's shift beyond containment to rollback, the strategy that eventually yielded victory.
One could go on. Throughout there's a single-minded obsession with donors and interest groups that favor a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, and neglect of the countervailing donors and interest groups. It amounts to a skewed story. The Anti-Defamation League's antisemitism statistics are dismissed as a "hoax," downplaying or ignoring FBI or New York Police crime statistics that show similar surges in anti-Jewish hate.
The interesting question is how and why a book this gross and full of falsehoods found a mainstream publisher—One Signal, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by KKR. The chairman of Qatar Investment Authority, Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani, met with Co-Chief Executive Officer of KKR & Co. Scott Nuttall in July during a visit to New York, according to a photo released by the government of Qatar. The acknowledgments say, "This book benefited from the generous support provided by Lina and Ali."
Who are Lina and Ali? What sort of "support" did they provide? And why not be fully transparent about it? Eli Clifton's author photo on the book jacket is provided "Courtesy of the Quincy Institute," an institution that lists Clifton as "cofounder and senior adviser." Quincy also lists Ali Munir & Lina Lazaar as donors in the $100,000 to $250,000 category (the same level as the Soros Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund but a lower level than Koch's Stand Together Trust).
With the last names available, so is more information. The Charity Commission of England and Wales lists Ali Munir as one of three trustees of Ibraaz, a London-based cultural center whose website describes it as "an initiative of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation." The president of the Kamel Lazaar foundation is Lina Lazaar; the website describes it as "a Geneva- and Tunis-based institution." Lina's father is Kamel Lazaar, a Tunisian-Swiss investment banker. Her ex-husband, Hassan Jameel, is a Saudi Arabian billionaire. Corporate registration documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the Jersey Islands, the offshore jurisdiction where Munir's Panarae Limited company is based, indicate he is a British national and his full name is Mohammad Ali Munir Ahmed.
There are plenty of foreign powers whose grip is on display here, but Israel is not among them. As I said, it's nauseating. Lina and Ali should ask for a refund. This book is so shoddy it will damage their reputation to be associated with it. No wonder they didn't want their full names in the acknowledgments.
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