Israel’s Rivals in a Fight for Survival

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.

While Israel's leaders blew hot and cold about expanding military operations, the Biden administration consistently sought to restrain Israel from the very first weeks of the war. After the Democrats' defeat by Donald Trump in 2024, a narrative emerged on the Left attributing the loss to Biden's having been too supportive of Israel—rather than to his deeply unpopular domestic policies, such as weak border enforcement and woke, identitarian politics. Echoes of this view have since migrated to the nationalist Right, which worries about what it describes as Washington’s unquestioning support for Israel.

This book makes clear that no such unquestioning support existed even at the most critical moments. The Biden administration immediately inserted itself intimately into the conflict and consistently sought to restrain and narrow Israeli operations and to bring the war to an early and inconclusive resolution to avoid political headaches at home. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin held more than one hundred phone calls with his Israeli counterpart.

Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had written a piece for Foreign Affairs that appeared shortly after October 7, boasting that his administration's approach to the Middle East had made the region "quieter than it has been for decades" and had "de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy." Those sentences were later removed from the online version—but the Biden team was not humbled. At every turn, it called for Israel to do less, starting with its opposition to a preemptive attack on Hezbollah.

Nor did the United States favor tackling Gaza first, as some members of the war cabinet did. Right after October 7, three U.S. generals flew to Israel to try to stop a full-scale Gaza invasion. All their advice was filtered through the bitter American experience of the "Global War on Terror." They warned of massive Israeli casualties, citing their experience in Fallujah and Mosul. This was an odd way to persuade Israelis: Iraq had been an elective war fought halfway around the world, whereas Hamas was firing rockets at Israeli towns and holding hundreds of hostages in its dungeons.

In early 2024, the Biden administration took an extremely strong and public stance against an Israeli operation in Rafah, Hamas's last major stronghold. Secretary of State Antony Blinken confidently touted American estimates that the invasion would kill 20,000 civilians or more, and that it would take four to six months just to evacuate the city. The administration made clear it would stop providing weapons to Israel, and it actually did halt the delivery of certain weapons.

In fact, Israel evacuated almost all civilians from the city in a matter of weeks and rapidly defeated Hamas there. The Biden administration would similarly oppose Israel's retaliation for Iranian strikes on its territory. At each step, Israel fought not just its enemies, but also a massive campaign of disinformation and propaganda, and diplomatic partners in Washington and Europe who wanted the war to end at all costs to appease domestic constituencies.

Bob and Kaufman's chronicle of Israel's wartime decision-making is wonderfully written and suspenseful, even though readers already know roughly how the story goes. It is a powerful reminder that, whatever problems Israel faces, a million things had to go right to keep the outcome from being much worse.

In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis
by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Elliot Kaufman
Wicked Son, 352 pp., $32.50

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School and a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom.

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