When I heard that Israel had named its operation against Iran Sha’agat Ha’ari, “The Lion’s Roar,” I immediately thought of Winston Churchill’s iconic use of that phrase at a November 1954 ceremony in Parliament marking his 80th birthday. After the Labour Party’s Clement Attlee praised his long-time rival for rallying the country with his electrifying speeches during the darkest hours of World War Two, Churchill responded that the credit belonged not to him, but to the British people: “It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”

When Churchill made these remarks, the lion, with its courage and nobility, had been a prominent symbol of England for eight centuries. Through his metaphor, Churchill acknowledged that while he had given voice to the nation’s lion-like spirit, the real responsibility for British survival and the Allied victory it made possible belonged to the nation and not its leader.

Churchill was right. It was the common British man and woman who saw their country through the most daunting challenge it had ever faced. With steadfast courage, the British people withstood the threat of German invasion in the summer of 1940; maintained their spirits during eight months of nightly bombing; enlisted in the army in the millions and fought valiantly across the globe; and mobilized broad swathes of society to produce the vast quantity of armaments needed to outgun a determined foe. Through these herculean efforts, the British battled the seemingly invincible Nazis to a draw, almost entirely alone, until the tide of war turned in their favor after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States in 1941. During the subsequent four years, the British people continued with stoic determination to sacrifice blood and treasure until the Allies had triumphed.

Now that intense fighting between Israel and Iran has been going on for a month—coming on top of two and a half years of a multi-front war that Iranian proxy Hamas launched on October 7, 2023—Churchill’s distinction between the lion’s roar and its heart provides a prism through which to appreciate what is happening in the Jewish state. The parallel with England is an apt one, in part because Israel too has long been symbolized by the lion.

In blessing his son Judah the patriarch Jacob likened him to a lion cub. King David, from the tribe of Judah, inherited this association and the lion became a symbol of the Davidic dynasty in Biblical times. Two and a half millennia later, in his 1902 novel Altneuland, Theodor Herzl addressed the prospects for renewing Jewish statehood by having a skeptical protagonist observe to a young Jewish boy that “Judah once had a lion.” He immediately received a defiant response: “What Judah once had, it can have again.” And indeed, in 1948 the lion came back in the form of a reborn Jewish state. Today, every Israeli recognizes the lion as the symbol of the nation’s capital, Jerusalem.

Historical and literary analogies don’t travel perfectly across time and space. In Israel’s war with Iran (and Hezbollah, which attacked the Jewish state in solidarity with its Iranian patron), we have not heard any oratory that approaches the Churchillian roar. But where Churchill’s phrase is apt is in focusing attention away from the roar of the Israeli lion and onto its heart. Whatever one’s assessment of the country’s leadership—a subject I will not take up in this short essay—responsibility for the war’s achievements so far and the prospects for success going forward belong overwhelmingly to the fortitude of the Israeli people.

First, Israel could not have launched this war if the country’s leadership hadn’t been confident that the citizenry would, once again, rise to the occasion. Before Operation Roaring Lion was launched on February 28, the nation had already been at war for the better part of 29 months following the trauma of October 7th. Around 200,000 residents of the Gaza envelope and the Israeli communities close to Lebanon had been displaced for over a year due to the threat of missiles, rockets, drones, and cross-border infiltration. Israelis across the country had become accustomed to racing to their bomb shelters and safe rooms due to aerial attacks launched by Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran. Crucially, hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists, ranging in age from 22 to 64, had been called up to fight, often for a total of more than 300 days, alongside the country’s conscript and professional army.

Indeed, these citizen-soldiers had been the backbone of the forces that carried out ground campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, secured Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) against an eruption of Hamas terrorism, and patrolled the borders with Syria, Jordan, and Egypt to prevent Iranian proxies from carrying out another October 7th. Each time they left their homes, typically for weeks or months at a time, their children and other family members had to adjust to life without them while their spouses, aided by relatives, neighbors, and friends, had to go above and beyond to fill in for them. The damage to their families’ financial situation, especially for those running their own businesses, was in many cases devastating.

As the members of the war cabinet were deciding whether to attack Iran together with the United States, they knew this step would inevitably bring down new waves of missiles, drones, and rockets on civilian targets throughout Israel, leading to injuries and deaths whose numbers could not be predicted. They understood that hundreds of thousands of reservists would again be asked to leave their homes for weeks at a time and that their family, friends, and neighbors would have to step in for them. If these decision makers thought their citizenry was too exhausted for such an ordeal; that Israelis would fall prey to panic, despair, or paralysis that would shutter the country’s economy and disrupt its vital emergency services; or that the reservists might not respond in large numbers when called again to the flag, they would not have taken on the risks of war. It was the steadfastness—the lion’s heart of the Israeli people—that gave the country’s leadership the confidence to embark on a fateful battle against the Jewish state’s most dangerous foe.

Since the war was launched, the Israeli people have proven entirely worthy of that confidence. The pilots, intelligence services, and special forces have worked around the clock to destroy the Iranians’ capability to rain death and destruction on Israel and its allies. Over a hundred thousand reservists have deployed throughout the country, especially on both sides of the Lebanese border squaring off against Hezbollah, while others defend Israel from terrorist threats on its borders and in Judea and Samaria. Several IDF soldiers have been killed inside Lebanon while fighting with Hezbollah operatives and driving them away from the border, and dozens more have been wounded. (On the reservists’ unsung role in this war, see my Times of Israel post here.)

Israelis on the home front have likewise demonstrated lion-like courage, determination, and a remarkable ability to maintain good spirits. The families of IDF reservists have once again shouldered their heightened responsibilities. Bomb shelters, far from symbolizing restrictions on freedom of movement, have come to represent the nation’s resilience. As widely reported in the media, these dull, concrete structures have become centers of communal bonding, creative entertainment, artistic expression, and even weddings (see articles here, here, and here). Humorous songs about safe rooms and take-offs on the Home Front Command’s warnings about incoming missiles have gone viral. Not surprisingly in a culture built on entrepreneurship and the centrality of family, there is a dating app aimed at bringing singles together in bomb shelters. Enterprising Israelis have also created apps that calculate the best time, tailored to the user’s location, to fit in a shower that won’t be interrupted by warning sirens. (On these and other innovations, see here.) Support for continuing the war, despite the expected decline following the initial euphoria over the opening strikes against the Islamic Republic’s leadership, remains robust (as covered here).

War, as Clausewitz argued, is the realm of uncertainty. It is impossible to predict how long the fight against Iran and its proxies will go on and what form it will take. This will depend largely on decisions made by President Trump, the Iranian regime, and the Hezbollah leadership, as well as the response of the Iranian people to the weakening of their long-time oppressors. What is clear is that the longer the conflict continues, the more Israel’s ability to conduct it successfully will depend on the resilience of the Israeli people. For the Jewish state to remove the threats posed by Iran and Hezbollah, Israelis will have to be willing to endure this war for additional weeks or months—with all that this entails.

During the fateful months from May to September 1940, when England was under relentless attack from the Nazis, David Ben-Gurion, later to become Israel’s founding prime minister, was stationed in London on behalf of the Zionist movement. He developed a long-lasting respect for the steadfastness of the British people. Years later he wrote: “In Tel Aviv, in May 1948, while weighing up the risks and chances of a declaration of independence, I recalled the men and women of London during the blitz. And I told myself: ‘I have seen what a people is capable of achieving in the hour of supreme trial. I have seen their spirit touched by nobility…. This is what the Jewish people can do.’”

In the pre-dawn hours of May 15, 1948, shortly after Ben-Gurion read aloud Israel’s declaration of independence in Tel-Aviv, Egyptian bombers attacked that city. Ben-Gurion, wandering the streets, noted in his diary: “From all the houses people peered out in their pajamas and robes, but there wasn’t any noticeable fear beyond what was appropriate.” He added: “I felt: these people will stand firm.”

Today’s Israelis, worthy successors of the founding generation that had the courage of Churchill’s resolute British, are demonstrating that they too possess the heart of a lion. It is they who are largely responsible for Israel’s success during this past month and it is they who are the key to the Jewish state’s ability to persevere in the fateful days, weeks, and months ahead of us.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)