Beitzim

Golda Meir looks different to me after October 7.

My uncle Yossi Peer’s younger brother was Ze’ev Peer, Zeevik. He was 19 when the Yom Kippur War began and served in a tank unit. On October 7, 1973, his tank was hit by Egyptian antitank fire in Sinai. The commander was killed. Zeevik got out wounded with two other crewmen.

The other two were recovered.

Zeevik was not.

His body has never been found.

I never met Zeevik. I was not born yet. I know his story because my uncle Yossi lost his little brother and never got him back.

My uncle Udi had a different story. He happened to be off when the war started. His best friend was not. He was killed and is buried in Ness Ziona. I never met him either. Udi survived and carried guilt about that for the rest of his life. I do not pretend to know exactly what that felt like.

So this is not an attempt to rehabilitate Golda or excuse the failures of 1973. My family lived with their consequences.

But October 7 changed the way I think about leadership after catastrophe. It made me think about something Israelis have a particularly useful word for:

ביצים. Beitzim.

Literally, eggs.

Balls.

Not chutzpah. Chutzpah is audacity. Gall. Beitzim are something else. They are what you need when the choices are bad, the consequences are enormous and the decision is yours.

For most of my life, the Yom Kippur War arrived already interpreted. Israel was surprised. The intelligence failed. The first days were disastrous. Israel recovered. Golda resigned.

Then October 7 happened, and some of 1973 became easier for me to understand.

Not excuse. Understand.

October 7 showed me what it feels like to wake up and discover that assumptions you trusted were wrong and institutions you believed were watching had failed to see what was in front of them. I had my own reckoning afterward, with Israel, America, antisemitism, security and my own Jewishness. Somewhere in that process, I started looking at Golda again.

Israel’s political and military leadership was surprised in 1973, and Golda was prime minister. The failures before the war remain part of her record. But so does what happened after the attack began.

Later testimony from Arnan “Sini” Azaryahu described Defense Minister Moshe Dayan raising a nuclear “demonstration” option on October 7 amid fears about the Golan front. According to Azaryahu, Yigal Allon and Yisrael Galili opposed the proposal and Golda rejected it. Other accounts, including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option, allege that Israel took additional nuclear preparatory steps. The evidence remains contested, and Israel has never publicly confirmed possessing nuclear weapons.

What matters here is the decision Golda faced. The people in that room did not know how the war would end. They were contemplating what Israel should do if its conventional defenses failed.

America was part of Golda’s story long before she had to manage the American relationship as prime minister. She was born in Kyiv in 1898, raised in Milwaukee and moved to the Land of Israel in 1921. My own family was traveling both Jewish roads in those years: the Ruskins from London to Chicago, the Frankels to Ottoman Palestine.

Half a century later, Golda was dealing with Henry Kissinger, a German-born Jew whose family had fled the Nazis for America and whose responsibility was now the United States.

Golda’s job was Israel. Kissinger’s was America.

Washington ultimately mounted a massive airlift to replace Israeli losses while Kissinger was simultaneously thinking about the Soviet Union, the Arab states, oil, détente and where the war would end.

Israel and America were allies. They were not the same country.

That tension has never disappeared. An Israeli prime minister has to know when Washington is right, when to push back, how much American support Israel can depend on and what happens when the two governments agree about the threat but disagree about the response.

Sometimes restraint takes beitzim too.

Golda was 75 and privately undergoing treatment for lymphoma while all of this was happening. I do not need to turn her into the honorary man implied by that old line about her being “the only man in the cabinet.”

She was Golda.

And Golda had beitzim.

But Golda is only one example.

Israel’s unusually intimate relationship with military service shapes the way Israelis think about leadership. The reservist disappearing for months is not an abstraction. He is your cousin, your neighbor, your coworker, the father you saw at school drop-off.

Maybe that is one reason Israel has spent so much of its history turning generals into politicians. But a great commander does not necessarily make a great prime minister.

A commander is given a mission. A prime minister has to decide what the mission is, what it is worth and when it ends.

Ben-Gurion

On May 14, 1948, with fighting underway and neighboring Arab armies preparing to enter the war, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel.

There was no modern IDF, no Iron Dome and no American military relationship remotely resembling today’s.

Hindsight turns dangerous choices into dates on a calendar.

Eshkol

Levi Eshkol may be the least glamorous example, which is partly why he belongs here.

In May 1967, Egypt moved forces into Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran. Israel mobilized, but Eshkol first pursued diplomacy and accepted American requests not to initiate hostilities while Washington explored an international response.

When diplomacy failed, Eshkol expanded his government, gave Moshe Dayan the defense portfolio and authorized the June 5 strike. Six days later, the strategic map of the region had been transformed.

Eshkol did not know on June 4 that there was going to be a Six Day War. He knew the straits were closed, Egyptian forces were in Sinai, diplomacy had not solved the crisis and waiting carried risks of its own.

There is something important about Eshkol handing the defense ministry to Dayan. Beitzim does not require pretending you can do everything yourself. A prime minister has to decide who should be in the room and who should be given authority.

Begin

Menachem Begin’s record complicates any attempt to equate nerve with aggression.

In 1981, his government ordered the airstrike that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

But Begin also made peace with Egypt and agreed to return Sinai. Those decisions pointed in opposite directions, but both carried enormous strategic and political consequences.

Beitzim is not simply a willingness to use force.

Rabin

In 1976, Israeli and Jewish hostages were held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The rescue plan required commandos to fly across Africa, defeat hijackers and Ugandan forces, free the hostages and bring them home.

On July 3, Rabin’s government approved the military plan. About an hour later, he told the chief of staff: “Let the troops take off.”

Entebbe became Entebbe because it worked. Rabin had to decide before anyone knew that it would.

Shamir

During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel. The United States pressed Israel not to retaliate, fearing that an Israeli strike could damage the coalition against Iraq. Shamir’s government chose restraint.

That same year, Operation Solomon airlifted more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in roughly 36 hours.

One decision was not to strike back. The other was to move thousands of Jews out of a collapsing country with extraordinary speed. The point is not that the decisions were equivalent. They were not.

It is that leadership does not always look like charging forward.

Arik

Ariel Sharon makes the distinction between commander and prime minister particularly clear. Unit 101, paratroopers, general, the Suez crossing in 1973: his military reputation was built on audacity.

I think Sharon’s beitzim were easier to see before he became prime minister.

As prime minister, the courage demanded of him was less cinematic and more consequential. His government launched Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Three years later, a man associated for decades with the Israeli right carried out the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, fought much of his own political camp over it, left Likud and formed Kadima.

General Sharon could charge. Prime Minister Sharon had to calculate.

A commander asks how to take the hill. A prime minister has to decide whether the hill is worth taking.

Bibi

Which brings me to Benjamin Netanyahu.

October 7 happened while he was prime minister. That fact is not going anywhere. But responsibility and a complete historical explanation are not the same thing. We still do not know everything that was warned, dismissed, assumed or misunderstood in the years and hours before the attack.

The record will become fuller as investigations, testimony and archival material accumulate. People who sat in the rooms will tell their stories. Historians will argue about what Netanyahu knew, what the military knew, what the intelligence services believed, what Hamas understood about Israel and which assumptions failed.

That is why I keep coming back to Golda.

I grew up with half a century of hindsight about 1973. We do not have that with October 7.

We are still inside it.

The American relationship is different now too. Earlier this year, I sat in the room at the IAC National Summit in Florida and listened to retired Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, talk about Iran. He recalled a conversation with President Trump and Steve Witkoff in which he said, “If we’re ever going to take action, I want to phone a friend, and that friend is Israel.”

Israel still needs America. But America also sees strategic and military value in Israel. An Israeli prime minister still has to know what to do when the interests of two close allies overlap, and when they do not.

Looking across these decisions, what interests me is not aggression. Some of the choices were to attack. Others were to wait, withdraw, negotiate, rescue or restrain. Eshkol waited in 1967 and then authorized war. Golda rejected proposals for a preemptive strike in 1973 and then had to lead through the consequences. Begin bombed Osirak and made peace with Egypt. Shamir absorbed Iraqi Scuds without retaliating. Sharon spent much of his life associated with taking territory and then, as prime minister, withdrew from Gaza.

That is what I mean by beitzim.

Not wisdom. Not morality. Not competence. Not proof that the decision turned out to be right.

The person sitting in the prime minister’s office does not get the history book first. There is intelligence, pressure from Washington, generals arguing, families waiting for soldiers to come home and sometimes no good option at all.

Someone still has to decide.

ביצים. Beitzim.

Balls.