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........

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