“Resolve was never stronger than in the morning, after the night, when it was never weaker.” – Johnny, in Naked (1993), directed by Mike Leigh.
I first encountered Mike Leigh’s work at 17, watching Naked at Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center cinema. David Thewlis’s Johnny, a restless, brilliant, self-destructing drifter roaming nighttime London, stayed lodged in my mind for three decades. That line about resolve stayed the longest.
In October 2010, the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem announced that Leigh would lead an improvisation workshop. They ran a Facebook competition, common at the time, where the public could win a ticket by rallying friends to like their post. I entered and won.
Then Leigh canceled. In a letter to the school’s director, Renen Schorr, the British filmmaker, himself Jewish, said Israel’s government had gone “from bad to worse.” The proposed loyalty oath requiring non-Jewish citizens to pledge allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic state” was, he wrote, the straw that broke the camel’s back. He wanted to send “a very clear message.”
The loyalty oath debate had first been reported on October 7, 2010, a date that would acquire an entirely different meaning 13 years later. The cabinet vote followed on October 10. By October 17, Sam Spiegel posted that the workshop was canceled:
“Dear friends, we thank everyone who participated in our competition in an attempt to win a ticket to the artist’s workshop with Mike Leigh. Unfortunately, Mike Leigh canceled his arrival in Israel. We promised the winner, Doron Goldberg, that he would receive a message with another prize from us. We will soon publish Renen Schorr’s response letter to Mike Leigh regarding the cancellation.”
(They never contacted me personally.)
I mention this not out of bitterness but because of where the thread leads. Thewlis went on to play Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films, a kind, brilliant professor who also happened to be a werewolf.
That was simply who Lupin was. He did not choose it, could not change it, and refused to be ashamed of it. He lived his life fully, teaching, protecting his students, standing against darkness – while the world around him could not accept what it did not understand.
To safeguard Lupin’s way of life, Hogwarts planted the Whomping Willow: a fierce, sentient tree guarding the passage to the Shrieking Shack, where Lupin would go during his transformations. The Whomping Willow did not wait for threats to arrive. It struck first, hard, at anything that approached uninvited.
From Johnny to Lupin. From a man destroyed by a world that could not accommodate him, to a man who thrived despite a world that could not understand him. Same actor, opposite poles, connected by the same question: What happens when who you are is something others refuse to accept? The thread runs through walls and trees, fear and resilience, and eventually through a hundred-year-old essay that shaped a nation.
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From personal story to national doctrine
In November 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky published the “Iron Wall” essay in the Russian-language journal Razsviet. His argument was as uncomfortable as it was clear-eyed: there could be no voluntary agreement between Jews and Arabs over Palestine. Not because Arabs were irrational; Jabotinsky explicitly called them “not a rabble, but a living people,” but because no native population in history had ever voluntarily consented to being outnumbered in its own land.
His solution was the Iron Wall: an unbreachable defense so strong that the Arab world would eventually abandon hope of destroying the Jewish state. Only then, he argued, would moderate leadership emerge and genuine negotiation become possible. This was not a rejection of peace but a theory of how to reach it. Jabotinsky pledged equal rights for all inhabitants and swore never to eject anyone.
For a century, the Iron Wall doctrine shaped Israeli strategic thinking. The IDF, the security barrier, the qualitative military edge, the Abraham Accords, all rested on Jabotinsky’s core insight: deterrence precedes diplomacy.
Then came October 7, 2023.
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The massacre carried out by Hamas was not merely an intelligence failure. It was the night when resolve was never weaker – a breach of the most heavily surveilled border on earth, which killed more than 1,200 people and took over 250 hostage. The Iron Wall, the static barrier that Israel had believed sufficient on October 6, was exposed. A wall that only stands and endures can be tunneled under, rocketed over, and stormed through.
October 7 did not disprove Jabotinsky. It proved his framework needs an upgrade.
The first lesson is non-negotiable: Israel cannot allow a genocidal terrorist organization or regime to establish itself on any of its borders. Not Hamas in the south, not Hezbollah in the north, not on any front. This principle is being implemented as these lines are written, and it should be formally enshrined in Israel’s security doctrine on the day after.
This is where the Whomping Willow stops being a literary metaphor and becomes a strategic doctrine. The Whomping Willow does not announce itself. It does not negotiate. It does not wait to be breached. The moment a threat approaches, it responds with overwhelming, disproportionate force. Defense that is indistinguishable from offense.
Israel needs a Whomping Wall.
Not a passive barrier that absorbs attacks, but an active perimeter built on four pillars. Deterrence and early warning were always the foundation of Israel’s security doctrine, but both failed catastrophically on October 7. The Whomping Wall demands two more: decisiveness, which existed in doctrine but went unexercised since 1973, and depth, the new and necessary insistence that hostile forces never again mass within striking distance of Israeli communities.
This is the doctrine Israel has been constructing since that morning after: deeper intelligence operations, preemptive strikes against Iranian proxies, expanded aerial defense systems, and a strategic posture that ensures any attack on Israeli civilians is met not with proportional response but with the elimination of the capacity to attack again.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the opportunity, and the obligation, to formalize this evolution. Jabotinsky gave the Zionist movement the Iron Wall. Netanyahu can give it the Whomping Wall: a defense doctrine that honors Jabotinsky’s original insight while updating it for an era of tunnel networks, drone swarms, and rocket arsenals. Not a wall that waits. A wall that strikes. And one that protects everyone within Israel’s borders, Jews and Arabs alike, exactly as Jabotinsky envisioned.
Mike Leigh canceled his visit because he wanted Israel to change. On October 7, it did – though not in the way he imagined. If the Whomping Wall becomes doctrine, historians may judge it as Netanyahu’s most consequential legacy: the morning resolve that was institutionalized into strategy, making Israel not merely defensible but the safest place on earth for the Jewish people.
Resolve was never stronger than in the morning.