Israel, The Mouse That Roared – OpEd
One of the funniest movies you will ever see in your life is “The Mouse That Roared,” the 1959 satire in which Peter Sellers plays three roles at once: the dotty Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, her scheming Prime Minister Count Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe, the hapless field marshal sent off to war.
Here is the spoiler. The tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a postage stamp of a country tucked into the Alps, on the order of a Liechtenstein or a Monaco, goes bankrupt when a California winery knocks off its one and only export, the noble Pinot Grand Fenwick. The Prime Minister hatches a scheme that belongs in a public choice seminar on the perverse incentives of foreign aid: declare war on the United States, lose at once, and collect the lavish reconstruction largesse that Washington showers on its defeated enemies. No nation that has gone to war with America, he observes, has ever gone hungry afterward.
So a couple of dozen men in medieval chain mail, armed with longbows, sail to New York to surrender. The trouble is that they arrive during an air raid drill that has emptied the city, find no one willing to accept their surrender, and instead blunder into possession of the “Q bomb,” a doomsday device that makes the hydrogen bomb look quaint. They win. (Don’t ask. Go see the film. You will die laughing.) The crowning moment is a telephone call in which one Peter Sellers (the general) despairs to another (the queen) that the whole fiasco could have been avoided. “Only an imbecile could have won this war,” the Prime Minister moans, “and he did.”
Israel, too, is a mouse that roars, and it has been roaring since the day it was born. By the cold arithmetic of size, it is supposed to lose. In 1948, a community of some 650,000 Jews beat back the regular armies of five invading states whose combined populations dwarfed its own: Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, with a Saudi contingent thrown in under Egyptian command for good measure. The war of extermination that Arab leaders openly promised ended instead with the would-be exterminators on the losing side, and with the supposed victims drawing the new map.
The roaring has never stopped. At present the adversary is the Middle Sized Satan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country of nearly 90 million. Israel holds barely 10 million people, of whom roughly 7 million are Jews. That alone is odds of about ten to one. Fold in the populations that march under the banners of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and the gap yawns wider still.
To feel the weight of such odds, consider Canada and the United States. Some 41 million Canadians live beside roughly 342 million Americans, a ratio in the neighborhood of eight to one. Can anyone picture Canada marching south and conquering its neighbor? The notion is preposterous. Yet the preposterous is precisely what Israel has been made to accomplish, over and over again.
True, the Little Satan has lately had help against the Middle Sized Satan from the Big Satan. But that assistance arrived late, under the second Trump Administration. Under Obama and Biden, Washington was at least as much an anchor as a sail, forever counseling restraint, on at least one occasion leaking sensitive plans to the press, and treating the only genuinely free society in the region as the party most in need of adult supervision.
How do we account for so unnatural a result? The two combatants, Iran and Israel, sit beside each other in the dictionary and almost nowhere else. They occupy different rungs on every ladder that matters: intellectual, institutional, industrial, scientific, and civilizational. Numbers count for something in war. They do not count for everything. Organization, knowledge, and the institutions that convert knowledge into capability count for a great deal more.
The nearest historical parallel is the collision between the Spanish conquistadors and the peoples of the Americas five centuries ago. Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with a few hundred men and brought down an empire of millions. The Spaniards carried steel, gunpowder, and relied on horses. Their opponents, brave beyond any doubt and vastly more numerous, carried obsidian blades and wore no armor at all. When a technologically advanced force meets a far larger but far less developed one, the outcome is usually a foregone conclusion.
This is not to say the larger side is helpless. Sheer numbers can always exact a price, and some conquistadors did fall. But measured as a share of those who fought, the losses ran overwhelmingly the other way. Something similar is unfolding in the Middle East today.
Yes, there was October 7, 2023, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, when roughly 1,200 people were murdered and some 250 were dragged into captivity. It was a horror without qualification. But set against the toll later borne by the perpetrators and by those who cheered them on, even that atrocity is, in the grim ledger of war, a small number. That the toll on the other side climbed so high owes much to a deliberate strategy. Hamas fights from beneath hospitals, schools, and apartment blocks, and treats the very population it claims to protect as a renewable supply of human shields.
What, concretely, are the advantages that produce so lopsided a result? Consider the pager operation of September 2024, in which Israeli intelligence salted thousands of Hezbollah communication devices with explosives and then detonated them at a moment of its own choosing, removing a large slice of the organization’s fighting strength in a single afternoon. It was a feat of engineering and patience wholly beyond the reach of the enemy it humiliated. Consider, too, the shield Israel has raised above its cities: Iron Dome against short range rockets, David’s Sling against medium range threats, Arrow II and III against ballistic missiles, and the newer Iron Beam, which knocks projectiles out of the sky with a laser at the cost of a few dollars per shot. In June 2025, Israeli aircraft ranged over Iran almost at will, striking nuclear facilities and senior commanders far from home. Israel commands the skies above its enemies not because it fields more soldiers, but because it is the most technologically advanced society in the region confronting adversaries that are not at all in its league.
The roar, then, has a straightforward source. A small, highly educated, technologically sophisticated people stands against far larger numbers that lack those same advantages, and prevails. There is, however, one happy difference between Israel and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Grand Fenwick won its war by accident and spent the rest of the film wishing it had lost. Israel wins on purpose, because it must, for the alternative to victory is not a Marshall Plan but the grave. The mouse that roars in the Levant did not stumble into its strength. It built that strength, the hard way, by becoming the kind of society that turns a handful of people into something its enemies cannot match. Long may it roar.
About the authors:
- Walter Edward Block is an American economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist who holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
- Oded J. K. Faran holds LL.B. and LL.M. degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the General Director of Faran & Co. International Translations Ltd. and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.
References
- “The Mouse That Roared” (1959), directed by Jack Arnold, starring Peter Sellers.
- The five invading armies of 1948 (Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon): U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian, “The Arab-Israeli War of 1948.” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war
- September 2024 Hezbollah pager and walkie-talkie operation, attributed to Israeli intelligence (Mossad and military intelligence). June 2025 Israeli air campaign against Iranian nuclear sites and senior commanders.
- Report: Netanyahu prepared to act alone against Iran if needed. https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/report-netanyahu-prepared-to-act-alone-against-iran-if-needed/ar-AA25ef8m
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