On March 21, Al-Monitor and the Israeli press broke the story of Israel admitting that jets from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had destroyed the Syrian nuclear reactor at Deir ez-Zor in September 2007. Soon after publication, a battle of versions began as to who had been responsible for the decision to attack.

When the dust finally settles after this week’s embarrassing jostling over credit for the operation, the notion that Israel is best led by someone who used to be a general will be dispelled forever. Following a day of battling versions and public squabbling between the two Ehuds — former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Defense Minister and Prime Minister Ehud Barak — it turns out that Lt. Gen. Barak had actually sought to delay the airstrike.

Olmert’s rendition of events, laid out at length in his newly published memoir, is not the only version of Barak’s reluctance to approve the bombing. According to almost everyone at the nexus of decision-making in those days, Olmert had bravely led the attack plan, knowing that it could embroil Israel in a bloody war, while Barak, the vaunted military commander, was the one trying hardest to rein him in.

Barak had only become defense minister in June 2007, after winning the Labor Party primaries. Until then, the person shepherding the attack plan alongside Olmert had not been a general either. Olmert's defense minister was another politician, Labor Party leader Amir Peretz. Furthermore, the public standing of these two civilians was at a record low for their alleged failures in conducting the Second Lebanon War, in summer 2006. The ridicule to which Peretz was subjected peaked some six months later when a video surfaced showing him, surrounded by the country’s top brass, peering into a pair of binoculars with the lens caps on during a military exercise on the Golan Heights. That photo “proved” that Israel had been led during the war by a clueless defense chief whose military inexperience and lack of understanding were the main cause of its flawed handling.