Who’s in Charge of the IDF?

It was a profound national crisis; Begin established the Kahan Commission to determine whether Israel was responsible for the massacre.

Israel now had a policy known as the “Begin Doctrine,” which would endure long after Begin himself was gone from the political arena. It held that Israel would not countenance any of its mortal enemies seeking to develop or acquire a weapon of mass destruction.

Instead, the IDF sought to weaken Hezbollah, attacking both Hezbollah military targets as well as Lebanese civilian infrastructure, including Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. But Hezbollah fought back for several intense weeks during what became known as the Second Lebanon War and held a seemingly much more powerful IDF at bay. It was a

The terrorists once again hid behind their own civilians while trying to kill Israeli civilians, and then cried “war crimes,” when innocent Palestinians were killed.

Operation Peace for the Galilee was launched on June 6, 1982. Despite some initial successes at ridding southern Lebanon of PLO fighters, Israel’s plans quickly unraveled. Ariel Sharon took Israeli troops far beyond the forty-kilometer line to which the cabinet had agreed and that Begin had committed to Reagan he would observe. Not long thereafter,

Israeli life had changed in numerous ways. If in the early years of the state military leaders spoke of their accomplishments with a sense of humility—the pervasive culture insisted that they were merely “doing their duty to serve the nation”—Israel now venerated IDF generals and treated them as heroes. Some of those generals then parlayed their ne

And no one understands it better than the terrorists, Hamas and Hezbollah. If they fire at Israeli civilians, Israel will retaliate and unintentionally kill the Palestinian and Lebanese civilians behind whom the terrorists hide.