ABSTRACT
War is an existential challenge of the first magnitude, but it is also a stimulating intellectual exercise. The focus of this article is on the attitudes toward war of Israel’s political leadership in the 1980s.2 In the 1980s, the political debate on the use of force resulted from the collapse of the national consensus on the justice and wisdom of the Lebanon War.3 The preoccupation of the Israeli political elite with the Lebanon imbroglio generated much thought and many statements on war in general.
