THE BEGIN YEARS HAD not been easy ones for Israel, but they had been important. Israel had made peace with its once most potent enemy, Egypt. It had made clear that it would not tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of its sworn enemies. It had shown that it would go to war—even a war that many Israelis eventually opposed—to protect the

AFTER THE GERMAN INVASION of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis began their systematic liquidation of Europe’s Jews. Einsatzgruppen, or special operating units, would round up Jewish communities and shoot them all—men, women, and children—destroying entire communities in only a few hours. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in just a

Violating the 2009 cease-fire, Hamas and other terrorist groups maintained a steady “drizzle”—tiftuf, in Hebrew—of rockets and mortar shells on southern Israeli towns. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s 2012 victory, that drip became a downpour. On October 24 alone, Hamas fired eighty projectiles at Israel. This

The campaign of terror began in earnest in the mid-1960s. In