Israel in Focus: The Story of Israel's Defenders

Dear Friends,

Israel in Focus is our ongoing effort to carry you behind the headlines and into the real stories of struggle, sacrifice, and faith unfolding here in the Land. This month, we want to tell you about an institution woven into nearly every chapter of Israel's modern survival, one that touches almost every family we serve: the Israel Defense Forces, known here simply as Tzahal.

For seventy-eight years, whenever danger has come to Israel, it has been met by young men and women barely out of childhood, sons and daughters who leave home to stand watch over their nation. Their story is not only one of tanks and borders. It is a story of ordinary people carrying an extraordinary weight, and of a God who, as the psalmist promised, neither slumbers nor sleeps as He keeps watch over His people.

A Nation Born Under Fire

The IDF was not founded in a season of peace. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel. The very next day, the armies of five neighboring nations poured across the borders, joined by volunteers from as far away as Sudan, Pakistan, and Yemen, all of them determined to destroy the newborn state before it could draw its first breath.

Israel was one day old and already fighting for its life. Its defenders were seasoned by years of local conflict, but they were poorly equipped, short on training, and short on funds. On May 26, 1948, one of Ben-Gurion's first orders as prime minister established a single, unified army and dissolved the underground groups that had come before it: the Haganah, the Etzel, and Lehi. On that day, the Israel Defense Forces was born.

Against every expectation, the young army held. Officials and supporters scrambled across the seas to arm it, and a real breakthrough came when the first fighter planes arrived from Czechoslovakia, forming the beginnings of what is today one of the world's most respected air forces. By the summer of 1949, Israel had repelled five invading armies and secured the survival of the state. But the victory came at a staggering price: more than 4,000 soldiers and over 2,000 civilians fell in a nation of only about 600,000 people. Nearly every community buried someone it loved. The memory of that war, both the deliverance and the sacrifice, still shapes how Israel mourns and how it celebrates to this day.

What “Tzahal” Means

You will often hear Israelis speak not of “the IDF” but of Tzahal. The word is an acronym, and like so much of the Hebrew language, it wears its meaning on the surface. Tzahal stands for Tzva HaHagana LeYisrael, “the Army for the Defense of Israel.”

Each word tells the story. Tzava means “army,” or in the older biblical English, “host,” the very word Scripture uses when it speaks of the Lord of Hosts, Adonai Tzva’ot. Hagana means “defense,” and it shares its root with magen, the Hebrew word for “shield,” familiar to many of you from Magen David , the Shield of David. And LeYisrael simply means “for Israel.”

Even the name was chosen with care. When Israel's founders debated what to call their new army, they deliberately settled on a name that placed defense, not conquest, at its very heart. The purpose was written into the title: to be a shield for a people who had endured too many centuries with no shield of their own.

The Spirit of the IDF

Service in Israel is not reserved for a professional few. At eighteen, most Israelis, young men and young women alike, are called to serve, a rhythm of life that binds nearly every family to the army in some personal way. And each soldier is handed something small but weighty: an ethical code meant to guide them in the field and in ordinary life. It is called Ruach Tzahal, the Spirit of the IDF.

It rests on four fundamental values:

1. The defense of the State of Israel and its residents
2. Patriotism and loyalty to the land and its people
3. The protection of human dignity
4. Statehood, the principle that the army answers to the law and the elected government, never the other way around.

From these flow ten further values, among them Purity of Arms, which instructs soldiers to use force only when the mission demands it and to do all they can to spare those who are not part of the fighting.

Another is the simple, heavy value the code calls Human Life. It insists that every person carries inherent worth, regardless of religion, nationality, or status, a conviction that will sound familiar to anyone who believes each of us is made in the image of God. This is the standard to which Israel holds its sons and daughters, even in the chaos of war. No army meets it perfectly, but it remains the goal, written down and carried in the pocket of every soldier who serves. As the psalmist prayed, Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war (Psalm 144:1).

Wars, Sacrifice, and a Staggering Cost

In its 78 years, the IDF has fought what historians generally count as nine major wars:

• The War of Independence in 1948
• The Sinai campaign of 1956
• The Six-Day War of 1967
• The War of Attrition
• The Yom Kippur War of 1973
• The First Lebanon War of 1982
• The Second Lebanon War of 2006
• The wars in Gaza
• The war that began on October 7, 2023, and continues to shape daily life here.

Between and around those wars have come two Intifadas and countless smaller operations. Few armies on earth have been tested so relentlessly.

That testing has come at an almost unbearable cost. This spring, as Israel paused for Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day, the Ministry of Defense released the updated count of the fallen. Since 1860, the year modern Jewish life began to take root beyond the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, 25,644 soldiers and members of the security forces have laid down their lives in defense of the land and its people. In the past year alone, 170 more names were added to that roll.

We share that figure carefully, because it is far too easy to let a number that large blur into abstraction. But every one of those 25,644 was a name. A face. A child who did not come home. Behind them stand nearly 60,000 bereaved family members living in Israel today: parents, widows, and children who will carry an empty place at the table for the rest of their lives.

Standing with Israel's Defenders

At Vision for Israel, we see those empty places. Behind every soldier is a mother waiting for a phone call, a young widow, a family learning how to live alongside grief. And so, together with our humanitarian work across the Land, we walk with the men and women who serve and with the families who have paid the highest price. We do it because we believe these are not merely soldiers and statistics, but people whom God loves, standing watch so that others may sleep in peace.

Your gift helps us bring practical comfort and a steady, faithful presence to those who guard Israel and to those who mourn them. Would you stand with them today? You can give here knowing that your generosity reaches real families, in real time, with real hope.

Two thousand years of exile could not erase this people, and no enemy will erase them now. Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live, and by the grace of God—will go on living.