When an Israeli infantryman radios for a helicopter to remove two wounded comrades, and the corpse of a third, from the battlefield, he says, “We have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.” Other militaries, writes Matti Friedman, have their own jargon that similarly obscures what goes on in war, but IDF lingo may be uniquely horticultural. “What,” Friedman asks, “does this say about Israel’s military?”

Perhaps [it says] something about the agricultural preoccupations of the kibbutz and of the socialist militias that spawned the army in the early years of the state. Even after he became the country’s most famous general and the defense minister in the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan used to say his profession was “farmer”—the point being that war was to be treated as something you were forced to do, though you’d rather be plowing. This is still close to what I experienced as the Israeli military’s ideal approach to soldiering or command. . . .

According to the Israeli linguist Ruvik Rosenthal, author of a recent book on military language, the floral euphemisms reflect the fact that while Israelis recognize the necessity of war, they don’t celebrate it and would rather not think about it. The fact of the country’s mandatory draft means that people are too close to the army to wax romantic about the institution or what it does. There are no military parades here and haven’t been for years. So though as soldiers we did violence and had violence done to us, we were armed with peaceful language. A forward operating base sounds dangerous; a “pumpkin” doesn’t.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.