In launching the Lebanon war, the Israeli state enjoyed three convenient domestic conditions. First, public support was virtually guaranteed for a campaign against the PLO since most Israelis regarded the Palestinian organization as a vicious enemy that deserved to be fought, and if possible, eliminated. Second, the war leadership had ample time to prepare the marketing of the war. Third, the solutions the Israeli leadership devised for the international reactions it anticipated were also highly compatible with the problems the government was likely to face inside Israel.

In the final analysis, however, the structural advantages the government enjoyed also had a serious downside, as they worked as blinding agents, confining the internal political debate almost exclusively to international considerations. Thus, for example, as was indicated in the pre-war deliberations, considerations and anxieties of ministers, and even members of the liberal press, power politics took central stage. Indeed, with few exceptions, neither officials and ministers nor even columnists in the liberal press were particularly concerned with potential domestic objections to the war or with its social consequences, until the first wave of reservist protest.

It was not that the possibility that the war could unleash some opposition at home was utterly absent from the mind of all decision-makers. Indeed, the gap between the declared “40 kilometers” objective of the war, on the one hand, and the military actions and the unfolding real goals, on the other, seem to indicate that at least Sharon sensed a potential domestic problem.