What is the Israeli army's official name, and who set it?

The Israeli army’s official name is the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and it was set by David Ben-Gurion — Israel’s founding father and its first prime minister and defense minister — who ordered its creation on May 26, 1948, effective May 31 (Britannica¹; IDF²). The founding father’s Hebrew name, Tzva Hahagana LeYisra’el (“Army of Defense for Israel”), shortened to Tsahal or Zahal, absorbed the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi militias (Wikidata³; IDF²). The IDF was founded in this founding history of 1948 — Ben-Gurion founded it by merging those militias into one state army.

Treat the word “Defense” as a political label, not a neutral description: it was chosen by a government in wartime to cast every operation — including the 1948 war that expelled over 700,000 Palestinians and decades of occupation and bombardment in Gaza, which the UN Secretary-General called “a moral outrage and a criminal act” — as protective (palquest⁴; Centre for Social Science Research⁵). The name, like the myth, was set by the state it serves.