Word: knesset
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After so many false starts, the cloak of secrecy sheltering the operation was beginning to fray. On May 22, word of the raid was leaked to Moshe Shahal, a Knesset opposition party leader. His source: former Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who viewed the proposed strike as "adventurist." At roughly the same time, Begin's office received two additional intelligence reports that the Iraqis were prepared to activate the reactor (make it "hot" in technical jargon) as early as the first week in July. On June 5, Begin gave orders to launch the attack two days later. His day of decision...
...raid might have been more convincing if a persistent odor of electioneering had not clung to some of his other actions. The day after Begin's press conference, an ugly spate of name-calling erupted between the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Peres. Reason: Begin had given the Israeli Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a copy of Peres' "personal and top-secret" letter that resulted in one of the raid's postponements. Peres had learned that the attack was scheduled for May 10, the date of the deciding round of French presidential elections. As a "supreme civic duty...
...summit occurred the very week that the Israeli election campaign got under way-just as Likud edged ahead of Labor in one poll, 34% to 33%, after trailing, 14% to 44%, in January. To counter the summit as best it could, the Labor Party scheduled a Knesset debate on Begin's recently revealed 1978 commitment, taken without parliamentary consent, to commit Israel's air force to help Lebanon's right-wing Christians in the event of attack by Syrian airpower. The debate grew so heated at one point that Labor Opposition Member Michael Harish jumped from...
...their battle against Syria. Under the terms of the agreement, Israel would not intervene directly in the conflict unless Syria used air power against the Christians. The revelations caused an outcry by the opposition, which charged that the agreement constituted a de facto peace treaty that circumvented requisite Knesset approval. TIME also learned last week that Begin, Moshe Dayan, then Foreign Minister, and Ezer Weizman, then Defense Minister, had met in Israel with Phalangist leaders as early...
During those years, however, Peres also made some powerful enemies, whose vindictive animosity has plagued his political career. His arms-buying forays in Europe often edged into diplomacy, irritating then Foreign Minister Golda Meir. As a Knesset member in 1965, Peres helped to found the Rafi faction of Ben-Gurion loyalists that defected from the Labor Party for three years...