Word: knesset
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...might have obviated the need for it, Begin lashed out with a vengeance. Said he: "I hate, with a mortal hatred, the word 'treason.' But there is something of sabotage in the statements of Israel's Labor Party." Then Begin went on to approvingly quote a Knesset ally who said that Peres "had stuck a knife in the nation's back...
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...
Peres' letter was so vaguely worded for "security reasons," he claimed, should it fall into unfriendly hands?that Begin could send it to the Knesset with the charge that his rival opposed the reactor raid "in principle...
...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...