Word: menachem
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...Menachem Begin [Sept. 20] has said, "A friend does not weaken his friend." Begin's actions have weakened the U.S. in the Middle East, especially with the moderate Arab states. Before Begin accuses the U.S. of not being a true friend, he should look at his own actions...
...dispute over the evacuation of Israeli troops from the airport. The Israelis had arranged to keep a small technical unit there, but the Reagan Administration insisted on the removal of all but one Israeli air controller from the airport and all other troops from Beirut. Prime Minister Menachem Begin capitulated to the American demands after receiving what U.S. officials described as an "extremely tough" cable from Washington...
...trust? In the eyes of many in the Reagan Administration, that is the central dilemma confronting U.S. Middle East policy in the wake of the Beirut massacre. Teeth gritted, State Department and White House officials acknowledge that they must go on negotiating with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, if only because any overt U.S. pressure would prompt disaffected Israelis to rally around him, making him even more defiant. But U.S. officials, despite their best diplomatic efforts, cannot hide a deep sense of betrayal. Put crudely, they now believe the Begin government has lied to them-repeatedly, deliberately...
...memoirs, Menachem Begin wrote fiercely of the emergence of "the Fighting Jew." For much of Jewish history, through the long centuries of the Diaspora, that phrase was an oxymoron, a kind of contradiction in terms. Israel was the creation of fighting Jews, of course, but at least until the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was the heroic and democratic underdog struggling for its very existence in the vast and hostile Arab wilderness. For a couple of thousand years, Jewish morality presupposed a kind of victim's righteousness, the special blamelessness of those without great collective power. Now Israel...
...Menachem Begin refuses to struggle with this dilemma. He still likes to carry the blank check of Jewish history; he finds it useful in the conduct of government and war. "No one," Begin's government repeats with a baleful glare, "will preach to us ethics and respect for human life." Why not? Because of the record, because of pogroms and the 6 million dead in the Holocaust. There are many centuries in that line. Begin claims that as the Israeli dispensation. That is the moral capital of world Jewry, cataclysmically acquired. Do not presume to discuss suffering and death...