Word: menachem
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Finally, Habib has a distinctive personal touch that helped move the talks along. Dealing with the loquacious Menachem Begin, Habib would let him run on a while, then interrupt him with a blunt deflator: "Prime Minister, what you're really saying is this . . ." Habib had a different style from Henry Kissinger, whom he assisted during the Middle East shuttles in 1974 that led to the disengagement agreements made by Israel with both Egypt and Syria. "Kissinger," says one Israeli official, "was more of a preacher. He'd lecture us. Habib takes pains to avoid that...
...minutes past 11 o'clock last Thursday morning when the President of the U.S., after an hour of trying, finally managed to get through by telephone to the Prime Minister of Israel. In a cold fury, Ronald Reagan told Menachem Begin of his "outrage" that at the very moment when a negotiated settlement for the evacuation of Palestine Liberation Organization guerrillas appeared to be in sight, the Israeli armed forces were conducting their most severe air blitz of West Beirut. Virtually shouting, the President said that he was "shocked" at the Israeli attack, which he said had caused "needless...
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin bitterly proclaimed that "once again the cry is heard in the streets of Paris, 'Death to the Jews!' " deliberately stirring images of anti-Semitic incidents at the time of Jewish Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus' trial in the 1890s. Begin even indirectly accused President François Mitterrand of helping to create an anti-Semitic climate in France that fostered the attack. Begin charged that the massacre resulted from "the shocking talk and anti-Israeli incitement which has become like anti-Jewish incitement." The Prime Minister was referring to a remark by Mitterrand...
...official American reaction to the Israeli assault was contained in a private letter from Reagan to Begin. "Dear Mr. Prime Minister," it began. It was the first letter Reagan has not addressed "Dear Menachem" since the two men met last September. The President reminded Begin that U.S. weapons could only be used for defensive purposes. But a warning about possible sanctions that was included in an early draft was left out, partly at the behest of America's Ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, who argued that even raising the issue would infuriate the Begin government. Reagan's accompanying...
Even so, the Israelis were concerned last week that the U.S. would feel that their attack on West Beirut was a punishment that did not fit whatever crime the P.L.O. may have committed. Major General Menachem Meron, Israel's senior military attaché in Washington, called in reporters to try to claim that the Wednesday assault on West Beirut was aimed only at rooting out P.L.O. gunners who were firing on Israeli troops. But Meron had told the same reporters two months earlier that Israeli forces would go no deeper than 25 miles into Lebanon. When bluntly asked...