Word: navon
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Last week Reagan told Israeli President Yitzhak Navon that Israel's West Bank settlements are "not helpful" to the peace process. In private, U.S. diplomats are more direct. Says a senior Administration official: "The President has a choice. He can tell the Israelis that they must stop the settlements or it will cost them dearly. Or he can watch his peace initiative get buried by Israeli bulldozers...
...public comment, thereby drawing a rebuke from the Jerusalem Post. The paper regretted that Begin, "whose sensitivity to anti-Semitism and communal animosity is well known, should choose to remain silent." Once again, as in the aftermath of the Beirut massacre last September, it was left to President Yitzhak Navon to address the nation's conscience. Navon, a Sephardic Jew, called for an investigation and at the same time denounced the "criminal exploitation" of the tragedy...
Obsessed as he is with the righteousness of his cause, Begin did not see it that way. In September, when Israelis learned about the massacre by Lebanese Christians of an estimated 800 Palestinians in two Beirut refugee camps, they reacted with anger and astonishment. Political leaders, including President Yitzhak Navon, demanded a formal investigation of the role that the Israeli army had played in allowing the Christian militiamen into the camps. In Tel Aviv, a mass rally of 400,000 Israelis, an extraordinarily large crowd for so small a country, protested Begin's refusal to launch an official inquiry...
Begin has fared better. According to the same poll, the Prime Minister's support declined from 54% in August to 42.9% in September, but then increased to 44.8% in October. His closest rival is President Yitzhak Navon, with 18.4%, followed by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, with 11.1%. Opposition Leader Shimon Peres is a distant fourth, with only 3.3%. Reason: the Sephardic Jews who support Begin approve of his hard line toward the Arabs, massacre or no massacre, and the Sephardim now make up more than half of the Israeli population. -By William E. Smith. Reported by David Halevy/Jerusalem...
...reason for Begin's truculent behavior may have been a sense that events were careening out of his control. On Monday, Israel's President Yitzhak Navon, whose office is essentially nonpolitical, took the unusual step of summoning Begin to his office for a one-hour accounting of Israel's role in the massacre. Afterward, Navon went on television to call for a "credible and independent inquiry...