Word: raiding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...aftermath of the reprisal raid on Beirut airport by Israeli commandos, the Middle East last week seemed closer to war than at any time since all-out hostilities formally ceased 19 months ago. Jordan mobilized 17-year-olds, and King Hussein urgently called for an Arab summit conference. Diplomats of the U.S., Russia, Britain and France met in three capitals to discuss the crisis. In Washington, officials judged the Middle East the one place right now where a confrontation with the Russians could occur, and a White House aide reported that the turbulent region is uppermost in President Johnson...
Unhappy Example. Until now, Israel has been able to count in time of crisis on a reservoir of world sympathy for an outnumbered nation surrounded by implacably hostile neighbors. After the Beirut attack, however, Israel found itself largely isolated diplomatically. The raid, which fueled the latest round of violence, struck even Israel's friends as an unhappy example of a propensity to overreact, demanding not a tooth for a tooth but a whole mouthful of teeth for every one lost by Israel...
...have killed everyone aboard if one of their incendiary grenades had ignited the liner's loaded fuel tanks. Israel accused Lebanon, which had served as the gunmen's point of departure, of harboring the terrorists. At a meeting in Jerusalem, senior cabinet ministers split over whether to raid Beirut airport or attack one of three guerrilla camps that the Israelis claim are located in Lebanon. Premier Levi Eshkol cast his vote with the hardliners: it would be Beirut...
...Israeli commandos had expected to find only half a dozen Arab planes on the ground; instead, they found and destroyed 13. Israel also miscalculated the raid's explosive effect on world opinion, despite the commandos' care not to take a life for the one lost in Athens. President Johnson publicly termed the raid "serious and unwise" and used considerably stronger language in private. In the United Nations, the U.S. joined the other 14 members of the Security Council in unanimously condemning Israel in the harshest of diplomatic terms for its "premeditated military action in violation of its obligations...
...Washington, the Beirut raid inevitably served to strengthen the hand of State Department advocates of a less unquestioning alliance with Israel. The raid could also make it politically easier for President-elect Richard Nixon to pursue a more even-handed policy in the Middle East, if he should so decide. In what might almost have been a preview of such a policy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk last week called on the Arab states to "do their utmost to restrain terrorist activity," and on Israel "to recognize that a policy of excessive retaliation will not produce the peace that Israel...