Word: raids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...notice, not to be given before news reports of the attack came over the wires. Porath waited through all of Sunday evening for a telephone call from Begin authorizing release of the story. Not until the following day, after Amman Radio sketchily outlined the raid as a joint Israeli-Iranian venture, did Israel give its own version of events...
...Israeli reaction was, naturally enough, pride in their military accomplishment. But there was not the same spontaneous celebration in the streets, for example, that greeted the July 1976 pinpoint Israeli commando raid on Uganda's Entebbe airfield. One reason was that as international criticism started to pour in, many Israelis sensed an impending isolation. Said Eli Ben-Hamo, 26, a Jerusalem caf� owner: "It was necessary. It had to be done. But I'm worried. We're doing it to ourselves. For years the world didn't much like us. Nowadays we're giving them reason...
Outside Israel?and even inside the country?there was an immediate suspicion that the raid and its timing had more to do with Israel's June 30 national election than with impending nuclear threats from the Iraqis. The six-month campaign between Begin's ruling Likud coalition and the opposition Labor Party of Shimon Peres was one of the most strained in the country's history. Owing in part to Begin's tough stance on the Syrian missiles in Lebanon, his party had moved ahead, 38% to 33%, in a poll conducted before the raid. The Likud had trailed...
Begin built his rationale for the attack on Iraqi documents. Following the September raid by Iran on the Tammuz reactor, Iraq issued a statement that Begin read from a Baghdad newspaper. Quoted Begin: "The Iranian people should not fear the Iraqi nuclear reactor, which is not intended to be used against Iran, but against the Zionist enemy." He added that the imminent start-up of the reactor would enable Iraq to begin manufacturing, "in the near future, between three and five Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs of 20 kilotons...
Begin then gave a humanitarian twist to the raid. He declared that the reactor was going to start to process highly radioactive materials either the first week of July or the first week of September. Once the reactor was "hot," explained Begin, any successful bombing attack would unleash "a horrifying wave of radioactivity." In a ghoulish reference, he reminded listeners that Nazi mass murderers had used poisonous Zyklon B gas on their Jewish victims, and radioactivity "is also a poison." Said Begin: "In Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens would have been hurt. I for one would never have...