Word: raids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with the Saudis again. As usual, Habib was tight-lipped about his negotiations, but Begin announced that Israel was determined to destroy the missiles if diplomacy did not remove them, and he warned pointedly that he would not wait forever. One of the most serious effects of the raid on the reactor appeared to be on Saudi efforts to fashion an Arab initiative to ease Lebanese tensions. Last week the Saudis dismissed Habib's mission as "irrelevant" and castigated the U.S. for its support or Israel...
...other Arab leaders closed ranks, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat found himself once again dangerously isolated because of his continuing support of the peace talks with Israel. So outraged was the Egyptian parliament by the raid that it might have demanded that the entire Egyptian-Israeli dialogue be reconsidered if Sadat aides had not intervened to cool off the members of his own party. Egyptian officials, moreover, expressed concern that the U.S.'s own credibility in the Middle East was at stake and urged Washington to take a decisive stand for the sake of its interests...
...Israel itself, the raid had become an inflammatory issue in the already bitter campaign for the national elections on June 30. Ever since his first press conference after the raid, Begin had been a fount of information-and astonishing misinformation. Even the chief of MOSSAD, Israel's intelligence agency, felt constrained to lament the "devil's dance of public statements and counterstatements." Begin incorrectly said that there was a secret chamber for making bombs beneath the reactor, falsely quoted a Baghdad newspaper to the effect that the reactor was to be used "against the Zionist enemy," and claimed...
When Labor Party Leader Shimon Peres condemned the raid, arguing that quiet diplomacy might have obviated the need for it, Begin lashed out with a vengeance. Said he: "I hate, with a mortal hatred, the word 'treason.' But there is something of sabotage in the statements of Israel's Labor Party." Then Begin went on to approvingly quote a Knesset ally who said that Peres "had stuck a knife in the nation's back...
...neared, it appeared that Begin's hard-line strategy of recent weeks was going down well in Israel. Polls last January showed his Likud coalition trailing far behind, with Labor in reach of obtaining an absolute majority in the Knesset. But in a poll taken just before the raid, Likud pulled ahead of Labor, 38% to 33%, and Menachem Begin appeared to be within reach of another four-year term. -By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by David Aikman/Jerusalem and Louis Halasz at the United Nations, with other bureaus