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The Begin government's response to the report was more circumspect. In the days that followed the release of the report at 9 a.m. Tuesday, the Cabinet met for three stormy sessions. Each time, Sharon refused to resign and Begin refused to dismiss him. Finally, after a grueling 6½-hour session Thursday evening at which the Cabinet voted 16 to 1 to accept the commission's findings, with only Sharon himself dissenting, he called Begin to say he would vacate the post. As it turned out, however, the Cabinet voted on Sunday to keep him in the government as a Minister Without Portfolio. Begin will serve as Defense Minister for a while, after which the job may go to Moshe Arens, 57, a hard-line Begin ally now serving as Israel's Ambassador to the U.S.
As tension mounted in Israel after the report's release, the political atmosphere grew progressively uglier. Demonstrations took place day after day by supporters and opponents of the Begin government. On Thursday night, outside the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem, where the Cabinet was in session, a hand grenade exploded in the midst of a group of Peace Now antiwar demonstrators, killing one person and injuring nine others, including the son of Interior Minister Yosef Burg. It was the first time that an Israeli had been killed as a result of the continuing internal political debate, and it shocked the nation. Decrying the violence, Israel's President Yitzhak Navon declared somberly, "Whoever threw the hand grenade tonight should know: we all have hand grenades."
At the center of the storm was the commission report, a 115-page document painstakingly prepared by a three-member panel headed by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan (see box). Prime Minister Begin reluctantly appointed the commission in late September after an unprecedented wave of protest within Israel, culminating in a mass rally of 400,000 people in Tel Aviv, an extraordinary demonstration for so small (pop. 4.1 million) a country. Begin had previously grumbled, "Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews." But under the rising pressure, he named the commission, which was charged with ascertaining "all the facts and factors connected with the atrocity." In the weeks that followed, the commission heard testimony from 58 witnesses and received written statements from 163 others. Assessing the accumulating evidence, the commission formally advised nine Israeli government and military leaders, including Begin and Sharon, that they were "liable to be harmed" by the findings. Serious political activity was now all but suspended in Israel as government and opposition alike awaited the commission's conclusions. Complained one Cabinet member: "It's like a sentence hanging over our heads."