When France announced three years ago that it planned to sell 114 Mirage jet fighters to Libya, the French Premier of the moment, Jacques Cha-ban-Delmas, assured the Israelis that the planes would never be used against them. If the Libyans transferred a single Mirage to Egyptian control, he declared, "we shall put an embargo on the planes that have not yet been supplied." Those assurances have been regularly renewed.
On Easter Sunday, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban summoned French Ambassador Francis Huré from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to present him with what Eban called "documentary evidence" that 18 of the...