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Begin claimed to quote closed-door remarks made at the meeting by Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam, who urged his brother Arabs to "wait 100 years or more, until Israel is weakened" and then destroy the country completely. Israeli action was intended to make Syria think differently. Said a Begin aide: "Begin thought that we must convince the Syrians that time was not necessarily on their side."
The Israeli Prime Minister apparently pondered all those factors two weeks ago, as he lay in an eighth-floor ward of Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital. On Dec. 10, he secretly ordered Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir to prepare the Golan Heights legislation. When word came that Haig would visit Israel, any notion of presenting the bill was temporarily shelved. But when Haig suddenly canceled, the opportunity once again loomed.
The night before his Knesset appearance, according to a close aide, Begin hardly slept. In the small hours he telephoned Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and asked him to come to the hospital at 8 a.m. Half an hour before that meeting, Begin also called Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, asking him to attend. "Has something happened?" Sharon asked. Said Begin: "No, but something is going to happen today."
The trio hastily agreed that a parliamentary coup was possible. One tactical advantage they saw was that Opposition Leader Shimon Peres and his predecessor as Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Rabin, were both out of the country. Begin decided to leave the hospital and called a full Cabinet meeting at his home at noon. As a precaution, however, he decided to disarm potential opponents by summoning a seven-member mini-Cabinet, composed of the heads of his coalition parties, to meet 90 minutes earlier. When the full Cabinet finally assembled, all members—with the exception of Energy Minister Yitzhak Berman—supported Begin.
Haig learned of Begin's thunderbolt on his way home from Europe and angrily ordered the State Department to issue a protest. Back in Washington, he made the message doubly clear by calling Israeli Ambassador Ephraim Evron on the carpet for an hour and a quarter and declaring that he considered the action a personal betrayal. Even more vocal was Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who on ABC's Good Morning America said :he move was "provocative and destabilizing and must be changed." On the other hand, President Reagan seemed to downplay the action at a Thursday press conference, where he merely "deplored" the Israeli move.
In Western Europe, governments also seemed to be striving in their reaction for a balance between outrage and moderation. Though France's Cheysson declared that the Golan Heights legislation "cannot be justified on either juridical or political grounds," he added that the move would not affect French participation in the multilateral peace-keeping force that will oversee the Sinai Peninsula after Israel returns the remainder of that territory to Egypt in April 1982. The same attitude was taken by Cheysson's British counterpart, Lord Carrington.