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The Israeli Prime Minister only partly clarified matters on Tuesday at one of the most extraordinary press conferences of his life. His defense of the mission was vintage Begin. "Despite all the condemnations heaped on Israel for the last 24 hours," he began, "Israel has nothing to apologize for. Ours is a just cause, we stand by it, and it will triumph."
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 made a proposal under such circumstances to send our Air Force and bomb the reactor."
Thus, in Begin's view, Israel faced "a terrible dilemma: Should we now be passive and then lose the last opportunity without those horrible casualties to destroy the hotbed of death, or should we act now?" His voice dramatically pitched, Begin answered his own question. "Then this country and this people would have been lost, after the Holocaust. Another Holocaust would have happened in the history of the Jewish people. Never again, never again. Tell your friends, tell anybody you meet, we shall defend our people with all the means at our disposal." The bombing raid, drummed Begin, was a "morally supreme act of national self-defense. No fault whatsoever on our side."
No mention was made then of the fact that the CIA had concluded in 1974 that Israel had nuclear weapons of its own or that Israel, unlike Iraq, has not signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and will not allow inspectors to visit its reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert.
At one point, Begin was asked what would happen if the world condemned Israel. "Well, my friends," he said, "what can we do? We are an ancient people, we are used to it. We survived, we shall survive." And to the question of how Israel would react if Libya got the bomb, Begin replied, amid laughter, "Let us deal first with that meshuggener [Yiddish for lunatic], Saddam Hussein. With the other meshuggener [Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi], another time."
Stripped of its rhetoric, Begin's defense of the raid was based on an implicit strategic calculation: that tiny Israel, unlike the