Attack - and Fallout: Israel and Iraq

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U.S., could not survive a first nuclear assault and deliver a counterattack. All the country's airbases, for example, could be taken out in a single strike. Nor can Israel afford the enormous expense of keeping warplanes in the air at all times as a deterrent to aggressors. Thus the country feels a particular vulnerability to nuclear blackmail. The Begin view: no Israeli government, or any other government in a similar position, could ever take the risk that a foe armed with atomic bombs would not use them.

By invoking an argument that jurists sometimes call "anticipatory self-defense," Begin was straying into an exceedingly murky area of international law. The United Nations Charter, which prohibits international aggression, also recognizes a state's legitimate right of self-defense in the face of "armed attack."

The U.N. has broadened that definition on occasion to include pre-emptive attacks when there was overwhelming evidence that an aggressor planned a hostile act in the immediate future. In 1967, for example, the U.N. Security Council did not condemn Israel for its Six-Day War attack on Egypt, since there was evidence of Egypt's aggressive intentions. Says Christian Tomuschat, professor of international law at the University of Bonn: "It always comes down to the same question: Was there a real and imminent danger that would have justified a preventive strike?"

Almost no expert feels that Iraq's alleged bombmaking capability—in one year, as Israeli intelligence would have it, or ten, as nuclear regulators claim —falls within the internationally recognized definition of "imminent danger." Legal scholars sympathetic to Israel suggest that the country should have given a public warning or ultimatum to Iraq, or taken other overt diplomatic action before launching the strike. Says Alfred Rubin, international law professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy: "It makes a difference politically. I would have thought they would have been better off lining up al lies and so forth."

Begin's justifications for the raid might have been more convincing if a persistent odor of electioneering had not clung to some of his other actions. The day after Begin's press conference, an ugly spate of name-calling erupted between the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Peres. Reason: Begin had given the Israeli Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a copy of Peres' "personal and top-secret" letter that resulted in one of the raid's postponements. Peres had learned that the attack was scheduled for May 10, the date of the deciding round of French presidential elections. As a "supreme civic duty," he warned Begin not to go ahead. Peres felt, correctly, as it happened, that Socialist François Mitterrand would win, and that there were signs that the new French President would do everything possible to "make the Iraqi reactor impotent, militarily." Peres also warned Begin that the raid would leave Israel as isolated "as a lonely shrub in the desert."

Peres' letter was so vaguely worded for "security reasons," he claimed, should it fall into unfriendly hands—that Begin could send it to the Knesset with the charge that his rival opposed the reactor raid "in principle."