وثيقة

document - وثيقة



Ne laissez pas la violence se perpétuer, cela ne ferait qu'engendrer plus de violence...
Les documents sont toujours là pour tenter de se trahir (document extrait d'un magazine libanais).


Don't allow violence to perpetuate itself, it would only bread more violence...
Documents are always there to try to betray themselves (document from a lebanese magazine).

THE TWO BOMBS

June 7, 1981: The Israeli Air Force destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor, which had been built by France for the Iraqi government under a contract signed by Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister. This was the first serious incident the new President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, had to face on the international stage, even though his old comrade Shimon Peres had managed to secure a delay in the bombing, originally scheduled for May 10, the day of the French presidential elections...

Was it the Jewish state’s “preemptive” self-defense, or rather a desire to prevent the rebalancing of that superiority—known and acknowledged in its time by Sadat—which Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons had earned it?

In any case, it is a heavy legacy: this dual responsibility assumed by France between 1956 and 1975 to successively help two warring countries in the Middle East—Israel and Iraq—to perhaps one day give themselves the means to blackmail one another with nuclear weapons.

It is this long and murky history, rich in political and quasi-police twists and turns, that is recounted by Pierre Péan, a journalist at *Le Nouvel Économiste*, to whom several key players and witnesses have kindly entrusted some of their secrets.

This week, *Magazine* is publishing a chapter from this book, published by Fayard. The chapter focuses on the relationship between De Gaulle and the State of Israel, and the circumstances under which Tel Aviv obtained the bomb from France.