Shlomo Argov

Shlomo Argov was Israel's ambassador in London, and the attempt to assassinate him was used as the reason for invading Lebanon. He was born in Jerusalem under the Mandate, fought in the Palmach in 1948, studied at Georgetown and the London School of Economics, and spent his career in the foreign service - Washington, Accra, Mexico City, the Netherlands, and from 1979 the embassy in London. On the night of 3 June 1982 he was shot in the head outside the Dorchester Hotel as he left a diplomatic dinner. The gunmen were from the Abu Nidal Organisation, which had split from the PLO years earlier, had been condemned to death in absentia by it, and was at that point being sheltered by Iraq. The Israeli cabinet met the next day and ordered the invasion regardless; when the head of military intelligence pointed out that Abu Nidal was an enemy of the PLO, Begin's recorded answer was that they were all PLO. The war that followed reached Beirut, drove the PLO out of Lebanon, brought the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and left Israel occupying southern Lebanon for eighteen years. Argov himself survived, paralysed and in constant pain, and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, where he continued to read, to receive visitors and to write. He was a critic of the war fought in his name, and said so. He died in 2003. The three men convicted at the Old Bailey included Abu Nidal's cousin and a Jordanian army officer; the man who fired was shot in the neck by Argov's bodyguard during the escape and survived. It is one of the clearest cases in the record of a pretext being taken for a cause.

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