Operation Israel

Further to yesterday’s post on, among other things, changing Conservative attitudes to Israel, several people have been in touch to remind me of something that they all said that they had first learned on this site, namely that Israel had armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge on the part of Menachem Begin.

As mentioned yesterday, Margaret Thatcher had not wanted to meet Begin when he had visited London, and she had regretted changing her mind. That generation knew. My late father, who had served in Palestine, could not abide the sight of Yitzhak Shamir, while his old comrade, my erstwhile Senior Tutor, remains forthright on the subject to this day. The Israelis fulsomely returned the compliment to the tune of one billion dollars of military assistance to General Galtieri. In those days, a billion dollars was a lot of money.

My friend Hernán Dobry is the author of a groundbreaking book, Operation Israel: The Rearming of Argentina During the Dictatorship, 1976-1983. He owns all of the rights, because his publisher in Argentina has decided against a second edition. But he has updated it based on new research. Both the Spanish text and an English translation need to be published both in Argentina and in Britain.

Hernán maintains that his English is not up to translating his text, and my Spanish is certainly nowhere near that good, so we do need to find someone. A major London publishing house is interested, but the question is that of the translation costs, which would be in the region of £5000. Anyone in a position to help in any way, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

Thatcher issued what amounted to an open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands. The starved Royal Navy then had to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. She had been about to sell the ships in question, at a knocked down price, to Argentina, and she thought that they would be able to reach the Falklands from Britain in three days. 

Nor did Thatcher experience any electoral bounce as a result of the war that she had caused. The Conservative Party took fewer votes in 1983 than it had done in 1979, and it won only because it faced a divided Opposition, both parts of which had in any case supported the conflict that Thatcher’s incompetence had made unavoidable.

There were no Commons Divisions on these things in those days, but by no means all Conservative MPs were openly supportive of the war, and in 1989, having been reselected and reelected twice in the meantime, the only one to have opposed it took 33 votes against Thatcher for Leader, with a further 27 MPs abstaining. Think on.

Think on that Anthony Meyer was quite so implacably pro-EU because he was quite so dedicated to the legacy of his mentor, Nigel Birch, who had been one of the three proto-monetarists to have resigned as Treasury Ministers in 1958. And think on that Meyer therefore felt no need to move against Thatcher until she had already been Prime Minister for 10 years. All in all, think on.

Think on, while pondering that Stephen Pollard, once a researcher for Peter Shore, now listed support for publicly owned utilities as proof of anti-Semitism, because Corbyn. And think on, while pondering that Google was yet again locating me in the ward of the former Leader of Durham County Council. Operation Israel, indeed.