Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
28 August
US AMBASSADOR CLAIM ISRAELI ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
On this day in 1980, the motorcade of the American Ambassador to Lebanon, John Gunther Dean, was attacked by a well armed group using light anti-tank weapons. Dean has long insisted Israel was using a shadowy right-wing Lebanese group to assassinate him because he was consulting with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its head, Yasser Arafat, at a time when such contacts were highly controversial in US politics. He was also outspokenly critical of Israel’s repeated attacks on Lebanon.
ادعى السفير الأمريكي ان إسرائيل حاولت اغتياله
28 أغسطس
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1980، هاجمت مجموعة مسلحة تسليحا جيدًا موكب السفير الأمريكي في لبنان جون جونتر دين باستخدام أسلحة خفيفة مضادة للدبابات. وأصر دين لزمن طويل على أن إسرائيل كانت تستخدم جماعة لبنانية يمينية غامضة لاغتياله لأنه كان يتشاور مع منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية ورئيسها ياسر عرفات في وقت كانت فيه هذه الاتصالات مثيرة للجدل إلى حد كبير في السياسة الأمريكية. كما انتقد علنا الهجمات الإسرائيلية المتكررة على لبنان.
Israeli Ronen Bergman's book on Mossad, Rise and Kill First, gives credence to US ambassador’s claim that Israel tried to assassinate him in 1980
Over the years Ambassador Dean has repeatedly argued that Israel was behind the August 1980 attempt on his life. In an interview for the Oral History Project in September 2000, he explained how the Lebanese Intelligence services had managed to retrieve the empty canisters of two of the light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) that had been used during the attack on his motorcade and, during raiding a house by the intersection where the assault had taken place, found 8 more. Dean collected the numbers on the 10 missiles & sent them to Washington to be traced.
“Three weeks (and one angry phone call) later, the US Ambassador finally learned ‘where the light anti-tank weapons came from, where they were shipped to, on what date, who paid for them, and when they got to their destination.’
“The LAWs had been manufactured in the US and ‘were sold and shipped to Israel in 1974.’ In this interview, Dean further states that he “did find out a great deal about this incident’ over the following years, and calls this assassination attempt ‘one of the more unsavory episodes in our Middle Eastern history’ and ends by noting that ‘our Ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, took up this matter with the Israeli authorities.’..
Rise and Kill First received rave reviews in the US press following its January 2018 publication, and its author was interviewed countless times...The book focuses on Israeli ‘targeted assassinations’ and it contains this revelation:
“In 1979, [Rafael] Eitan and [Meir] Dagan [both brass in the Israel Defense Forces] created the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, and ran that fictitious group from 1979 to 1983. In 1981 and 1982, Ariel Sharon used that Front to conduct a series of indiscriminate car bombings that killed hundreds of civilians.
“The objective of this massive ‘terrorist’ car bombing campaign was to ‘sow chaos’ amongst the Palestinian & Lebanese civilian population” and, in 1981-82, to provoke the PLO into resorting to ‘terrorism,’ thus providing Israel with an excuse to invade Lebanon."
Bergman's book on Mossad assassinations received massive attention in the US, with innumerable TV interviews on material in his book. Here, in Israeli i24 News, he analyses Israel's programme of killing Iranian scientists. US media showed no interest in the part of the book on the Israeli front group's attempted assassination of US Ambassador GuntherDean.
An obituary on the BBC Radio 4 weekly Last Word in July 2019 alludes to Gunther Dean's secret tealks with the PLO and the assassination attempt but made no mention of Israeli involvement.
Here at 11m49secs in
