- Book by Israeli journalist reveals history of assassination attempts against Palestinian leader by Ariel Sharon, band of special agents he set up
TEL AVIV: Ariel Sharon, during his term as Israel’s defence minister, ordered the Israeli Army to shoot down a passengers plane if it was confirmed that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was on board, according to journalist Ronen Bergman.
In one instance in 1982, the plane in question was carrying 30 wounded Palestinian children, survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. That operation was called off, but, according to a new book by Ronen Bergman, it was one many planned assassinations, some even inspired by the film The Manchurian Candidate.
“The military operation had been set in motion by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Taking advantage of lax security at the Athens airport, the agents waited for Arafat in the area where private planes were parked,” Bergman wrote in The New York Times newspaper, revealing parts of his upcoming book.
Lt Gen Rafael Eitan, then-Sharon’s chief of staff who the journalist claims was pushing for the operation, scrambled Israeli jets to follow the aircraft suspected of carrying Arafat. “You don’t fire without my OK. Clear? Even if there’s a communications problem, if you don’t hear my order – you don’t open fire,” Eitan stressed to the pilots as the plane took off from Athens.
But the confirmation never came, and the man they thought to be Arafat was most likely his younger brother, the journalist writes. From November 1982 to January 1983, four F-16s and F-15s were on alert in case Arafat was spotted, he said. They were scrambled at least five times to intercept and destroy airliners believed to be carrying Arafat, only to be called back soon after takeoff,” he writes.
One such instance saw the fighter jets closing in on a commercial flight traveling from Amman to Tunisia before they were pulled off the mission. In another instance, they even disrupted the communications of a Boeing 707 they were targeting.
According to the book, after the 1979 Nahariya attack, Eitan decided to up Israel’s battle against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO): “Kill them all,” he reportedly told his deputy in reference to members of the organisation, then based in Lebanon. Meir Dagan, the man who would go on head Israel’s Mossad, was then appointed by Eitan to lead the what was called the front for the liberation of Lebanon from foreigners.
After 1981, when Sharon was appointed defence minister, the operation – which Bergman claims was until then run almost entirely without the authorisation or knowledge of the defence establishment or the government – shifted gears. Among its different ideas: a plan to detonate a bomb in the Beirut stadium where the Palestinian leadership was planning an event.
“You can’t just kill a whole stadium,” one officer recalled telling then-prime minister Menahem Begin: “The whole world will be after us.” Begin overruled Sharon and decided to nix that bombing which Bergman says would have taken out the entire Palestinian leadership. However, Sharon was not deterred. After launching an invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, he hatched a new plan to push the Palestinians out and into Jordan – thus eliminating their demand for a state in the West Bank.
Bergman reports that a key element to this plan was killing Arafat. “To this end, a special task force was set up, code-named Salt Fish,” he writes, with Dagan and Eitan, then a counterterrorism adviser, joining the special team. “I thought that hitting him would have changed the course of history. Arafat was not only a Palestinian leader, but a kind of founding father of the Palestinian nation. Killing him would unleash a large part of the internal conflicts inside the PLO and significantly hinder its capability to make any strategic decisions from then on,” Bergman wrote.
The Salt Fish team tried targeted bombings in Beirut, but Arafat managed to avoid them. When Uri Avnery, an Israeli journalist and pro-peace activist, traveled to Lebanon to interview Arafat, the team trailed him with the aim of taking Arafat out, even at the cost of the Israelis’ lives. But Arafat’s maneuvering payed off and the journalists lost their tail and lived. “Arafat was saved by two things,” said Uzi Dayan, Salt Fish’s commander, “his interminable good luck and me.”
“I told chief of staff Eitan that it could ruin the state internationally if it were known that we downed a civilian airliner,” Amos Gilboa, then head of Israel’s military intelligence, told Bergman. “Gradually, the awareness grew that Arafat was a political matter, and he must not be seen as a target for assassination,” Gilboa explained.
