Declassified UK: Declassified files reveal how Tel Aviv deceived Britain while it supplied Argentina’s anti-Semitic dictatorship with weapons during the 1980s.
Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands – a British territory in the South Atlantic – 43 years ago this month.
UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher responded by dispatching a naval taskforce to retake the territory, pinning her political career on military success some 8,000 miles from London.
The conflict lasted for 74 days and cost the lives of over 900 people, with Thatcher scoring her highest ever public approval rating shortly after the Argentine surrender in June 1982.
“It is no exaggeration to say that… the Falklands War transformed the British political scene”, she later wrote in her memoirs. “I could feel the impact of the victory wherever I went”.
Yet victory in the Falklands was far from inevitable, and Argentina’s prospects of holding onto the islands had been boosted by military support from an unlikely source: Israel.
The Argentine dictatorship was notoriously anti-Semitic. By the early 1980s, it had ‘disappeared’ as many as 30,000 people, with a disproportionate ten percent of those being Jewish.
Yet Argentina was able to acquire over twenty Nasher fighter jets from Israel in 1982, the year of the Falklands war, with more Israeli weapons and supplies secretly transferred through Peru.
It also used Israeli-supplied Skyhawk jets to sink four British warships, including the Sir Galahad, which resulted in the deaths of 48 soldiers.
Declassified files now reveal how Israel repeatedly misled the UK government about its military support to Argentina, provoking a diplomatic crisis between both countries.