Shlomo Argov

Israeli ambassador shot in an ambush in London in 198

Shlomo Argov, diplomat: born Jerusalem 14 December 1929; married (one son, two daughters); died Jerusalem 23 February 2003.

Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London who was shot in the head by a Palestinian gunman on 3 June 1982, resented the way Menachem Begin's government used the attempt on his life as a pretext for invading Lebanon three days later. A friend who visited him in the hospital where he spent the next 20 years, said he was "very, very furious" at the link.

In his first public statement, a year after the event, Argov denounced the Lebanese war. "If they had been able to predict the extent of this adventure," he said in an interview from his bed, "they could have saved the lives of hundreds of our finest sons."

The gunman had ambushed Argov as he was leaving a reception at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. Scotland Yard later arrested three members of Abu Nidal's radical splinter group, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, who were sentenced to 30-35 years in prison. The Israeli daily paper Haaretz claimed in an investigative report in 1998 that a British agent who had penetrated the cell had told his handlers about the planned hit, but that they did not respond effectively.

Argov was paralysed from the neck downwards, but until recently he remained alert and able to communicate with visitors to his room in Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. His condition deteriorated following the death last summer of his wife, Hava.

Yehuda Avner, who served with him in Washington in the Seventies and succeeded him as ambassador to London, described Argov as "the brightest and most imaginative Israeli diplomat I ever met". He was valued as an eloquent and intensely patriotic advocate of Israel's cause. Weidenfeld & Nicolson published a collection of his speeches and writing, An Ambassador Speaks Out, in 1983.

Colleagues have suggested that if he had not been incapacitated, the ambitious Argov might have played a major role in the peace negotiations with Jordan and the Palestinians in the Nineties. But in the mid-Seventies, when he was a deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry, he was deeply sceptical of the Arab capacity to come to terms with the Jewish state. He even proposed, in a memorandum to the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, that Israel invite the United States to post troops along its borders, an idea which Rabin quietly pigeonholed.

Shlomo Argov was born in Jerusalem in 1929, into a Jewish family that had lived there for seven generations. He was educated in Jerusalem and at Georgetown University in the United States and the London School of Economics.

Taking up a diplomatic career in 1959, he served in junior positions in Africa and the US during the Sixties. In 1968, he was appointed to number two in the Washington embassy, then as ambassador to Mexico (1971-74) and the Netherlands (1977-79). He was posted to London as ambassador in 1979.

Menachem Begin, Prime Minister at the time Argov was gunned down, kept the position open for a year afterwards in the hope that Argov would recover. He never did.

Eric Silver