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South Africa: Israel/Apartheid Connections
AfricaFocus Bulletin
May 31, 2010 (100531)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Polakow-Suransky puts Israel's annual military exports to South
Africa between 1974 and 1993 at $600 million, which made South
Africa Israel's second or third largest trading partner after the
United States and Britain. ... He puts the total military trade
between the countries at well above $10 billion over the two
decades." - Glenn Frankel in review of new book "The Unspoken
Alliance"
Polakow-Suransky's book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret
Relationship with Apartheid South Africa
(http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0375425462), is hardly
the first to outline the open secret of Israel's military
relationship with apartheid South Africa (see books listed below).
But it is certainly the most well-documented and will arguably be
the most influential. It is based on more than 7,000 pages of
formerly secret documents from South African government archives.
It also comes at a time when the comparison of Israel's policies
with those of the apartheid state are gaining increasingly
currency.
While the close alliance with Israel still faces only muted doubts
in Washington policy circles, activists in the United States as
well as around the world are finding inspiration for divestment
campaigns modeled on the anti-apartheid model. And Israel's own
actions, such as today's commando raid on the Gaza protest flotilla
killing at least ten activists, repeatedly reinforce global
condemnation, as did those of the apartheid state.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a review of Polakow-Suransky's
book by Glenn Frankel, former Washington Post correspondent in
South Africa, a list of books on Israel/South Africa connections
and comparisons, beginning in 1977, and links to several websites
on the current framing of campaigns for Palestine on the "anti-apartheid"
model.
Note: Thanks to those of you who have recently sent in a voluntary
subscription payment to support the work of AfricaFocus. If you
have not yet done so, please consider doing so if you are able. See
http://www.africafocus.org/support.php for more information on
making a payment on-line or by check.
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
Israel's Most Illicit Affair
A new book reveals that Israel's secret relationship with apartheid
South Africa went far deeper than previously understood.
By Glenn Frankel | May 24, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com
Glenn Frankel, who teaches journalism at Stanford University, was
Southern Africa, Jerusalem, and London bureau chief for the
Washington Post and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International
Reporting. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with
Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky will be published
May 25 by Pantheon Books.
History is a great teacher, but sometimes it packs a nasty sense of
irony. A case in point: South African Prime Minister John Vorster's
visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in April
1976, where he laid a wreath to the victims of the German Reich he
once extolled.
It's bad enough that a former Nazi sympathizer was treated like an
honored guest by the Jewish state. Even worse was the purpose
behind Vorster's trip to Israel: to cement the extensive military
relationship between Israel and the apartheid regime, a partnership
that violated international law and illicitly provided the
white-minority government with the weaponry and technology to help
sustain its grip on power and its oppression of the black majority
over two decades.
Like many illicit love affairs, the back-door relationship between
Israel and the apartheid regime was secret, duplicitous, thrilling
for the parties involved -- and ultimately damaging to both. Each
insisted at the time that theirs was just a minor flirtation, with
few regrets or expressions of remorse. Inevitably it ended badly,
tainting everyone it touched, including leaders of American Jewish
organizations who shredded their credibility by endorsing and
parroting the blatant falsehoods they were fed by Israeli
officials. And it still hovers like a toxic cloud over Israel's
international reputation, providing ammunition to those who use the
comparison between Israel's 43-year military rule over Palestinians
and the now-defunct system of white domination known as apartheid
to seek to delegitimize the Jewish state.
As bureau chief for the Washington Post in Southern Africa and
Jerusalem in the 1980s, I squandered a lot of hours trying to
pierce the iron curtain that the two countries carefully drew
around their strategic partnership. I reported the various
estimates that the arms trade between the two amounted to anywhere
from $125 million to $400 million annually -- far beyond the $100
million that the International Monetary Fund reported as total
imports and exports in the mid 1980s. Soon after arriving in
Jerusalem in 1986, I asked Ezer Weizman, a former Israeli defense
minister and champion of the secret partnership, about the uncanny
resemblance between Israel's Kfir fighter jet -- itself patterned
on the French Mirage -- and South Africa's newly minted Cheetah. He
just smiled at me and replied, "I've noticed that as well."
Now comes Sasha Polakow-Suransky, who is an editor at Foreign
Affairs magazine, a Rhodes scholar, and an American Jew whose
parents emigrated to the United States from South Africa. His
singular achievement in his new book, The Unspoken Alliance:
Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa scheduled
for publication on May 25, is to have unearthed more than 7,000
pages of heretofore secret documents from the bowels of South
Africa's Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and Armscor, the state
defense contractor, including the secret 1975 military cooperation
agreement signed by defense ministers Shimon Peres and P.W. Botha.
The Israeli government sought to block release of the pact to the
author, but the post-apartheid South African government ignored its
protests. The black-majority government, led by the African
National Congress, "is far less concerned with keeping old secrets
than with protecting its own accumulated dirty laundry after 15
years in power," Polakow-Suransky notes. Beyond locating the secret
papers, he also interviewed South Africans and Israelis who played
key roles in forging and promoting the partnership. The result is
the best-documented, most thorough, and most credible account ever
offered of the secret marriage between the apartheid state and
Israel.
(By way of disclosure, let me add that Polakow-Suransky thanks me
in his acknowledgements, although he needn't have; I only bought
him a cup of coffee and passed on a handful of names and numbers
when he approached me about this project some five years ago.)
Polakow-Suransky puts Israel's annual military exports to South
Africa between 1974 and 1993 at $600 million, which made South
Africa Israel's second or third largest trading partner after the
United States and Britain. Military aircraft updates in the
mid-1980s alone accounted for some $2 billion, according to
correspondence he obtained. He puts the total military trade
between the countries at well above $10 billion over the two
decades.
Israel reaped big profits, but paid a price in moral standing. By
focusing solely on its purported strategic value to the United
States, Israel and its supporters have tended to downgrade the
country's real case for preserving a special relationship with its
staunch ally. Foreign-policy realists argue that the price
Washington pays in the Muslim world for its support of Israel far
outweighs whatever strategic value the Jewish state provides. The
more compelling case has always focused on Israel's character as a
robust democracy that shares American values. But the clandestine
alliance with South Africa undermined Israel's rightful claim on
U.S. admiration and support. After all, if Israel is just another
standard-issue country that conducts business with pariah states
and lies about it, why should America be concerned about its fate?
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, understood this,
routinely condemned apartheid and sought to ally his country with
the new black-governed nations of sub-Saharan Africa that emerged
from colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the
balance of forces began to change dramatically after the 1967
Six-Day War, when Israel seized control of East Jerusalem, the West
Bank, and Gaza. Ben-Gurion's heirs -- Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres,
and Moshe Dayan, second-generation leaders of the ruling Labor
Party -- worked to transform Israel into a mini super power and had
no qualms about cooperating with South Africa to get there. "It was
not a shotgun marriage," writes Polakow-Suransky.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War put the seal on the shift. Egypt succeeded
in framing the war as a Zionist invasion of the African continent,
and more than 20 African states severed diplomatic ties with
Israel. South Africa, by contrast, furnished Israel with spare
parts for its Mirage jet fighters, and South Africa's substantial
Jewish community, encouraged by its government, poured money and
support into the Zionist state. The two countries were on their way
to becoming, in Polakow-Suranskys words, "brothers in arms."
The relationship started as a marriage of self-interest. South
African money helped Israel became a major arms manufacturer and
exporter and funded its high-tech economy, while Pretoria gained
access to cutting-edge weapons and military technology at a time
when most of the world sought to isolate and condemn the apartheid
regime. For the ensuing two decades Israel continued to publicly
denounce apartheid while at the same time secretly propping up the
white-minority government and helping sustain racial supremacy.
Peres had been Ben-Gurion's gifted protege and a key architect in
building Israel's defense establishment and its nuclear capability
during his years as director general of the Defense Ministry. When
he became defense minister after the Yom Kippur War, he sought to
grow the military-industrial complex in part with millions from the
arms export market, which Polakow-Suransky reports increased
15-fold between 1973 and 1981. Early on his new role, Peres
secretly visited Pretoria. In a memo afterward, he told his South
African hosts that their mutual cooperation was based not only on
common interest, "but also on the unshakeable foundations of our
common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it." That
same year the two governments began holding biannual gatherings for
Defense Ministry officials and arms industry exporters and an
annual strategic cooperation conference between intelligence
officials.
After Peres and Botha signed their secret security pact in April
1975, Israel sold tanks, fighter aircraft, and long-range missiles
to Pretoria and offered to sell nuclear warheads as well. Israel
also began to act as middleman, buying arms from countries that
refused ostensibly to do business with Pretoria and passing them on
to the regime. All of this continued even after the United Nations
Security Council passed a mandatory arms embargo against South
Africa in November 1977. Menachem Begin's rightist Likud came to
power that same year, and relations became even stronger.
Along the way, Polakow-Suransky introduces the unsung actors who
helped cement the relationship. One of the key figures was Yitzhak
Unna, a skilled, pragmatic and two-fisted Israeli diplomat who
became counsel general in Johannesburg in 1969 and was later
promoted to ambassador. Unna learned to speak Afrikaans, befriended
the former Nazi sympathizer who headed South Africa's bureau of
state security and launched a series of deals that brought the two
countries closer together. Then there was Binyamin Telem, former
commander of Israel's navy, who handled defense contracts with
Armscor. Both men saw themselves as anti-racists -- Telem insisted
that the Israeli embassy pay its black employees at the same rate
as whites -- but both deepened the ties and approved contracts in
the millions. Included were training and weapons systems that
helped the South African military suppress internal revolts against
apartheid. Israeli security companies and former military men also
trained and equipped the repressive police forces of the sham
puppet states known as Bantustans that South Africa sought to
establish in the 1970s and 1980s.
By 1979, Polakow-Suransky writes, South Africa was Israel's single
largest arms customer, accounting for 35 percent of its military
exports. South Africa supplied Israel a 500-ton stockpile of
uranium for its nuclear program. In turn, Israel sold South Africa
30 grams of tritium, a radioactive substance that helped increase
the explosive power of its thermonuclear weapons. The extent of
Israeli-South African cooperation was symbolized in September 1979
by a double flash over the South Atlantic that analysts believed
came from an Israeli nuclear bomb test, undertaken with South
African cooperation. To this day the details remain classified.
In the early days of the arms supply pact, Israel could argue that
many Western countries, including the United States, had similar
surreptitious relationships with the apartheid regime. But by 1980
Israel was the last major violator of the arms embargo. It stuck
with South Africa throughout the 1980s when the regime clung to
power in the face of international condemnation and intense rounds
of political unrest in the black townships.
By 1987 the apartheid regime was struggling to cope with the
combination of internal unrest and international condemnation to
the point where even Israel was forced to take notice. A key
motivator was Section 508, an amendment to the anti-apartheid
sanctions bill that passed the U.S. Congress in 1986 and survived
President Ronald Reagan's veto. It required the State Department to
produce an annual report on countries violating the arms embargo.
The first one, issued in April 1987, reported that Israel had
violated the international ban on arm sales "on a regular basis."
The report gave South Africa's opponents within the Israeli
government and their American Jewish allies ammunition to force
Israel to adapt a mild set of sanctions against South Africa. I was
in Jerusalem when Israel admitted publicly for the first time that
it had significant military ties with South Africa and pledged not
to enter into any new agreements -- which meant, of course, that
existing agreements would be maintained. It was, writes
Polakow-Suransky, "little more than a cosmetic gesture."
From the start, spokesmen for American Jewish organizations acted
as apologists or dupes for Israel's arms sales. Moshe Decter, a
respected director of research for the American Jewish Committee,
wrote in the New York Times in 1976 that Israel's arms trade with
South Africa was "dwarfed into insignificance" compared to that of
other countries and said that to claim otherwise was "rank
cynicism, rampant hypocrisy and anti-Semitic prejudice." In a March
1986 debate televised on PBS, Rabbi David Saperstein, a leader of
the Reform Jewish movement and outspoken opponent of apartheid,
claimed Israeli involvement with South Africa was negligible. He
conceded that there may have been arms sales during the rightist
Likud years in power from 1977 to 1984, but stated that under
Shimon Peres, who served as prime minister between 1984 and 1986,
"there have been no new arms sales." In fact, some of the biggest
military contracts and cooperative ventures were signed during
Peres's watch.
The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda
campaign against Nelson Mandela and the ANC in the mid 1980s and
employed an alleged "fact-finder" named Roy Bullock to spy on the
anti-apartheid campaign in the United States -- a service he was
simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL
defended the white regime's purported constitutional reforms while
denouncing the ANC as "totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic,
anti-Israel, and anti-American." (In fairness, the ADL later
changed its tune. After his release in 1990, Mandela met in Geneva
with a number of American Jewish leaders, including ADL president
Abe Foxman, who emerged to call the ANC leader "a great hero of
freedom.")
Polakow-Suransky is no knee-jerk critic of Israel, and he tells his
story more in sorrow than anger. He grants that the secret alliance
had its uses. To the extent it enhanced Israel's security and
comfort zone, it may have helped pave the path to peace efforts.
Elazar Granot, a certified dove who is a former left-wing Knesset
member and ambassador to the new South Africa, says as much. "I had
to take into consideration that maybe Rabin and Peres were able to
go to the Oslo agreements because they believed that Israel was
strong enough to defend itself," he tells the author. "Most of the
work that was done -- I'm talking about the new kinds of weapons --
was done in South Africa."
Polakow-Suransky sees in the excoriation of Jimmy Carter's 2006
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by American Jewish leaders an
echo of their reflexive defense of Israel vis-a-vis South Africa in
the 1970s and 1980s. The author himself draws uncomfortable
parallels between apartheid and Israel's occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, noting that both involved the creation of a system
that stifled freedom of movement and labor, denied citizenship and
produced homelessness, separation, and disenfranchisement. As the
Palestinian population continues to grow and eventually becomes the
majority -- and Jews the minority -- in the land between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean, the parallels with apartheid may
become increasingly uncomfortable. Even Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
agreed, observing in 2007 that if Israel failed to negotiate a
two-state solution with the Palestinians, it would inevitably "face
a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights."
"The apartheid analogy may be inexact today," Polakow-Suransky
warns, "but it won't be forever."
I've always believed the apartheid analogy produces more heat than
light. But it's a comparison that Israel itself invited with its
longstanding partnership with the white-minority regime. While
Israel profited from the alliance, it paid a heavy price. Moral
standing in the international community doesn't come with an
obvious price tag, nor does it command an influential lobby of
corporate and military interests working tirelessly on its behalf.
But it does have value and its absence has consequences. The
anti-Israel divestment campaign that is slowly gathering steam in
college campuses across the United States and Europe is one such
potential consequence. This movement, backed both by genuine
supporters of the Palestinians and by Arab governments whose
motives are far more cynical, once again seeks to equate Zionism
with racism and rob Israel of its hard-earned legitimacy by
portraying it as, in Polakow-Suransky's phrase, "a latter-day South
Africa." The Israeli government has provided this movement with
plenty of ammunition, including the sad and sordid saga that he so
carefully unearths in his important new book.
Connections and Comparisons: Books on South Africa and Israel
Richard P. Stevens, Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a
Relationship. 1977.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0930244001
Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development:
Studies on South Africa, Alabama, Northern Ireland and Israel.
1980.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0300025270
James Adams, The Unnatural Alliance: Israel and South Africa. 1984.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0704323737
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and
Why. 1987
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?1850430691
Sheila Ryan and Donald Will, Israel and South Africa: Legal Systems
of Settler Domination. 1990
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0865430667
Donald H. Akenson, God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South
Africa, Israel, and Ulster. 1992.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?080142755X
Ran Greenstein, Genealogies of Conflict: Class, Identity, and State
in Palestine/Israel and South Africa. 1995
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0819552887
Helen Purkitt and Stephen Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass
Destruction. 2005.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?025321730X
Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid. 2007.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0743285034
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret
Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. 2010.
http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0375425462
Sources on Divestment Movement for Palestine
Global BDS Movement: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for
Palestine
http://bdsmovement.net
Israeli Apartheid Week 2010
http://apartheidweek.org
Towards a Global Movement for Palestine: A Framework for Today's
Anti-Apartheid Activism
http://www.stopthewall.org/downloads/pdf/bds-s.pdf
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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