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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



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?


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/24/israels_most_illicit_affair

"We are Jews!". " Israel loves us!". "Isreal will die for us because they descended from us!"

Make una day dream there.

p.s: I do not hate Israel (because I know that will be the next line of attack from the shallow-minded). My Girlfriend is Jewish (Israeli of Ethiopian descent). Go through my posts and you will see that nobody is exempt from criticism in my books. I just hate lies, and despise ignorance.

29 views not a single comment. Ok o.

E be like say reality don catch una

Make I comment small, we all know that nations will always take decisions that favour them, Israel is not whiter than white, infact, they do whatever gives them strategic advantage, our brothers from the east are just deluded about this Jewish stuff, only Africans can save Africans.

hercules07:

Make I comment small, we all know that nations will always take decisions that favour them, Israel is not whiter than white, infact, they do whatever gives them strategic advantage, our brothers from the east are just deluded about this Jewish stuff, only Africans can save Africans.

Ah, blasphemy! Are you saying theres no Nigerian tribe that the present Jewish Nation descended from?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wruEHycu8xQ

Dare Sweet You Rock Me Bad Ft Tone produced and directed in
Sweden

Israel supported or had an alliance with Apartheid South Africa. . .so what? No permanent friends, but permanent interests is what it shows. Note that the secret defense agreement was signed in 1975. What did the OAU do in 1973? What does the term Israeli term "solidariot" mean with regards to the events that played out in 1973?

In the mid-1970s, the OAU sought to establish in a number of resolutions a connection between Israeli and South African governments. African states hoped to enlist Arab and other oil producing and exporting countries' support in their campaign against South Africa, just as Arab states, during the October 1973 war, had persuaded them to cut their ties with Israel and support the Arab league.

Source: South Africa: time running out : the report of the Study Commission on U.S. Policy Toward Southern Africa

^So it can be argued that this rather foolish policy of the OAU drove the Israelis into Apartheid South Africa's arms. Before then African countries had enjoyed close ties with Israel (For example, did you know they helped build UCH in Ibadan?).

P.S. I am not an apologist for the modern state of Israel. . .but I understand the emotional argument you are trying to make with your post (after all, Nigerians are easily manipulated through their emotions). I disagree with the picture you are trying to paint (not that any State can be regarded as altruistic though).

aletheia:

Israel supported or had an alliance with Apartheid South Africa. . .so what? No permanent friends, but permanent interests is what it shows. Note that the secret defense agreement was signed in 1975. What did the OAU do in 1973? What does the term Israeli term "solidariot" mean with regards to the events that played out in 1973?
^So it can be argued that this rather foolish policy of the OAU drove the Israelis into Apartheid South Africa's arms. Before then African countries had enjoyed close ties with Israel (For example, did you know they helped build UCH in Ibadan?).

P.S. I am not an apologist for the modern state of Israel. . .but I understand the emotional argument you are trying to make with your post (after all, Nigerians are easily manipulated through their emotions). I disagree with the picture you are trying to paint (not that any State can be regarded as altruistic though).

Sometimes, its best not to indulge in convos beyond your mental capacity. Nigerians are emotional? Speak for your self, buddy, I havent lived there since I was a child so I dont get what youre trying to imply.

Supporting Apartheid in South Africa means they supported the abuse and enslavement of blacks on their own land, if thats ok with you, it sure aint with me.

kingoflag:

Sometimes, its best not to indulge in convos beyond your mental capacity.

^
Your response clearly shows that you are a typical Nigerian, held captive by his emotions, given to empty bombast and refusing to synthesize facts presented to him. . .hence it took you all of one post to sink to the lowest common denominator of insults. Clearly you cannot lift your mind out of the gutter and engage in civilized conversation.

You advanced a thesis concerning Israel, as if Israel was the only country with ties to Apartheid South Africa. I showed you based on recorded historical facts how that came about, given that a priori Israel had very strong ties to African countries. But since you are full of empty posturing: you respond with insults. Obviously you can't help but respond to counter arguments with insults instead of ideas.

kingoflag:

I havent lived there since I was a child so I dont get what youre trying to imply.

^
What has this tangential drivel got to do with Israel & Apartheid South Africa. Does living outside Nigeria (either in the US or UK) validate your intellect or IQ or your opinions? Obviously interaction with Caucasians has conditioned you with an inferiority complex, which you try to relieve by engaging in gratuitous insults of your fellow Nigerians. Come back home and stop living a false life.

kingoflag:

Supporting Apartheid in South Africa means they supported the abuse and enslavement of blacks on their own land, if thats ok with you, it sure aint with me.

^
Certainly, you are making an emotional argument: In what way did my brief post translate to "[Israel] supported the abuse and enslavement of blacks on their own land [being OK by me]". If the point I am making escapes you; why don't you ask? O, I see Heaven forfend that kingoflag be seen to admit that he cannot understand a point.

Grow up, si[b]ll[/b]y child. Get a life.