The Unspoken Alliance

HE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa

By SASHA POLAKOW-SURANSKY

Pantheon Books, 2010, 324 pages, $50 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Whilst Israeli Nazi-hunters were scouring the globe for World War 11-era fascists, one of them passed right under Israel’s nose in 1976 – South African President, B. J. Vorster. In Jerusalem visiting Holocaust memorials, Vorster was given the full red carpet treatment by Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was quite forgiving of the man who had been a general in theOssewa Brandwag, a militant Afrikaner organisation that had openly supported the Nazis during the war and who remained wedded to a policy of racial superiority and its brutal enforcement.

As Sasha Polakow-Suransky shows in The Unspoken Alliance, the Nazi-lover Vorster received special treatment because he was shopping for Israeli armaments. Increasingly isolated through boycotts and embargoes, apartheid South Africa was desperate for weaponry to contain the independence struggles of its black southern African border states and to hold at bay the anti-apartheid movement of the majority black population within South Africa.

Zionist Israel and apartheid South Africa were the perfect match. In 1948, apartheid became law in South Africa under Prime Minister Verwoerd (another Nazi-phile who had joined a Nazi-aligned South African Greyshirt’s protest against German Jewish refugees in 1936) whilst Israel, in its so-called ‘War of Independence’,had driven hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile.

The author of the ethnic cleansing, Israel’s Labor Party (which held power from 1948 to 1977), had spruiked an anti-apartheid rhetoric, attempting to court black states in Africa in order to win votes at the UN, but found itself struggling for diplomatic friends after the Six-Day War in 1967 tripled the size of the Jewish state with the occupation of Egyptian (West Bank and Gaza Strip), Jordanian and Syrian (Golan Heights) territory. As Algerian President and liberation hero, Houari Boumedienne, put it, ‘Israel can not adopt one attitude towards colonialism in Southern Africa ... and a completely different one toward Zionist colonialism in North Africa’.

Israel now turned to outlaw states for succour, including the military dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, and the apartheid regime of South Africa, but it was the alliance with the latter that was the “most extensive, the most lucrative and the most toxic”. For two decades, Israel, whilst continuing to claim opposition to apartheid, “secretly strengthened the arsenal of a white supremacist government”. The first, secret, agreement, allowing Israel to profit from arms exports and South Africa to gain access to modern weaponry and scientific expertise, was formally sealed in 1975 by Israeli Labor Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, and South African Defense Minister, P. W. Botha.

Business was brisk, with total military trade conservatively estimated at $10 billion over twenty years. As well as direct sales of Israeli weapons, there were intermediary sales through third parties, scientific exchanges, military training programs, visits to each other’s front lines (Lebanon, Angola) and advice on ‘defeating terrorists’. South Africa’s Army chief, Constand Viljoen, visited Israel’s occupied territories in 1977 and marvelled at the checkpoint system and searches of Arabs at roadblocks. Tips on riot prevention equipment, as used by Israel against demonstrators in the West Bank, were provided to the apartheid authorities for use against black protesters in the townships.

Israel’s covert, undeclared nuclear arsenal also benefited from South African uranium exports and testing ranges. Israel has threatened to use its nuclear weapons in order to ‘leverage intervention’ by Washington, as an admiring South African nuclear engineer put it. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War (when Egypt and Syria tried but failed to win back their lost territory), Israel’s nuclear gambit worked when the Nixon administration, firming up the value of a powerfully-armed, Western-aligned Israel in the volatile, oil-rich, Arab Middle East, became Israel’s main arms supplier. South Africa was the other ‘winner’, gaining, through Israeli nuclear know-how, its own nuclear bomb in 1982.

Throughout the Israel-South Africa alliance, disguise and denial were paramount. When Israel’s arms deals came under the spotlight as international sanctions pressure increased on South Africa from the mid-1980s, the slippery double-speak continued. Israel was forced to announce sanctions in 1987 but these did not cover long-standing arms contracts nor were Israel’s ties with South Africa severed.

Israeli Labor Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, quietly assured his apartheid colleagues that the changes were ‘mainly symbolic’, their aim to manage Israel’s image. Only when apartheid neared its end did Israel cease its arms deals, prompted by a recognition of the inevitable by Washington, with Tel Aviv cutting its South African export market to keep the generous military and economic aid from its American paymaster.

Polakow-Suransky has filled in many of the gaps in the long-suspected alliance between Israel and South Africa but he is loathe to make a link between the political philosophies of Zionism and apartheid. This is largely from a reluctance to recognise the corrupting ideological influence of Zionism. Zionism’s idealised image of Israel fails to see that the brutal dispossession and continued denial of basic political rights to the Palestinian Arab population is a form of racist discrimination not a million miles away from the former South African model.

Polakow-Suransky refers, for example, to the original Jewish state’s “democratic soul”, a characterisation which airbrushes the 1948 ethnic cleansing out of existence. His repeated characterisation of the Israeli Labor Party, at least until 1973, as a ‘socialist beacon’ignores the decades of arms deals and cover-ups under the alleged socialists of the Labor Party, who instigated the alliance, and the right-wing Likud Party and Labor-Likud coalitions which succeeded it. The only difference was that Labor paid more lip service to anti-apartheid rhetoric than did Likud.

This rhetoric once so annoyed Prime Minister Verwoerd in 1961 that he declared to the United Nations General Assembly that ‘Israelis took Israel from the Arabs after they had lived there for a thousand years … Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state’. It takes one to know one.