Israel’s ties to apartheid South Africa documented

To write a history of the political, military and economic alliance between Israel and apartheid South Africa, which began in earnest with the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and lasted until the collapse of the apartheid state in 1994, the author of “The Unspoken Alliance,” Sasha Polakow-Suransky, spent six years interviewing more than 60 people in South Africa, Israel and Washington.

The author also had access to 7,000 pages of previously classified South African archives, detailing extensive and secret negotiations between top leaders in Israel and apartheid South Africa. The most significant secret uncovered appears to be that South African Defense Minister P.W. Botha asked Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres for nuclear warheads in 1975. Peres, now Israel’s president, responded by offering warheads “in three sizes.”

The general outlines of the military and political cooperation between apartheid South Africa and Israel have been known for a long time. What is new here are the details — the who, what, when and where, based on both extensive documentary evidence and interviews with participants.

The Peres statement is admittedly ambiguous on its face. Polakow-Suransky and the Guardian newspaper of Great Britain on May 24 argue, however, that the very ambiguity of the formulation and its context — for example, the agreement stipulated that it was to be kept secret and its existence would be denied — and other agreements between Israel and apartheid South Africa on the development of missiles lead to the conclusion that one of the three sizes was “nuclear.”

Peres’ office quickly and firmly issued a denial on May 25, carefully maintaining Israel’s position of neither denying nor affirming its possession of nuclear weapons. Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel’s Dimona facility, revealed in 1986 that Israel possessed 180 to 200 nuclear warheads. The government’s policy of deliberate ambiguity didn’t keep the Israeli courts from sentencing Vanunu to 18 years for treason and espionage.

Polakow-Suransky is not just a bright young PhD who was lucky or fortunate enough to parlay his family connections in South Africa and Israel to obtain financing from the Rhodes Trust and the Harry S. Truman Foundation. He is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, the monthly publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR was founded in 1921 with Rockefeller money and ever since has been a highly influential think-tank presenting their interests and the interests of big oil and high finance. David Rockefeller, the patriarch of the family, joined the board of the CFR in 1949 and is currently its chair.

Given this connection to one of the major players in U.S. big oil, it is particularly interesting to see how Polakow-Suransky answers two charges: that Zionism is racism and that Israel has adopted an apartheid policy towards the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, lands it has occupied since the Six Day War of 1967.

In analyzing a shift in the 1970s in U.S. African-American positions on Israel, Polakow-Suransky writes, “Militant Black groups began ... denouncing Israel and South Africa as settler-colonial states that denied basic political rights to indigenous populations.” He then goes on, “While the radicals may have been right on that count ... .” (p. 175) This is a pretty damning admission about Israel.

On the first page, the author points out that even politicians like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who publicly denounced apartheid and belonged to Israel’s “left-wing” Labor Party, still welcomed South African Prime Minister B. J. Vorster to Israel’s Holocaust memorial in 1976. Vorster had supported the Nazis during World War II. Numerous times Polakow-Suransky details the ideological congruence between the National Party, which configured South Africa’s apartheid regime after World War II and ran South Africa until 1993, and Israel’s “right-wing” Likud Party.

In an article “The Most Dangerous Thing That Can Be!” on the Tishrin website May 31, Syrian political analyst Buthaynah Sha’ban writes: “The uproar raised about Israel’s attempt to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa was aimed, in part, at veiling the most important and serious part of the book that discloses a deeply-rooted racism in Israel against the Arabs and the Palestinians ... .”

Polakow-Suransky says that if Israel does not solve its conflict with Palestine, it can never become a “normal” state and “worldwide sympathy” will be created for the Palestinians. The question he fails to raise is if the U.S. ruling class, in such circumstances, might reconsider its apparently unwavering reliance upon the Israeli state as a strategic military ally for U.S. imperialist domination of the region.

He is speaking to Israel and the imperialists — and undoubtedly reflects a current within them — when he calls for the “creation” (by whom?) of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state and peace negotiations with Lebanon and Syria. He calls the current status quo “demographically and geopolitically untenable,” which becomes clearer every day as the international struggle in support of the Palestinians heats up.