Making Apartheid Look Like a Picnic
Genocide, Variations on a Theme #II Israel and South Africa 2
Genocide, Variations on a Theme #II
Israel and South Africa 2
“Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s” Chris McGreal once wrote[1] “as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But most African states broke ties after the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the government in Jerusalem began to take a more benign view of the isolated regime in Pretoria. The relationship changed so profoundly that, in 1976, Israel invited the South African prime minister, John Vorster – a former Nazi sympathiser and a commander of the fascist Ossewabrandwag that sided with Hitler – to make a state visit.”
“Leaving unmentioned Vorster’s wartime internment for supporting Germany, Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, hailed the South African premier as a force for freedom and made no mention of Vorster’s past as he toured the Jerusalem memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. At a state banquet, Rabin toasted ‘the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence’. Both countries, he said, faced ‘foreign-inspired instability and recklessness’.”
“Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: ‘Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.’”
“Vorster’s visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Alon Liel (a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria), who headed the Israeli foreign ministry’s South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.”
“‘We created the South African arms industry,’ says Liel. ‘They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.’”
“‘We were involved in Angola as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.’”
“‘Alongside the state-owned factories turning out materiel for South Africa was Kibbutz Beit Alfa, which developed a profitable industry selling anti-riot vehicles for use against protesters in the black townships.’”
“‘The biggest secret of all was the nuclear one. Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa’s development of its nuclear bombs. Israel was embarrassed enough about its close association with a political movement rooted in racial ideology to keep the military collaboration hidden.’”
“‘All that I’m telling you was completely secret,’ says Liel. ‘The knowledge of it was extremely limited to a small number of people outside the security establishment. But it so happened that many of our prime ministers were part of it, so if you take people such as [Shimon] Peres or Rabin, certainly they knew about it because they were part of the security establishment.’”
“‘At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating. So did many politicians. Israeli cities found twins in South Africa, and Israel was alone among western nations in allowing the black homeland of Bophuthatswana to open an ‘embassy’.’”
“By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces – in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings – Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 – that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts.”
“‘There are things we South Africans recognise in the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination and human rights,’ says (Ronnie) Kasrils. ‘The repressed are demonised as terrorists to justify ever-greater violations of their rights. We have the absurdity that the victims are blamed for the violence meted out against them. Both apartheid and Israel are prime examples of terrorist states blaming the victims.’”
“There are important differences. Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years. But, from the 1980s, the overwhelming superiority of Israeli military power, the diminishing threat from its neighbours and the shift of the conflict to Palestinian streets eroded the sympathy that Israel once commanded abroad.”
“White South Africa and Israel painted themselves as enclaves of democratic civilisation on the front line in defending western values, yet both governments often demanded to be judged by the standards of the neighbours they claimed to be protecting the free world from.”
“‘The whites [in South Africa] always saw their fate in a way related to the fate of the Israelis because the Israelis were a white minority surrounded by 200 million fanatic Muslims assisted by communism,’ says Liel. ‘Also, there was this analysis that said Israel is a civilised western island in the midst of these 200 million barbaric Arabs and it’s the same as the Afrikaners; five million Afrikaners surrounded by hundreds of millions of blacks who are also assisted by communism.’”
“When Israel finally began to back away from the apartheid regime as international pressure on the Afrikaner government grew, Liel says Israel’s security establishment balked. ‘When we came to the crossroads in 1986-1987, in which the foreign ministry said we have to switch from white to black, the security establishment said, ‘You’re crazy, it’s suicidal.’ They were saying we wouldn’t have military and aviation industries unless we had had South Africa as our main client from the mid-1970s; they saved Israel. By the way, it’s probably true,’ he says.”
“Shimon Peres was defence minister at the time of Vorster’s visit to Jerusalem and twice served as prime minister during the 1980s when Israel drew closest to the apartheid government. He shies away from questions about the morality of ties to the white regime. ‘I never think back. Since I cannot change the past, why should I deal with it?’ he says.”
“Pressed about whether he ever had doubts about backing a government that was the antithesis of what Israel said it stood for, Peres says his country was struggling for survival. ‘Every decision is not between two perfect situations. Every choice is between two imperfect alternatives. At that time the movement of black South Africa was with Arafat against us. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice. But we never stopped denouncing apartheid. We never agreed with it.’”
“And a man like Vorster? ‘I wouldn’t put him on the list of the greatest leaders of our time,’ says Peres.”
“The deputy director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, Gideon Meir, says that while he had no detailed knowledge of Israel’s relationship with the apartheid government, it was driven by a sole consideration. ‘Our main problem is security. There is no other country in the world whose very existence is being threatened. This is since the inception of the state of Israel to this very day. Everything is an outcome of the geopolitics of Israel.’”
“When apartheid collapsed, the South African Jewish establishment that once honoured Percy Yutar – the prosecutor who jailed Mandela – now rushed to embrace Jews who were at the forefront of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as Joe Slovo, Ronnie Kasrils and Ruth First.”
“‘I received these awards from international Zionist organisations claiming that it was my Judaic roots that had driven me,’ says Helen Suzman. ‘When I said I didn’t have a Jewish upbringing and that I went to a convent which didn’t influence me either, they said it was not actively but instinctively.’”
“For Kasrils, the embrace was short-lived. ‘They spent years denouncing me for ‘endangering the Jews’ and then suddenly they pretend they’ve been at my side all through the struggle. It didn’t last long. As soon as I started criticising what Israel is doing in Palestine they dropped me again,’ he said.”
“Nowadays, the language of the anti-apartheid struggle has found favour with the Jewish establishment as a means of defending Israel. South Africa’s chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, has called Zionism the ‘national liberation movement of the Jewish people’ and invoked the terminology of Pretoria’s policies to uplift ‘previously disadvantaged’ black people. ‘Israel is an affirmative-action state set up to protect Jews from genocide. We are previously disadvantaged and we can’t rely on the goodwill of the world,’ he said. Rabbi Goldstein declined several requests for an interview.”
“In 2004, Ronnie Kasrils visited the Palestinian territories to assess the effect of Israel’s assault on the West Bank two years earlier in response to a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people. ‘This is much worse than apartheid,’ he said. ‘The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.’”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT_4_0ToGsM&ab_channel=OwenJones