The Final Call

The Unholy Alliance Between Israel and South Africa’s Apartheid Regime

By Jehron Muhammad | Last updated: Dec 23, 2010 - 12:42:11 AM

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(FinalCall.com) - You'd think with all the recent ink, with both Foreign Affairs and the UK-based Guardian articles “Bringing Israel's Bomb Out of the Basement” and “Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa (SA) nuclear weapons,” that Israel's nuclear arsenal would be big on the WikiLeaks list of revelations. And if that's not enough you'd think the July 8 Israeli daily Haaretz headline, “Report: Secret Document Affirms U.S. Israeli Nuclear Partnership,” could of at least raised speculation that Israel's nuclear weapons capacity in WikiLeaks, would of been forthcoming.

But apart from the already known secret that the Jewish state has been urging the U.S. to join it in attacking Iran, there has been nothing.

According to published reports there also was no revelation related to the “stealing of Palestinian lands, and destruction of their homes,” or “the manipulations of Zionist lobbies.”

‘While the U.S. and some of its allies are threatening military action against Iran for enriching uranium, Washington is bypassing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty while aiding Israel's nuclear weapons program, the only country in the world that has actually helped another nation construct and test a nuclear devise.’ –blogger Conn Hallinan

Why is anyone's guess. But what we do know based on the above articles and Sasha Polakow-Suranski's recent book is more about the symbiotic relationship formed between Israel and the former South African apartheid regime.

To contextualize that relationship we cite the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who wrote in an autobiography of her country's budding relationship with Africa's newly formed independent states, “like them we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land … how to live together and how to defend ourselves.”

But what most don't understand about the history of this “alliance of the periphery,” as this Mossad brainchild was called, is how those ties with African nations were also used by Israel as a counter balance “to (the) Arab states surrounding it,” as Polakow- Suranski reveals in his recent book, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.”

So in the late 1950s, the budding Jewish state claims commonality with the newly forming African nations, only to see that commonality superseded by Israel's defense needs—and the $10 billion spent in military hardware, training, and technology selling over the Jewish state's relationship with South Africa's apartheid regime.

And then to add insult to injury, the diplomats and defense officials at the Israeli embassy were reportedly kept in the dark about the roles of their colleagues.

According to Polakow-Suranski, “Malcolm Ferguson, SA's ambassador toIsrael at the time, was stunned to learn that Israel's SA policy was not only self contradictory, but that the diplomats and defense officials at the Israeli embassy had no idea what their colleagues were doing.

A key advisor to Prime Minister Rabin had told Ferguson that the Foreign Ministry was deliberately kept in the dark about the nature of the military relations between the two countries for fear that its liberal employees would leak information to the media.”

On top of that Israeli's embassy in “Pretoria was divided by a wall.” In the chapter, “Forked Tongues,” the author writes of “a barrier that separated the Foreign Ministry from those working at the Defense Ministry mission, and the two sides carried out diametrically opposed policies.”

The policies included development of a multibillion-dollar military industry and developing relationships with up and coming Black anti-apartheid leaders.

When the world community eventually clamored against Israel's unholy alliance with the apartheid regime, Israel viewed her strategic interest and her economic well being—both tied to her relationship with South Africa—as the more important thing.

The October 1986 passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by the U.S. Congress forced “(Yitzak) Rabin to reconsider the Defense Ministry's approach to South Africa,” and helped those inside the diplomatic corps make their case against supporting the apartheid regime.

In April of 1987 a congressional report was released accusing the Israeli government of being “fully aware of most or all of the (military) trade (with South Africa).” Polakow-Suranski, whose parents are from South Africa, writes, an Israel apartheid South Africa tie “that for years leaked out in bits and pieces was now fi nally out in the open, and this time came from a source that was diffi cult for Israel and its allies (mainly the Jewish state's self proclaimed protector AIPAC) in Washington to dismiss or ignore.”

Though Jerusalem's sanctions received in-depth coverage in the Israeli and American media, “in practice,” according to the Polakow-Suranski book, “it amounted to little more than a cosmetic gesture.”

The sanctions had minimal “impact on the flourishing trade between the two countries, especially in the defense sector, where multibillion-dollar contracts signed before 1987 remained in effect,” notes Polakow-Suranski.

Now let's fast-forward to the July 8 article in the Israeli daily Haaretz: The article revealed that the Obama administration would begin transferring nuclear fuel to Israel in order to build up Tel Aviv's nuclear stockpile.

“There is profound irony,” wrote blogger Conn Hallinan, “in the fact that while the U.S. and some of its allies are threatening military action against Iran for enriching uranium, Washington is bypassing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty while aiding Israel's nuclear weapons program, the only country in the world that has actually helped another nation construct and test a nuclear device. ”

Hallinam wrote that on Sept. 22, 1979, an American Vela satellite, designed to detect atmospheric nuclear tests, was streaking over the South Atlantic. “At 53 minutes after midnight Greenwich Mean Time,” he wrote, “near South Africa's Prince Edward Island, it picked up the telltale double fl ash of a nuclear weapon detonation. Compared to the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb the explosion was small, about three kilotons.”

The U.S. Navy also picked up “an acoustic signal indicating a large explosion” occurring at the same time and place detected by the Vela satellite.

The Carter administration tried to cover up the test, but according to investigative journalist Seymour Herch, the nuclear test was a joint Israeli-South Africa low-yield “neutron” bomb.

The “alliance” between the South African apartheid regime and Israel, writes Polakow-Suranski, allowed the former “to develop advanced nuclear missile technology” and provide the latter “with the raw material and testing space it needed to expand its existing arsenal of missiles and nuclear weapons.”

According to a declassified Nov. 22, 1974 letter to the South African defense ministry, uncovered by Polakow-Suranski, Israeli leader Shimon Peres voiced the importance of co-operation between Tel Aviv and Pretoria.

“This mutually beneficial relationship,” Polakow-Suranski writes in the book's prologue, “was forged outside the jurisdiction of international conventions such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Missile Technology Control Regime, the cornerstones of Western efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The two countries developed and improved their respective weapons systems under such secrecy that not even American intelligence agencies knew the full extent of their cooperation.”

Israel tried to pressure the post apartheid South African government not to declassify documents eventually obtained by Polakow-Suranski. “The Israeli defense ministry tried to block my access … on the grounds it was sensitive material. The South Africans didn't seem to care; they blacked out a few lines and handed it over to me. The ANC government is not so worried about protecting the dirty laundry of the apartheid regime's old allies,” the author said.