Foreign Policy: Israel's Most Illicit Affair

[laststeamtrain]

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.

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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?

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, understood this, routinely condemned apartheid and sought to ally his country with the new black-governed nations of sub-Saharan Africa that emerged from colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the balance of forces began to change dramatically after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel seized control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Ben-Gurion's heirs -- Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan, second-generation leaders of the ruling Labor Party -- worked to transform Israel into a mini super power and had no qualms about cooperating with South Africa to get there. "It was not a shotgun marriage," writes Polakow-Suransky.

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The relationship started as a marriage of self-interest. South African money helped Israel became a major arms manufacturer and exporter and funded its high-tech economy, while Pretoria gained access to cutting-edge weapons and military technology at a time when most of the world sought to isolate and condemn the apartheid regime. For the ensuing two decades Israel continued to publicly denounce apartheid while at the same time secretly propping up the white-minority government and helping sustain racial supremacy.

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

[PDJane]

1. I wish I could say this is surprising.........

However, it isn't. It is also not surprising that the Israelis would want to deny that they have nuclear weapons, although it's clear they do, nor is it a surprise that they will not sign the NNPT.

It's not really a surrise that they would support a racist and apartheid system either; after all, that's what they have instituted. And that, my friend, pains me.