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Israel and South Africa’s apartheid

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Anchor Marco Werman talks with Sasha Polakow-Suransky about his book,
“The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid
South Africa.”

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. Author Sasha Polakow-Suransky takes on a touchy subject in his new book. It’s called “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.” In it, he documents how Israel came to secretly sell weapons to South Africa in the ‘70s and ‘80s, even as most of the world increasingly distanced itself from the pariah state. Polakow-Suransky says that Israel’s early leaders were outspoken in their criticism of South Africa’s apartheid regime. But that hard line started to soften as the years went by.

SASHA POLAKOW-SURANSKY:  And what you saw after the 1967 war and especially after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 is a real realignment in Africa. Israel moved away from its relations with the newly independent black African states after the ‘73 war because many of those states turned away from Israel and began to align themselves with Arab states. And so what you see is the evolution from a sort of moral stance in Israeli foreign policy toward Africa to really hardnosed realpolitik, and that’s exemplified by some of the new labor leaders, people like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan. And this new generation of leaders really saw Israel’s security as paramount and they were willing to make moral compromises in order to ensure what they thought was necessary to preserve Israel’s security. And for people like Peres and Rabin, that included getting into bed with a regime like apartheid South Africa.

WERMAN:  You dealt with a lot of declassified, newly declassified documents in researching this book. What did you learn that was not known before? Both about the relationship between South Africa and Israel and about the nuclear capabilities of both countries?

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Well, I learned that the relationship was much more extensive and much more lucrative than I ever imagined. And the most controversial of the revelations in the book has been discussions that took place between Shimon Peres, who was then Israel’s Defense Minister, and P.W. Botha, who was then South Africa’s Defense Minister in 1975. During which the two men and high-level defense officials from both countries discussed the possible transfer of nuclear capable Jericho missiles from Israel to South Africa. Now this deal never went through and it’s important to remember that, but the discussion took place and what its shows is that at that particular moment in history, in 1975, Israel was feeling incredibly isolated and somewhat abandoned by its key ally, the United States.

WERMAN: So that deal would have needed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s final approval and it’s not at all likely that that would have happened. How much did the prime minister know about this and how much did the Israeli public know about military cooperation with South Africa?

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Well, the Israeli public knew virtually nothing about it throughout the entire relationship. As far as Rabin is concerned, in 1975 he certainly knew what was going on, but Shimon Peres had a long history of freelancing in foreign police. During the 1950s he almost single handedly built Israel’s military relationship with France. A crucial relationship that gave Israel its first nuclear reactor which led to Israel’s eventual nuclear weapons capability. And so what was going on in 1975 is because Israel was feeling extremely vulnerable and because South Africa was a key export market for the Israeli defense industry. Peres was doing everything he could to sell everything he could at that time, and that included a bit of nuclear adventurism, in the sense that he was willing to at least discuss the possibility of a nuclear sale, one that never went through in the end and one that probably would have never received the approval of
Rabin if it had gone up to that level.

WERMAN: One of the striking things you mention is that the Israeli Embassy in Pretoria at the time of apartheid and this kind of shows the extent to which the Israeli and South African military dominated the relations between the two counties. In the Embassy, there was actually a wall and no civilian diplomatic corps were allowed to cross the wall. So tell us to what extent Israeli civilian policy got subverted by the military relationship Israel had with South Africa.

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: It was completely subverted and the military completely dominated and overshadowed the diplomatic corps when it came to South Africa. And the wall was there and it’s a story that was told to me by numerous Israeli ambassadors who served in South Africa and it wasn’t taken down until after Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994. But what’s interesting about that period is the total disconnect between Israel’s public pronouncements from the foreign ministry and the actual policy that was being carried out on the ground in South Africa very secretively. The military dominated in Israel, they also dominated in South Africa and so the diplomats in South Africa, some of whom had denied the allegations in my book, were also cut out of these deals and really kept in the dark by their military counterparts.

WERMAN: You know, some people will just read the title of this book and say “Ah-ha, I knew Zionism was tantamount to apartheid” and others will say “Why did you equate Zionism to apartheid.” How have you been dealing with these reactions?

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Well, I don’t equate Zionism and apartheid. I think that that’s a simplistic argument.

WERMAN:  But some people see it that way without even reading the book.

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Yeah, some people will see it that way and I encourage those sorts of people to actually read ten pages of the book because if they read the introduction they’ll see that that’s not what the argument is. What I argue, Marco, is much more subtle is that. I’m saying in this book that there were certain Israeli politicians and generals who saw in South Africa a minority group, the Afrikaners, facing a similar struggle to the Jews in Israel. A sense that this was another people that was besieged by a large majority that wanted to push it into the sea. And that was not shared across the board in Israeli government. There were many, many committed Zionists on the Israeli left for instance, who continually denounced this relationship with South Africa on moral grounds, on Jewish grounds, and on the grounds that a people that built a county in the ashes of the Holocaust could not get into bed with a group of people who were overt Nazi sympathizers during World War II. My book opens with a very striking scene. South African Prime Minister John Vorster walking into the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on an official visit with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres toasting him. And for South African Jews this was a disgusting moment for many South African Jews. Especially for people like my grandparents who were refugees from Nazi Germany and moved to South Africa in the 1930s, to see a man, Vorster, who was an over Nazi sympathizer during World War II being welcomed at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem was simply too much and it was sickening to many people, but that was what was going on in the 1970s. Those were the sorts of moral compromises that Israel was willing to make.

WERMAN: Why did you want to write this book, Sasha?

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Well, to some extent I suppose it’s in my genes. My parents are both South African Jews. Most of my family still lives in South Africa. My parents were anti-apartheid activists before they left South Africa in 1973 and they continued to mobilize against the apartheid regime on campus at the University of Michigan in the 1970s. So I grew up around anti-apartheid activists and this was sort of a side issue that people knew a little bit about, but not so much. And so I began to investigate it and I quickly found out that while there had been a lot written about this relationship, no one had ever had access to archival documents or the key players involved in it. And so I set out to actually document it and prove it.

WERMAN: What has reaction been to your book?

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: In Israel it’s been very interesting. Of course, Shimon Peres is not happy because he doesn’t come off looking very good, but elsewhere in Israel the reception has been surprisingly positive and part of this is because discussing Israel’s nuclear weapon’s program is not something that happens very often in Israel because it’s a taboo topic and subject to military censorship rules because the Israeli government has never officially confirmed or denied that it possesses nuclear weapons. And when a foreign journalist writes about the nuclear weapons program, the Israeli media is free to re-report it. And in South Africa the reception has been quite frosty from the official Jewish community organizations because many people who were leaders of those organizations in the 1960s and ‘70s are named in the book and they don’t look very good.

WERMAN: Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s new book is “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.” Sasha, thank you very much for your time.

POLAKOW-SURANSKY: Thanks so much for having me.

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