You know how the Tea Parties aren't racist? In fact, it isn't even possible for a Tea Partier to be racist. Except for all of them but the Useful Idiots.
Some Zionists tell me, in essence,
Israel is of course not a racist country, and Zionism is not racism. Look at the Arab Members of the Knesset. Is there any Muslim country with Jews in its legislature? Israel's walling off of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, [with the complicity of Egypt], is purely a security measure having nothing to do with Apartheid, no matter what anti-Semites such as Jimmy Carter or Judge Goldstone may claim.
How do we know that these claims are worth bupkes (beans)? Because many of the same Israeli politicians and military people allied themselves with Apartheid South Africa, with the approval of a majority of Israelis. The alliance included secret nuclear weapons cooperation between the two countries. Back in May, Sasha Polakow-Suransky of Foreign Affairs told us the sorry tale in his book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.
Let me tell you some of it, and about the hypocrisy of fear.
Oy, veh, s'iz a shande un a kharpe. Such Jews! Jewish anti-Semites! Worse than Goyim. Worse than Hamas, even.
Even such as these:
Former Israeli prime minister and current deputy prime minister and minister of defence Ehud Barak
The simple truth is, if there is one state including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, it will have to be either binational or undemocratic...if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert
If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
So anyway, you know who is really worse than regular Goyim, worse than anti-Semitic Jews, worse even than Hamas? Nazis, of course. Who else could it be? Not the mostly fake Nazis we get today, in their dress-up parties and parades, and certainly not all of the people absurdly accused of being Nazis on the Internet and in the media (including Jews and Blacks!), but real gather-'em-up, gas-'em-shoot-'em-burn-'em Nazis from the 1920s through 1945, who rounded up etc. my own Polish Jewish relatives in Poland, Lithuania, and Austria, among many other Jews and non-Jews.
The entire state of Israel is founded on the promise, "Never again". The great shrine to that promise and to the events that made it necessary, Yad Vashem ("A Memorial and a Name", the work of the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority), is a site of personal and political pilgrimage throughout Israel and the wider world.
So would Israel invite a Nazi from that period to Yad Vashem? Never! How can you even ask? What do you think we are? We were hunting down Nazis all over the world! Never! Never Again!
Except that this is where our story starts. The opening scene in The Unspoken Alliance describes the visit by former Nazi and then Apartheid Prime Minister B. J. Vorster of South Africa, one of the few countries willing to help Israel during its diplomatic isolation after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. He came to Yad Vashem, he was welcomed, he prayed, he laid a wreath in memory of the Holocaust victims, and he was whisked away to his meetings with top Israeli officials.
This B. J. Vorster:
We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism...You can call such an anti-democratic system a dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa Christian Nationalism.
Now Nazis today will likely tell you that by working with the enemy in this way, Vorster betrayed the White race, but that isn't how White South Africans saw it, and that isn't how German Nazis played race politics either. On one hand, Hitler declared Nazi allies the Japanese to be Aryans (though not the closely related but subjugated Koreans). They also got on famously with lots of Arabs. On the other hand, Roma ("Gypsies"), who trace their ancestry and their language straight back to India and to the original Hindu Aryans, were just as viciously treated in Germany as Jews were. And gays, and Communists, the physically handicapped and mentally retarded, Soviet prisoners of war (possibly as many as three million), Jehovah's Witnesses, Adventists, trade unionists, and psychiatric patients.
Race was just a convenient excuse, as it was under slavery, and still is in the US. Originally in the US, some Blacks owned slaves, and others besides Africans were taken as slaves, including Native Americans. Later on, however, race became the easiest way to whip up sufficient fear, hatred, and Southern Baptist and other Evangelical religious bigotry under Jim Crow and its successors, particularly the Republican Southern Strategy. And similarly in other times and places, whether under Apartheid, a thousand years of European anti-Semitism, Japanese ultra-nationalism, or any other such. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa supported Apartheid in much the same way that the Southern Evangelical churches supported slavery and Jim Crow as the Will of God.
The "problems" in South Africa involved none of the usual victims of Naziism. Just Blacks, and to a lesser extent Indians and mixed-race "Coloreds", whose status was significantly higher than Blacks. And the problems in Israel mostly involve Arabs, with occasional Persians, but few Turks, Kurds, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Nigerian Hausa, and so on. The heart of the Israel/South Africa alliance was on one side secret nuclear cooperation, with South Africa trading yellowcake uranium for Israel's tritium, and on the other sympathy and support for each other's intractable race problems. They supplied equipment and methodologies of oppression to each other for decades.
South Africa has since been through its changeover. Nelson Mandela was freed and allowed into politics, where he won the first free and open election in South Africa's history. The Black majority rules, and the country has not fallen or been pushed into the sea. The entire nation cheered when the nearly all-White Springbok rugby team won the World Cup in South Africa in 1995, as shown in the highly praised and very worthwhile movie Invictus (Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, Matt Damon as team captain François Pienaar, Clint Eastwood directing).
But you wouldn't know any of that to listen to meaninglessly frightened Whites in the US, or frightened Israelis, or frightened Sinhalatva Buddhists in Sri Lanka, or the mutually frightened Indians and Pakistanis, or frightened anti-Tibetan, anti-Uighur Chinese authorities, or any of the others. They have learned nothing from the history of empire and of slavery and oppression in a multitude of countries, and they have learned nothing from such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela: How do you inspire your team to do their best?
François Pienaar: By example. I've always thought to lead by example, sir.
Nelson Mandela: Well, that is right. That is exactly right. But how to get them to be better than they think they can be? That is very difficult, I find.
Invictus
Before the Alliance
It was not always thus.
Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.
Theodore Herzl, Altneuland, 1902
Jews have been strong allies of the oppressed worldwide, whenever given the chance, and not in fear for their own lives.
Exodus 23:9
Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
In her autobiography, My Life (1975; out of print) Golda Meir wrote about Israeli-African relationships in the 1950s.
Independence had come to us, as it was coming to Africa, not served up on a silver platter, but after years of struggle. Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves.
Israel sent sabras from the kibbutzes all over Africa. These Jews who were willing to work in the fields with Africans on practical solutions were far better received in African countries than the experts from elsewhere who only wanted to tell others what to do.
I have to leave out most of the geopolitics from this account, but I cannot omit Israel's strategy of forming alliances just outside the ring of hostile Arab nations, with Turkey, with Iraqi Kurds, with Iran under the Shah, with Ethiopia—staunch anti-Soviets all. This political strategy joined forces with the humanitarian interest in supporting post-independence African nations.
By 1960, Israel's blossoming relations with newly independent African states and its strident denunciations of Apartheid had put Jerusalem and Pretoria on a diplomatic collision course.
After the Sharpeville massacre of protesters against the hated pass laws, requiring Blacks to produce papers on demand or face arrest (Much worse than Arizona, so far),
Israeli diplomats, along with those from many other countries, protested at the UN.
As Israel's denunciations of South Africa grew louder, the South African Jewish community—placated by Malan's embrace in the early 1950s—began to worry once again. Hendrik Verwoerd had replaced Malan as Prime Minister in 1958 and his past as a fierce opponent of Jewish immigration from Europe during the 1930s added to their fears. South Africa's leading Jewish organization—the Jewish Board of Deputies—feared an anti-Jewish backlash if it failed to remain on good terms with the government of the day...They were not the sort of men who took on the government.
The South African National Party wanted South African Jews to condemn Israel's condemnation of Apartheid.
Aleck Goldberg a prominent member of the Board from 1958 to 1990, recalls that [National Party] members were "annoyed and taken aback" by Israel's criticism of South Africa. "They couldn't understand it. It was a kind of slap in the face to what they thought were gestures of friendship toward Israel and the Jewish community," says Goldberg. Making matters worse was the fact that NP leaders seemed to believe that South African Jews had the clout to influence Israeli foreign policy at the U.N. Even if the board could have done so, Goldberg insists that "being a very devoted Zionist community you would never, under any circumstances, denounce Israel." In 1961, however, the Board of Deputies did just that.
Nevertheless, Israel continued to criticize South Africa and to take other measures, such as an arms embargo, and the dreaded anti-Semitic backlash never happened. There were arrests of Jews, but only of the handful taking part in rebellion.
The most notable was ANC member Arthur Goldreich, who hid Nelson Mandela in the 1960s as a servant on his estate, Liliesleaf, north of Johannesburg, where they held clandestine ANC meetings. Goldberg, Mandela, and others were sentenced to life imprisonment at the infamous Rivonia trials. Their prosecutor was the brilliant Jewish lawyer Percy Yutar, whose career had been held back by anti-Semitism. Prosecuting Jews as well as Blacks proved his loyalty.
The Rivonia trial launched Yutar's career, earned him the praise of the apartheid regime's leaders, congratulations from his synagogue's rabbi and the Board of Deputies, and the nickname "Dr. Persecutor" from his critics.
Goldreich and fellow Jewish ANC prisoner Harold Volpe bribed their way out of prison before the trials began. Their adventures would be worthy of a Hollywood movie, particularly having the commercial airplane they planned to fly on from British territory burned up by South African agents. Goldreich later settled in Jerusalem as a leading architect and eventually as the leader of the Israeli anti-Apartheid movement.
After Suez in 1956, and even more after the 1966 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was hemorrhaging allies. Eisenhower ordered Israel, France, and Britain out of Suez. De Gaulle cut off military purchases from France in 1973. The Israeli Right turned to South Africa.
With the enthusiastic support of Israel's opposition leader, Menachem Begin, [Eliezer] Shostak took his fight for closer ties with South Africa to the highest levels of government. In November 1968, he confronted Israel's Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, on the Knesset floor, demanting that Eban instruct the Israeli U.N. delegation, "once and for all, not to vote against the S.A. government in order not to jeopardize relations between our two states.
Eban, originally from South Africa, would not be bullied, and stuck with Golda Meir's policies. However, the mood in the country changed, with South Africa almost the only country praising Israel's victories, and the Rightwing hardliners later got their way.
Actions, Words, and Pictures
It should come as no surprise that some favored the Israel-South Africa alliance, and even favored Apartheid publicly, while others protested. Apparently it still does come as a surprise when anyone attacks the Right-wingers but not all Israelis without distinction. I give you some from Column A and some from Column B.
Prime Minister Vorster
We view Israel's position and problems with understanding and sympathy. Like us, they have to contend with terrorist infiltration across the border; and like us they have enemies bent on their destruction.
Eliezer Shestak v. Arthur Goldreich
Israel Radio held a mock trial of Israeli policy toward South Africa in 1972. Eliezer Shostak argued that if we could ally with Stalin, we can set aside our moral discomfort and ally with South Africa. Arthur Goldreich denounced the policy and demanded an alliance with the Black majority. The on-air jury gave Shostak the victory.
The Haaretz Cannibal Cartoon
African countries, led by Uganda, began shutting down Israeli embassies. The Israeli press reacted in fury. The Left-leaning Haaretz ran a cartoon showing Idi Amin of Uganda together with other African leaders feasting on Israeli leaders boiled in the standard-issue cannibal pot. (Haaretz, January 12, 1973; reprinted in The Unspoken Alliance, p. 68) Even South Africans complained about the racism of the cartoon, and compared it with anti-Semitic Nazi cartoons.
AIPAC
In August 1986, as popular anti-apartheid legislation was making the rounds in the U.S. Senate, a paragraph with far-reaching consequences for Israel crept into the bill. It called for the president to document any arms sales to South Africa and "add the option of terminating U.S. military assistance to countries violating the embargo." In Israel, the national-unity government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir disregarded the bill, convinced that it would never pass.
In Washington, though, leading AIPAC officials believed that Israel's ties with Pretoria were tarnishing the country's image in Congress just as the push for anti-South African sanctions was gaining momentum on the Hill. And they began pressuring the Israeli government to act.
Some of AIPAC's biggest donors were outraged, given that arms sales to South Africa were a major economic windfall for Israel. But unlike the donors, AIPAC's Beltway insiders saw the bigger strategic picture. In their eyes, the ongoing and increasingly publicized military relationship with South Africa was alienating some of the Jewish state's staunchest supporters in Congress, who were also committed to the anti-apartheid cause. Pro-Israel lobbyists believed that attempts by anti-Israel groups to paint the Jewish state as an ally of the racist South African regime would eventually sway the American public unless Israel ceased selling arms to South Africa.
Yitzhak Rabin and Ronald Reagan v. AIPAC
When President Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act on September 26, 1986, the Israelis felt vindicated. But Congress immediately overrode Reagan's veto with overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act became law a week later--including the amendment threatening to cut off military aid to Israel. It was a rude awakening for Shamir, who left the foreign ministry to take over as Prime Minister on October 20. He was forced to apologize to the AIPAC lobbyists, telling them "Your president told me I didn't have to listen to you." But now, with the anti-apartheid law on the books, he did.
Further Information
There is, of course, much more of this. Even what we know so far of Israel's support for Apartheid is too complicated to summarize properly here, and more will come out in the years to come. Go read The Worst Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb, by Avner Cohen, also. Or at least go to the C-SPAN archive and watch The Unspoken Alliance.
Carnegie Endowment for Intl. Peace
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, looks at the secret military partnership between Israel and apartheid South Africa following the 1967 Six-Day War (including the transfer of nuclear technology). The relationship lasted 27 years. Commentary was provided by Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and the forthcoming The Worst Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb. This event, "Nuclear Pariahs," was hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thomas Carothers moderated.
Or you can read the Daily Kos story about it from May, when the book came out.
Note: There have been many Diaries on related issues.
Israel - Its Own Worst Enemy
The hot one recently was the Anti-Defamation League's opposition to the mosque near the Trade Center site.
Second Note: I found out something about knee-jerk pro-Israel hypocrisy from my previous I/P (Israel/Palestine) diary. Donutted to death, it was. By Kossacks expressing a dozen other prejudices in my direction, with no attempt at fact-checking, such as even glancing at my other Diaries. My membership has been downgraded as a result of lost karma. Presumably I will gain it back the same way I got it in the first place.