Israel and Apartheid South Africa Were the Closest of Friends
The mutually beneficial relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa was not just about the arms trade. It was an ideological affinity about how to treat unwanted populations.
Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion meets with South African prime minister Daniël François Malan in Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 15, 1953. (Hans Pinn / Wikimedia Commons)
The contradictions at the heart of the State of Israel have had little impact on its success. This can be seen in Israel’s relationship with Africa. Many African states had backed Israel after 1948 in what they saw as a noble anti-colonial struggle. They related to its cause. One of the least-known aspects of this dynamic, just before the Six-Day War, was Israel’s support for the campaign against white minority rule in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Israel condemned the regime led by white nationalist Ian Smith after his unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 and supported a military and civilian boycott of the regime.
Israel’s advocacy was not due to a love of African self-determination but was, rather, a calculated decision to gather support in Africa against what it perceived as Arab and communist “defamation.” Israel was also interested in exploiting Africa’s natural resources and immediately set about building relationships with pliant leaders in the Central African Republic after it declared independence from France in 1960.
Declassified documents from the Israel State Archives indicate that it provided training to rebel groups fighting racism in Rhodesia, though the exact nature of the training is unknown; some officials backed armed struggle. When the first leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, visited Israel in 1964, he thanked the Jewish state for its support of his resistance movement and expressed a desire for his fighters to get Israeli training in guerrilla warfare.
After 1967, Israel’s interest in liberation movements waned, and its support for them became far less effective as it turned into an occupier itself. However, there was no better political, military, diplomatic, and ideological alliance between like-minded nations than the one between Israel and apartheid South Africa. The apartheid regime in Pretoria took power in 1948 and soon put in place Nazi-style restrictions on non-whites, from forbidding marriage between the races to barring blacks from many jobs.
By the time the South African and Israeli governments cemented a political, ideological, and military relationship in the 1970s, often centered on weapons developed and tested by the Israeli military, many in the ruling Israeli Likud Party felt an affinity with South Africa’s worldview. As journalist and author Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes, it was an “ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilization defending their existence against barbarians at the gate.”
A prominent Jewish South African dissident was Ronnie Kasrils, who played a senior role in uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and served as the minister for intelligence between 2004 and 2008 in an ANC government. He told the Guardian that the comparison between the two nations wasn’t accidental. “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” he said:
This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was “a land without people for a people without land,” so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the seventeenth century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.
Doing Good Business in Inequality
The relationship became so close by the mid-1970s that Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African prime minister John Vorster to visit, including a tour of Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial. Vorster had been a Nazi sympathizer and member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War II; in 1942, he proudly expressed his admiration for Nazi Germany. Yet when Vorster arrived in Israel in 1976, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence.”
Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” A few months after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same challenge: “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.”
The relationship between the nations was broad but also sworn to secrecy. In April 1975, a security agreement was signed that defined the relationship for the next twenty years. A clause within the deal stated that both parties pledged to keep its existence concealed. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria and head of Israel’s foreign ministry’s South Africa desk in the 1980s, said that the relationship between Israel and South Africa was vital for the defense industries of both countries, turning them into major global players.
Liel argued that many in the Israeli security establishment convinced themselves that Israel as an occupying nation could not have survived without Afrikaner support. Liel and another former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, llan Baruch, wrote in 2021 that Israel was an apartheid state that took inspiration from pre-1994 South Africa.
“We created the South African arms industry,” Liel explained:
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 [South Africa never recognized the country’s 1975 independence and supported its opponents] as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.
Hostility to International Opinion
Israel ignored the United Nations Security Council–imposed arms embargo on South Africa while telling the world that it was complying. The deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hanan Bar-On, sent a telegram to the ministry director, David Kimche, on August 29, 1984, in explanation:
The Israeli policy . . . is that we do not in any way admit [such sales] to an Israeli or to a foreign actor and certainly not to an American Congressman, even if he is considered a friend and the relationship with him is supposedly intimate.
The most secretive aspect of the relationship was the mutual support given to each other’s nuclear capability. France and Britain provided essential materials in helping Israel develop nuclear weapons, and full-scale production began after the Six-Day War. With an abundant supply of uranium, South Africa had a solid base on which to build its own stockpile, but Israel provided technical expertise.
According to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, South Africa allowed Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979, though Israel denied doing so. Israel even offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa in the 1970s (in a deal that never went ahead). Declassified documents indicate that South Africa wanted the weapons to potentially hit neighboring states, as a deterrent from attack.
South African prime minister P. W. Botha and Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres colluded in an agreement to keep the deal completely secret. A 1974 letter from Peres to South Africa claimed that they both had a “common hatred of injustice,” and he pushed for a “close identity of aspirations and interests.” By the 1980s, Israel was South Africa’s main arms supplier. Washington was not initially fully aware of the extent of Israel’s nuclear collaboration with South Africa, and Israeli secretiveness continues to this day; its nuclear facility at Dimona has never been inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Israel is presumed to have more than two hundred nuclear weapons.)
During the first meeting between US president Joe Biden and then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett in August 2021, Washington reaffirmed the long-standing understanding that it would not pressure Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or to give up its weapons. Israel agreed not to conduct any nuclear tests or threaten nuclear strikes while maintaining its “nuclear ambiguity.”
In 1971, the New York Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger wrote that Israel and South Africa had become so close that he had heard an unconfirmed rumor that “a South African mission flew to Israel during the Six Day War to study tactics and use of weapons.” Vorster told the columnist that Israel faced its own “apartheid problem,” namely, how to manage the Arabs. “Neither nation,” wrote Sulzberger, “wants to place its future entirely in the hands of a surrounding majority and would prefer to fight.”
The mutually beneficial relationship was not just about the ability to make money from the defense sector. It was an ideological affinity about how to treat unwanted populations. South Africa’s Bantustans inspired many in the Israeli elite as a viable model for Palestine. This was the desire to isolate “undesirable” Palestinians in noncontiguous enclaves cut off from the rest of the country — in other words, like today’s West Bank, where 165 Palestinian “enclaves” are strangled by Israeli colonies, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and violent settlers.
During apartheid, Israeli diplomats were instructed across the world to tell the media that the Jewish state didn’t recognize the Bantustans. This was a lie, as a telegram by the deputy director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Natan Meron, on November 23, 1983, proved: “It is no secret that Israeli political figures and public figures are involved in one way or another, directly or indirectly, in economic activity in the Bantustans.”
The practice of using apartheid-era rhetoric to defend Israeli occupation remains alive to this day. During the 2019 Israeli election campaign, opposition leader Benny Gantz criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for banning US congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel and the Palestinian territories. Instead, Gantz said, both women should have been allowed to see “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel . . . and the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.”
This was reminiscent of South African apartheid leader John Vorster’s statement to the New York Times in 1977 that “the standard of living of the South African Black is two to five times higher than that of any Black country in Africa.” One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.” Ariel Sharon was a known fan of Bantustans, and he was one of the biggest advocates of the construction of Israeli settlements from the 1970s and wanted to adapt them into the West Bank.
Former Israeli ambassador Avi Primor wrote in his autobiography about a trip to South Africa in the early 1980s with Sharon, then a defense minister, recalling how much he was taken by the Bantustan enterprise. Former Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema told Haaretz in 2003 that Sharon had explained to him that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate for Palestine.
An Architecture of Global Control
Toward the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the first democratic election in 1994, Israel was one of the last nations to maintain a relationship with the white minority regime. The Israeli defense establishment had long become entranced by its own propaganda and believed that apartheid would last forever. Nelson Mandela took notice. In a 1993 speech to the delegates of the Socialist International, Mandela said: “The people of South Africa will never forget the support of the state of Israel to the apartheid regime.”
Israel’s mission from the beginning was to allegedly be a beacon in a century that suffered catastrophically from the perils of ethnonationalism. Today Israel provides inspiration, ideologically and with military and intelligence equipment, to further its missionary zeal to find and create like-minded countries. None will be the same as Israel, but its model of jingoism and unashamed pride in preferencing the Jewish people above all else is like an easily transportable toolkit that can be adapted to a multitude of countries and scenarios.
US and Israeli officials are present in many nations around the world, training, arming, or pressuring local officials to enforce their policies on immigration, counterterrorism, and policing. The Global North, including the United States, the European Union (EU), Australia, and Israel, ruthlessly enforces its power, controlling four-fifths of the world’s income, because there’s no interest in sharing its wealth.
This architecture of control has to be managed not only at home but also around the globe with reliable client states; external borders are physically invisible but ideologically powerful. It includes Israel keeping Palestinians in a ghetto, Australia forcibly sending refugees on boats to remote and dangerous Pacific Islands, the EU deliberately allowing non-white migrants to drown in the Mediterranean, and the US repelling people from Latin America who are often fleeing policies in their home countries that were designed in Washington.