Israel & Apartheid South Africa: my interview with Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Posted in Posts on 06/29/2010 12:18 pm by Laila El-HaddadSasha Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, poured through 7,000 pages of never-before-seen classified South African documents while researching his book, Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.
In it, he relays the minutes and details of conversations between top level officials on both sides that shed light on the extent and nature of Israel’s cooperation with and enabling of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, both in military and non-military matters.
It was a relationship that benefited both sides: South Africa acquired vital components from Israel to help advance its nuclear programme, while sharing their knowledge and components with Israel as it pursued its own nuclear ambitions.
An excerpt:
I discovered that the real story here is not so much money or the exchange of tritium and yellowcake uranium but that South Africa responded to an Israeli request to release safeguards which essentially stopped this uranium from being used for military purposes and agreed to lift safeguards which essentially allowed the Israeli to use it in Dimona [Israel's nuclear research centre] for their nuclear programme.
That is the most important and revealing thing in the book.
…
The most interesting part of this is how the Israelis advised South Africa on selling itself to the West.There are documents from the South African foreign ministry archive detailing conversations between South African diplomatic officials and Israeli visitors, with Israelis saying things like “make them think there is an agreement” and “you must be hypocritical in order to survive”.
There’s another conversation with a knesset member who talks about using Israeli-Arabs and Druze to go and sell Israel’s story to the world and how South Africa should send some “happy blacks” to sell their image.
…
If you look at the maps in the book, on a map of Israel, you see a series of noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves around the West Bank that are cut up by Israeli-only access roads, the wall weaving in and out, and also Jewish settlements in between everywhere cutting up this territory and making the possibility of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state in the future much less likely.A map of South Africa's former Bantustans alongside the modern-day occupied West Bank (maps from the book, image photoshop mine)
Read the rest here:
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/06/201062274848326213.html