Israel shared a lot with Apartheid South Africa from the beginning. Both nations were, of course, founded by European colonialists who had scant regard for the rights and claims of the native people. Both engaged in ethnic cleansing; Israel refuses to even acknowledge its ethnic cleansing spreading the lie that Palestinians just left on their own while the White government simply called its ethnic cleansing by the euphemism “resettlement”. And both not only oppressed the indigenous populations, but had the temerity to portray their oppression as righteous and as a necessary self-defense.
It is no coincidence that Israel’s armed forces are known as the Israel Defense Forces and the White army in Apartheid South Africa was known as the South African Defense Force. This is the Orwellian practice of calling one’s offensive nature (the reality in both these cases since colonization can only be offensive) defensive to make it seem as if the colonial state is the indigenous state and that its actions against the natives are nothing but self-defense. That it is the one being attacked, instead of being the state that attacked first the Africans and the Palestinians.
But both nations shared more than just intimate commonalities in ‘War Is Peace’-type language, they also shared incredibly diverse and intimate contacts.
All this is important to note now, because Israeli propagandists and their Zionist hoodlum friends are trying to smear Judge Goldstone, the judge behind the human rights report accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, for his service in the judiciary during the apartheid regime. But those who live in glasshouses should not throw stones.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs magazine (which is quickly becoming the most thoughtful of foreign affairs publications) has a new book titled The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa; and he writes about Israel’s relationship and the BS hypocrisy of Goldstone’s critiques:
The Israeli government has it in for Richard Goldstone. Ever since Goldstone, a Jewish South African judge, issued a report in September charging Israel (and Hamas) with war crimes during the January 2009 invasion of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked him–and his report–as a grave threat to Israel’s legitimacy.
On Thursday, leading Israeli government officials escalated their campaign against Goldstone, accusing him of sending 28 black South Africans to their deaths while serving as a judge during the apartheid years.
And the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth declared breathlessly–with nods of approval from Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Chait–that “the man who authored the Goldstone Report criticizing the IDF’s actions during Operation Cast Lead took an active part in the racist policies of one of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century.”
So did Israel’s government.
More importantly, Ayalon’s and Rivlin’s moralism conveniently ignores Israel’s history of arming the apartheid regime from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s. By serving as South Africa’s primary and most reliable arms supplier during a period of violent internal repression and external aggression, Israel’s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.
High-level exchanges of military personnel soon followed. South Africans joined the Israeli Chief of Staff in March 1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force Chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and
embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces.
There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoria’s nuclear missile program at South Africa’s secret Overberg testing range. By this time, South Africa’s alternative sources for arms had largely dried up because the United States and European countries had begun abiding by the UN arms embargo; Israel unapologetically continued to violate it.
The blatant hypocrisy of the latest attack on Goldstone is nothing new. In November 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s UN ambassador, gave a stirring speech to the General Assembly denouncing apartheid and insisting that “Arab oil producers provide the umbilical cord that nourishes the Apartheid regime.” (Never mind that Israel remained absent from the 1980 U.N. vote to impose an oil embargo on South Africa in deference to its friends in Pretoria.)
In fact, Israel was profiting handsomely from selling weapons to Pretoria at the time. Writing in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman estimated that the two countries did $400-$800 million of business in the arms sector in 1986. According to declassified South African documents, the figure was likely even greater: a single contract for modernization of South African fighter jets in the mid-1980s amounted to “approximately $2 billion,” and total arms sales in 1988-one year after Israel imposed sanctions against the apartheid regime-exceeded $1.5 billion. As the former head of the South African Air Force Jan van Loggerenberg told me bluntly: “Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980s.”
Declassified South African arms procurement figures (which exclude lucrative cooperative ventures and shared financing arrangements) reveal the full extent of Netanyahu’s lie. The “independent IMF figures” he cited (which excluded diamonds and arms) suggested trade was a minuscule $100 million dollars annually. It was actually between five to ten times that amount–depending on the year–making the apartheid regime Israel’s second or third largest trading partner after the United States. Not all of the weapons Israel sold were used in external wars, and there is no denying that Israeli arms helped prolong the rule of an immoral and racist regime.
But do not expect such facts to have any influence on Israeli/Zionist propagandists – they no neither truth nor decency. They are too self-righteous and too fanatical that they believe their own lies. And they will continue to spread them.
Most of them will never see the truth.
But the rest of us can and should see Israel for what it really is.
And now look at this hypocrisy:
A well-known American Jewish attorney who worked to deport former Nazis from the US is urging American officials to bar former judge Richard Goldstone from entering the country over his rulings during South Africa’s apartheid regime.
The feign outrage over Goldstone, but never noticed and still refuse to acknowledge Israel’s support for the apartheid regime in South Africa; to say nothing about Israel’s own apartheid. And they only reason they claim morality now is because Goldstone is a critic of Israel other than that they would not even care. Zionists do not have a moral compass one way or the other – they even form alliances with America’s anti-Semitic Evangelicals – all they care about is support for Zionism.
Support Zionism and you’ll be welcomed (even if you hate Jews), oppose it and they’ll try to destroy you.
They have no shame.
