Publication Date:May 25, 2010 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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ISBN13: 9780375425462
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Product Description A revealing account of how Israel’s booming arms industry and apartheid South Africa’s international isolation led to a secretive military partnership between two seemingly unlikely allies.
Prior to the Six-Day War, Israel was a darling of the international left: socialist idealists like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir vocally opposed apartheid and built alliances with black leaders in newly independent African nations. South Africa, for its part, was controlled by a regime of Afrikaner nationalists who had enthusiastically supported Hitler during World War II.
But after Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, the country found itself estranged from former allies and threatened anew by old enemies. As both states became international pariahs, their covert military relationship blossomed: they exchanged billions of dollars’ worth of extremely sensitive material, including nuclear technology, boosting Israel’s sagging economy and strengthening the beleaguered apartheid regime.
By the time the right-wing Likud Party came to power in 1977, Israel had all but abandoned the moralism of its founders in favor of close and lucrative ties with South Africa. For nearly twenty years, Israel denied these ties, claiming that it opposed apartheid on moral and religious grounds even as it secretly supplied the arsenal of a white supremacist government.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky reveals the previously classified details of countless arms deals conducted behind the backs of Israel’s own diplomatic corps and in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries, The Unspoken Alliance tells a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and Israel’s estrangement from the left. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Israel’s history and its future.
It takes one to know one.August 29, 2010 MR PHILIP J SHANNON 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As Sasha Polakow-Suransky shows in The Unspoken Alliance, the former Nazi-loving South African President, B. J. Vorster, received special treatment when visiting Jerusalem in 1976 because he was shopping for Israeli armaments. Increasingly isolated through boycotts and embargoes, apartheid South Africa was desperate for weaponry to contain the independence struggles of its black southern African border states and to hold at bay the anti-apartheid movement of the majority black population within South Africa.
Israel's anti-apartheid rhetoric, when attempting to court black African states in order to win votes at the UN) struggled to win over supporters after the Six-Day War in 1967 tripled the size of the Jewish state with the occupation of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian territory. As Algerian President and liberation hero, Houari Boumedienne, put it, `Israel can not adopt one attitude towards colonialism in Southern Africa ... and a completely different one toward Zionist colonialism in North Africa'.
Israel then turned to outlaw states for succour, including the apartheid regime of South Africa. For two decades, Israel, whilst continuing to claim opposition to apartheid, "secretly strengthened the arsenal of a white supremacist government". Business was brisk, with total military trade conservatively estimated at $10 billion over twenty years.
As well as direct sales of Israeli weapons, there were intermediary sales through third parties, scientific exchanges, military training programs, visits to each other's front lines (Lebanon, Angola) and advice on `defeating terrorists'. Israel's covert, undeclared nuclear arsenal also benefited from South African uranium exports and testing ranges whilst South Africa gained, through Israeli nuclear know-how, its own nuclear bomb in 1982.
Polakow-Suransky has filled in many of the gaps in the long-suspected alliance between Israel and South Africa but he is loathe to make a link between the political philosophies of Zionism and apartheid. This is largely from a reluctance to recognise the corrupting ideological influence of Zionism. Zionism's idealised image of Israel fails to see that the brutal dispossession and continued denial of basic political rights to the Palestinian Arab population is a form of racist discrimination not a million miles away from the former South African model.
Polakow-Suransky refers, for example, to the original Jewish state's "democratic soul", a characterisation which airbrushes out of existence the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. His repeated characterisation of the Israeli Labor Party, at least until 1973, as a `socialist beacon' ignores the decades of arms deals and cover-ups under the alleged socialists of the Labor Party, who instigated the alliance, and the right-wing Likud Party and Labor-Likud coalitions which succeeded it. The only difference was that Labor paid more lip service to anti-apartheid rhetoric than did Likud.
This rhetoric once so annoyed Prime Minister Verwoerd in 1961 that he declared to the United Nations General Assembly that `Israelis took Israel from the Arabs after they had lived there for a thousand years ... Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state'. It takes one to know one.
The truth shall set you freeAugust 10, 2010 Olumuyiwa O. Omololu(Visalia, Calif. USA) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A thoroughly enlightening material about the clandestine relationship between Apartheid South Africa and the State of Israel. While it is pointless going into a tirade about the double speak of the Jewish State in arming the Apartheid regime in the face of universal condemnation of oppression of the majority by the minority, justified by the quest for survival and realpolitik considerations; I submit there is a lot to be learned from this book by the proponents of the Revisionist Zionism school of thought.
These elements, so visible today on the hard israeli right, mainly of the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu extraction, will do well to understand that if the ideals of Zionism's founding fathers of both a Jewish and democratic State are to be realized, then the message in the epiloque of this book should be adopted as an article of faith.
Nothing stays secret foreverJuly 27, 2010 Doug Characky 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As time goes on past deeds do come to light in this case Israel did have a secret military and political relationship. In reading this book and from other sources it is probable that Israel and Apartheid South Africa cooperated in all types of weapons development including Nuclear, biological and chemical. They had military, economic and political exchanges between themselves but so did the USA, Great Britain, West Germany, France and etc.
Apartheid South Africa committed human rights abuses against a majority of it's population. Yet, the regime fell from power and a new majority government runs South Africa today. Was Israel right to cooperate with Apartheid South Africa? How about rephrasing this question was West Germany and France right to cooperate with Iraq's chemical weapons development? Where is the Book on Iraq and Western Europe?
It is clear when it comes to international business and economic affairs strategic concerns will triumph over other issues. it is more so today then in the 1980s-that is how humans have always behaved!
ExcellentJuly 6, 2010 highland_harrier 1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book was very good at fleshing out the relationship between South Africa and Israel in a dispassionate and unbiased manner. What I also liked about it, but didn't expect is that it discusses both countries internal politics as well as how international opinion affected their relations.
Well researched but disappointing...July 5, 2010 Holden Caulfield 1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I found The Unspoken Alliance to be well researched and full of interesting anecdotes of SA/Israeli military cooperation.
However there is very little new information on the joint nuclear test in the South Atlantic. This was the pinnacle of the secret relationship and the book is incomplete without a thorough account of it.
