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.
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. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#33967): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/33967 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109998228/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
