The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (review)

This book, which evolved from a doctoral dissertation, reads like a novel and has created considerable publicity, especially Polakow-Suransky's acquisition of a file of documents from the South African government that the British newspaper The Guardian claimed gave the "first official evidence of Israeli nuclear weapons."¹ Reportedly, senior defense officials from South Africa and Israel met in late March-early April 1975, during which time the Israelis offered to sell nuclear warheads to the Apartheid regime; while the South Africans refused the deal due in part to high costs, Israeli officials tried to prevent South Africa from declassifying the archive, one which included a security and secrecy agreement signed by then-Israeli Defense Minister and current President Shimon Peres and his South African counterpart P.W. Botha, who would later become prime minister and the country's first state president. Peres' office vehemently denied the claims made in The Guardian article, which also contends that it is uncertain that then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would have approved a nuclear missile deal. Yossi Beilin — a former Minister of both Justice and Religious Affairs and one known to have been close to Peres during his political career — whose praise for Polakow-Suransky's work is found on the book jacket, is quoted in The New York Times asserting that The Guardian article "does not concretely say that Israel wanted to sell nuclear warheads" and that the book "itself does not say this explicitly."² Interestingly, the details of the documents and of the related meetings are discussed in a little over two pages in the book (pp. 81-83). One thing that cannot be denied is that Polakow-Suransky begins his narrative in the prologue with a bang: the visit in 1976 of the then-South African Prime Minister and later State President B.J. Vorster — a man detained during the Second World War for pro-Nazi activities — to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, states emphatically that the "book does not equate Zionism with South African racism. Rather, I contend that material interests gave birth to an alliance that greatly benefited the Israeli economy and enhanced the security of South Africa's white regime. Yet ideology was a factor, too" (pp. 10-11). In the latter regard, he is referring to a "small — albeit powerful and influential — minority of leading right-wing generals and politicians," including Ariel Sharon, who developed an affinity with the Apartheid regime. At the same time, Polakow-Suransky points out that "Many left-wing Israelis vehemently opposed the alliance both in rhetoric and practice — with the notable exception of the ever sanctimonious Shimon Peres" (pp. 233-234).

The book provides brief background on the South African Jewish community and its uncomfortable relationship with Afrikaner nationalist ideology and anti-Semitism prior to Apartheid as well as Israel's "honeymoon" with the countries of Africa prior to the Six-Day War of 1967 and the effect of those ties on relations with South Africa before discussing Israel's "realignment" of policy that led to "Unspoken Alliance" as well as alliance itself, which lasted almost two decades. This is the first comprehensive account of Israeli-South African relations, during a time when both countries were regarded as pariahs, since Besieged Bedfellows: Israel and the Land of Apartheid by Benjamin M. Joseph (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), a scholarly work without the benefit of archival material.³ An earlier work, The Unnatural Alliance by British journalist James Adams contains far less documentation.⁴ Jane Hunter, who published Israeli Foreign Affairs from 1985-1993, provided a much shorter though more thoroughly-documented work entitled Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America.⁵

Polakow-Suransky has the benefit of hindsight, as the alliance ended more than...