Antony Loewenstein

Hind Awwad, national coordinator of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, tells Electronic Intifada:

It took the South African BDS campaign 25 years to achieve what we achieved in five years. That is what South Africans and anti-apartheid activists tell us. And we see [new tactics] of BDS activities by the young generation with flash mobs, actions in supermarkets, dances and songs. It takes the BDS campaign to new levels. A growing number of Palestinian trade unions signed the BDS call [and] trade unions in France, Scotland and Ireland are considering ending their relationship with the Israeli Histradut trade union.

Israeli writer Amos Oz speaking to the country’s Army Radio:

We are placing ourselves under an international siege, which is more dangerous for us than the siege on Gaza in dangerous to Gaza.

Israel is turning into South Africa in the Apartheid days – a country which the world’s nation wouldn’t want to buy its goods, wouldn’t want to visit, and that will be thrown out of international organizations. We will become a pariah state that nobody wants anything to do with…

This event is resonating around the world. From a country that knows a thing or two about racial oppression:

Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and a group of retired global leaders have joined international leaders in condemning the Israeli forces’ raid on a ship delivering relief supplies to Gaza.

“We as elders condemn Israel utterly for this attack. The actions of the Israelis is inexcusable,” said Tutu.

He was speaking at the conclusion of a meeting of the group formed in 2008 to highlight humanitarian issues. Members include former UN secretary general Kofi Annan and former US president Jimmy Carter.

Reading a statement, Tutu said the Elders wanted an urgent investigation into the “tragic incident” after Israeli forces boarded the Mavi Marmara as it sailed with a flotilla to Gaza.

He said it should draw the world’s attention to the “terrible suffering of Gaza’s 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under the age of 18″.

The Elders considered Israel’s blockage of Gaza illegal collective punishment of its inhabitants and said it was also counterproductive.

“This is because it creates unacceptable suffering, in the process empowering extremists and undermining moderate forces in Gaza”, they said.

On Monday morning Israeli forces boarded one of the ships which was violating Israel’s blockade on certain goods entering the contested area. Israel warned last week that it would arrest those on board.

News reports said that at least 10 people were killed.

The Israeli Defence Force has said that they had tried to intercept the ships to search them, but were then fired on and attacked with knives and clubs.

Ten civilians were killed and four navy staff were among those injured.

The soldiers had been given full backing by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Associated Press.

South Africa’s foreign office said it was trying to establish whether there was a South African on board the ship during the attack, which it said should get the “highest level of international condemnation”.

The Congress of SA Trade Unions called the incident “state sponsored piracy” and urged a boycott of Israeli products, while the SA Municipal Workers’ Union issued a statement on behalf of a large group of civil society organisations calling it a “massacre”.

“The convoy of ships was carrying 750 people from 40 different countries including 35 international politicians, members of parliament, former diplomats, human rights activists, aid workers and journalists and was destined for the Gaza port of Rafah later this afternoon.

“The flotilla carried essential aid material, such as medication, construction material, toys, workbooks, chocolate and pasta to Gaza,” which the organisations said were banned by Israel.

They said South Africa should immediately recall its ambassador to the capital Tel Aviv, expel the Israeli ambassador in South Africa, and sever diplomatic ties with Israel.

The organisations represented in the statement included the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Muslim Judicial Council.

The Guardian music blog publishes an interesting discussion about the rights, wrongs and issues over musical boycotts (South Africa, Israel etc):

Last week, Elvis Costello became the latest, though probably not the last, musician to pull out of a concert in Israel under pressure from various groups calling for a cultural boycott of the country over its mistreatment of Palestinians. Before him it was Gil Scott-Heron, whose recent London show was disrupted by protesters, and Carlos Santana. But Israel has by no means been struck off the international gig circuit: forthcoming attractions include Elton John, Mark Knopfler, Placebo, and Costello’s wife, Diana Krall. This is largely because there is no official cultural boycott of Israel equivalent to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid. Despite the rhetoric of the pro-boycott lobby, which talks of Israel’s “colonial apartheid”, it remains a matter of individual choice.

A successful boycott requires general consensus on two principles: one, that the cause is just, and two, that a boycott is an effective political tool. In the case of Israel, neither agreement yet exists. Talking to the Jerusalem Post before his U-turn, Costello argued: “The people who call for a boycott of Israel own the narrow view that performing there must be about profit and endorsing the hawkish policy of the government. It’s like never appearing in the US because you didn’t like Bush’s policies or boycotting England because of Margaret Thatcher.”

Costello could not be described as a Zionist hawk, and nor could Gil Scott-Heron. Leonard Cohen attempted to forge a compromise last year, when he donated proceeds from his Tel Aviv show to the Leonard Cohen Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, which helps bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, and scheduled a concert in Ramallah. But the Palestinian authorities nixed the Ramallah show, calling it a phony gesture towards “balance”. Some pro-Palestinian campaigners applauded the cancellation; others regretted the “missed opportunity” to raise awareness.

We are not dealing here with either pro-settlement cheerleading or ignorant greed. These artists decry aspects of Israeli policy without wanting to shun the entire country. As Costello explained on his website: “I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government.” I have traveled to Israel to interview both Jewish and Arabic musicians, and met the kind of liberal Jewish Israelis, such as the rapper Sagol 59, that Costello is talking about. A formal boycott would punish hawk and dove alike. What about another group I met, the Arabic hip-hop trio DAM, who rage against government policy from their home in the Israeli town of Lod? A full, South Africa-style boycott would ban them from playing abroad too.

Boycotts are always blunt tools. South African apartheid remains the most potent example of a successful boycott, but even that was not without complications. Take the example of Paul Simon’s Graceland. A few years after the UN’s 1980 resolution establishing a cultural boycott, Simon traveled to South Africa to record with black musicians. He obeyed the letter of the UN boycott, which governed live performances but not recording sessions, and, he believed, the spirit because he was bringing money and publicity to black musicians, and presenting a more positive image of South African culture to the world.

But he was careless about the politics and refused to seek the ANC’s approval, thus triggering a bitter war of words with anti-apartheid campaigners. Lined up against him were Jerry Dammers (writer of the classic song Nelson Mandela), Billy Bragg and Dali Tambo, son of ANC leader Oliver Tambo. But he was supported by South African exiles, and tireless campaigners, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Graceland was enormously popular among black South Africans and Masekela resented the stringent boycott: “Agencies overseas don’t feel that they have to consult with South Africans while they’re helping them. Like the cultural boycott – nobody approached us, nobody asked us!”

Simon handled the affair badly — “if he had come to us first and discussed this, none of this shit would have happened”, said Dali Tambo — but it exposed the cracks and ambiguities in the boycott. Anyone attending the Graceland revue at the Royal Albert Hall in 1987 experienced the bizarre sensation of passing noisy picket lines (which included the writer of “Nelson Mandela”) in order to hear Hugh Masekela perform the pro-Mandela Bring Him Back Home. The songs had the same message, but the musicians who wrote them were, at least temporarily, on opposing sides.

Last year, Jerry Dammers explained his hardline stance to me: “No matter how much you love South African music, the people who make that music are going to be better off when apartheid is abolished, so the message is solidarity.” But solidarity has its victims. At the same time as the Gracelands furore, the UK Musicians Union, which had maintained a boycott against South Africa since the 1960s, endeavoured to block UK shows by the Malapoets, a group of black Sowetans, and the multiracial Savuka, whose own anti-apartheid record, Asimbonaga, had in fact been banned at home. Once again, people with the same politics were forced to be at each other’s throats.

You might believe that the current Israeli regime is as brutal and unreasonable as Botha’s South Africa, and merits similarly extreme measures. And you might argue that the only way for any performer to protest Israeli policies is to avoid the country completely. But a boycott is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel, and it does not divide people neatly into right and wrong. There will be casualties.

My following article appears in today’s Canberra Times newspaper:

The headline in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz this week was striking: ”Who says Jews and racism don’t go together?” Columnist Akiva Eldar discussed the revelations in a new book by a senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine that details the extensive relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. The work by Sasha Polakow Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance, has already triggered front-page headlines across the globe, especially the allegation that Israel was on the verge of selling nuclear technology to Pretoria in the 1970s, a charge vigorously denied by Israel’s current President Shimon Peres, then defence minister.

Suransky recounts how in 1974 Peres, sitting in Yitzhak Rabin’s first government, returned from a secret visit to South Africa and wrote to his gracious hosts that, ”this cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it.” Less than two years later, Israel welcomed South African prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and he was given full diplomatic status throughout his stay.

Vorster was an unapologetic backer of National Socialism in Germany and regularly compared his country to the supposed achievements under Nazi Germany. In 1976, Israel was still searching the world for former Nazis but realpolitik took centre stage. The relationship between the nations was initially economic but soon developed into a deeper ideological commitment to racial supremacy.

Suransky writes in his prologue that by the end of the 1970s, ”many members of the [ruling] Likud Party shared with South Africa’s leaders an ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilisation defending their existence against barbarians at the gates.”

The African National Congress and Palestinian Liberation Organisation were common enemies that allegedly threatened the established order so a brutal war against ”terrorism” had to be waged. Israel provided arms, uranium and military training to Pretoria when global sanctions were in place and even while the Jewish state publicly chastised the government’s extremism.

One of the few countries willing to provide secret support for South Africa’s racial policies until the fall of apartheid in 1994 was Israel. Suransky has uncovered mountains of documents that detail the close ties between the military establishments of both countries. For example, in 1977 South African General Constand Viljoen visited the occupied Palestinian territories and was astonished with the level of efficiency of the Israeli checkpoint system (hundreds of which are still in operation across the West Bank today). He wrote a report to his country’s defence minister that, ”the thoroughness with which Israel conducts this examination is astonishing. At the quickest, it takes individual Arabs that come through there about one-and-a-half hours. When the traffic is heavy, it takes from four to five hours.”

The Israeli policy of separation remains in effect today. US magazine The Nation recently uncovered a segregated road network throughout the West Bank, built by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, that facilitates the Israeli goal of annexing vast sections of the West Bank, making a Palestinian state impossible.

In another sign of South African-inspired policy, Route 443 is a road that runs through the West Bank and has long been inaccessible to Palestinians; only Israelis have been allowed to use it. Although the Israeli High Court ruled recently that the road be open to all, this week the Israeli military announced that they would introduce new checkpoints along the route, further isolating the indigenous population in the area.

The justifications for such moves are remarkably consistent with the South African model. ”Security” and ”fighting terrorism” are buzzwords used by the Zionist state to discriminate along racial lines. The announcement last week by musician Elvis Costello to not play in Israel due to his concerns over treatment of Palestinians is just the latest example of a growing global movement to isolate Israel until it conforms to international, humanitarian law. Similar tactics were used successfully against apartheid South Africa.

Recent months have even seen ongoing attacks against South African judge Richard Goldstone who documented for the United Nations war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during the January 2009 invasion. He has been accused of being an ”apartheid judge” sentencing blacks to their deaths during the dark days of the regime but critics conveniently ignore, as Suransky notes in Foreign Policy, that, ”Israel’s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.”

Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa remains relevant today because one regime recognised the errors of its way and reformed while the other merely accelerates the colonisation process.

The Unspoken Alliance may be recent history, but its message resonates into the 21st century, highlighting the moral degradation of discriminating, harassing and isolating one people at the barrel of a gun.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

Yet more interesting questions about Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa and the testing of nuclear weapons, a love both countries shared:

On 22 September 1979 at about 1 a.m. GMT, a US Vela satellite passing over the South Atlantic detected a double flash of light in the vicinity of Prince Edward Island. The satellite had been launched in 1969 in order to detect atmospheric nuclear tests. When a nuclear weapon explodes in the atmosphere, the heat of the fireball strips the electrons off the atoms and molecules of the surrounding air. For a fraction of a second the ionised air is opaque, until the blast blows it away. The resulting double flash is the signature of a nuclear explosion.

The closeness of Israel and apartheid South Africa revealed far more than simple realpolitik. It was about “values”, the belief of maintaining racial superiority over the indigenous population. And now this revelation:

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.

The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa‘s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.

The journalist who wrote this story, Chris McGreal, penned a penetrating series of articles about the increasing similarity between apartheid South Africa and Israel. Back in 2006.

An extract (via Mondoweiss) of an amazing new book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.

What’s that about Israel “sharing values” with the democratic West?

The Israeli–South African relationship was not only about profit and battlefield bravado, however. After Menachem Begin’s Likud Party came to power in 1977, these economic interests converged with ideological affinities to make the alliance even stronger. Many members of the Likud Party shared with South Africa’s leaders an ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilization defending their existence against barbarians at the gates.

Indeed, much of Israel’s top brass and Likud Party leadership felt an affinity with South Africa’s white government, and unlike Peres and Rabin they did not feel a need to publicly denounce apartheid while secretly supporting Pretoria. Powerful military figures, such as Ariel Sharon and Rafael (Raful) Eitan, drew inspiration from the political tradition of Revisionist Zionism—a school of thought that favored the use of military force to defend Jewish sovereignty and encouraged settlement of the biblical lands of Greater Israel, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sharon, Eitan, and many of their contemporaries were convinced that both nations faced a fundamentally similar predicament as embattled minorities under siege, fighting for their survival against what they saw as a common terrorist enemy epitomized by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The ANC may have never employed indiscriminate violence to the extent that the PLO did, but in the eyes of the generals in Tel Aviv and Pretoria, Mandela and Arafat were one and the same: terrorist leaders who wished to push them into the sea. And for the top brass in both countries, the only possible solution was tight control and overwhelming force.

Foreign Ministry officials in Israel did not always approve of close ties with South Africa, but it was the defense establishments— not the diplomatic corps— that managed the alliance. The military’s dominance was so complete that the Israeli embassy in Pretoria was divided by a wall through which no member of the diplomatic corps was allowed to pass. Only when opponents of apartheid within the Israeli government sought to bring down that wall in the late 1980s did the alliance begin to crumble.

The latest article by Max Blumenthal simply must be read in full. Powerful, telling and tragic, really. The legacy of Zionism is occupation and complicity with apartheid South Africa. Charming:

A May 6 “expose” from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot gave Israeli government officials and their hardline American proxies the ammunition they had been seeking against Judge Richard Goldstone. After Goldstone, a Jewish former South African judge who describes himself as a proud Zionist, charged Israel with crimes against humanity for its assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and 2009, the Israeli government sought to destroy him. Now, thanks to Yediot’s report, which documented Goldstone’s career as a judge in South Africa’s apartheid system and ignored his heroic role in guiding the country’s democratic transition, Israel and its allies have renewed their assault.

According to an editorial [1] by Alan Dershowitz, Goldstone “helped legitimate one of the most racist regimes in the world… he had climbed the judicial ladder on whipped backs and hanged bodies.” Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine followed up, calling Goldstone, “a man without a moral compass.” The attack spread throughout the neocon blogosphere, including to Tablet, where Marc Tracy accused Goldstone of publishing his report about the assault on Gaza to alleviate his “severe case of guilt.” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon piled on, characterizing [2] the judge’s explanation for working inside the apartheid system as “the same explanation we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II.”

However, by assailing Goldstone’s reputation to protect Israel from the meticulously documented facts and modest recommendations contained in his report about the assault on Gaza, Israel’s right-wing government and its American allies unwittingly summoned the Banquo’s Ghost of Israeli foreign policy: the country’s longtime military alliance with South Africa’s apartheid regime.

In the wake of the 1973 war, Israel initiated a close relationship with apartheid South Africa, exchanging intelligence, nuclear technology, arms and military strategy with the white supremacist government. Though figures from Israel’s Labor Party initiated the connection with purely cynical motives, the Likudniks who now dominate Israeli politics consolidated the alliance along the lines of ideological affinity, nurturing cozy personal relationships with the architects of apartheid. Israel was apartheid South Africa’s most dependable ally, sustaining its racist system even after the rest of the world recoiled in disgust, and perhaps learning a thing or two along the way.

This sordid and under-examined relationship comes to life on the pages of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, [3] a meticulously researched book that reads like a spy thriller. The author, Foreign Affairs senior editor Sasha Polakow-Suransky, spent seven years on his project, conducting interviews with key players from Israel and South Africa, mining South Africa’s apartheid-era archive and resurrecting documents and articles that the Israeli Foreign Ministry would prefer remain forgotten. Rich with intrigue and shocking details but written without a trace of stridency, The Unspoken Alliance is the most authoritative account to date of Israel’s scandalous dealings with the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Readers of the book will learn that while serving as Israeli defense minister, Shimon Peres nurtured his country’s diplomatic relationship with South Africa even while publicly condemning apartheid. After a secret trip to Pretoria in 1974, when Peres first proposed the alliance, he assured his South African hosts that “this relationship is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.” The following year, Peres signed a secret security pact with South African defense minister P.W. Botha that led immediately to $200 million in arms deals.

Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster to Israel in 1976, taking him on a tour of the Western Wall and the requisite stop at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It did not seem to matter to Peres or Rabin that Vorster had been an outspoken supporter of Nazi Germany during World War II, or that he devised the policy of torture and repression against his country’s black opposition. Though Vorster’s disturbing past was well known, he encountered few organized protests while gallivanting around Jerusalem.. The Israeli media almost unanimously avoided harsh criticism of the visit, while the Jerusalem Post fawned over the apartheid leader for “recharting his country’s racial and foreign policy.” Back in South Africa, a leading daily called the visit “one of the most successful diplomatic coups in [Vorster's] ten years in office.”

When Menachem Begin led the right-wing Likud Party into power in 1977, ties between Israel and South Africa’s military brass deepened. Appointed as Defense Minister in 1981, Ariel Sharon became a key link to the apartheid regime; along with Army chief of staff Raful Eitan, he became fast friends with South African military commander Magnus Malan. Days after Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 (“not to allow these crazy Arabs to possess nuclear weapons,” as Eitan wrote), earning harsh condemnations from governments around the world, Malan relayed his sympathy to Eitan, “It is comforting to know that South Africa does not stand alone in facing criticism from the international community,” Malan wrote to his counterpart. “Our respective countries will have to withstand this in many manifestations.” Then, when Sharon resigned after his role in the grisly Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut came to light, Malan wrote to thank his disgraced counterpart for the “friendly and understanding way in which you have conducted matters of mutual interest between ourselves and our respective Defense Forces.”

But South Africa and Israel were bound together in their respective battles against the ANC and PLO by much more than a shared anti-communist agenda. In their private correspondences, as Polakow-Suransky documents, leaders from the two countries discussed their alliance in terms of a holy war against the dark-skinned hordes. As Israel’s former ambassador to apartheid South Africa, a Likudnik named Eliahu Lankin, wrote to his South African allies in 1987, “What the ANC is demanding today is nothing less than ‘one man, one vote’… If the whites were to agree to this in present circumstances, they would be committing suicide, not only politically but physically as well.” Eitan made no secret of his fears about empowering the demographic majority, warning before an audience at Tel Aviv University that blacks “want to gain control over the white majority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over.”

During the mid-1980′s, while Western governments gradually divested from South Africa, the Laborites Rabin and Peres maintained practical imperatives for continuing the alliance. When the idealistic young Foreign Ministry director-general Yossi Beilin lobbied Peres to support sanctions against South Africa, Peres angrily summoned Mossad chief Nahum Admoni to berate Beilin, insisting to him at Peres’ behest that the white minority government would not give up power for another thirty years no matter what the international community did. For his part, Rabin justified opposing sanctions on the grounds that they would “mean the firing of tens of thousands of workers” in Israel’s defense industry. Israeli labor unions echoed Rabin’s argument. In 1988, one year after Israel finally imposed sanctions on South Africa, its arms sales to the apartheid government totaled over $1.5 billion.

“Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980′s,” South Africa’s former Air Force chief Jan van Loggerenberg told Polakow-Suransky.

By the mid-1980′s, international opinion had turned solidly against South Africa’s government. In the United States, the anti-apartheid movement had broken into the mainstream, gathering celebrity support and powerful allies in the Congressional Black Caucus. Seeking to reverse the tide, South African intelligence agents found an eager accomplice in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a New York-based Jewish outfit supposedly dedicated to combating bigotry.

Under the leadership of Irwin Suall, a former communist who came to see the American left as a threat to Israel’s existence, the ADL deployed a spy named Roy Bullock to the mission, dispatching him to infiltrate US-based anti-apartheid groups and monitor the movements of visitors like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While the ADL concealed Bullock’s salary by paying him through a shadowy Los Angeles law firm, Bullock collected a paycheck from South Africa’s intelligence service, which also benefited from his “findings.” The ADL supplemented its skullduggery with a propaganda campaign against the ANC. In a 1986 article, ADL national director Nathan Perlmutter called Nelson Mandela and the ANC “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American.”

The apartheid regime’s former allies in the ADL now readily concede that the state of Israel is engaged in a legitimacy battle remarkably similar to the one South Africa faced. Together with Dershowitz and the usual “pro-Israel” voices, the ADL assails any public figure who dares use the term “apartheid” in the context of Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank, tainting them with accusations of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has personally authorized a campaign of political warfare against Judge Goldstone and the human rights NGOs who contributed data to his report on the Gaza assault, accusing them of waging “lawfare” against the Jewish State.

Netanyahu appears in The Unspoken Alliance in a remarkable cameo. As one of the Likud Party’s rising stars, Netanyahu was deployed before the UN General Assembly in 1986 to rebut charges that Israel was assisting South Africa’s apartheid regime. Larded with diversions and outright deceptions about Israel’s trade ties with South Africa, Netanyahu’s speech was immediately discredited. At the same time, his bravado performance helped pave his path to the prime minister’s office.

Netanyahu ended his speech with a stentorian denunciation of the apartheid system. “The battle against apartheid has reached an historic junction,” he boomed from the podium. “It can either surge forward on a straight path to the total abolition of this hateful system. Or it can sink into the mud of falsehood and vindictiveness.” His words grow more ironic by the day.

A necessary history lesson for anybody who wants to forget the reasons South Africa and Israel were once good friends:

In October 1985, as it happens, the editor of [Israel's biggest newspaper] Yediot Ahronoth’s weekend magazine, Aharon Shamir, came to South Africa to meet with a mid-level Foreign Ministry functionary. When the bureaucrat complained that South Africa was being denounced everywhere as undemocratic but could not risk giving blacks the vote, Shamir advised: “Give the blacks the vote very slowly. See how it works. Bit by bit. If you see that your bit by bit approach is not working, change it. But make the world believe you are sincere. You have to be hypocritical to survive.”

A country with a dark past reminds the Jewish state that its behaviour is worthy of a dictatorship:

Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Order 1650 caused the South African government to have “taken note, with the greatest concern,” over a policy a statement called a “violation of an individual’s human rights.”

Moreover, the statement said, the law is “reminiscent of past laws under apartheid South Africa,” and called the situation “unacceptable.”

“South Africa, because of its history, is particularly sensitive to the infringement of human rights that the carrying of a permit implies and should this “permit” not be the correct one, the unilateral punishments that can be brought to bear on an individual by the state, without the individual having recourse to an independent court of law,” the statement read.

Israel’s military order 1650, which went into effect on 13 April, expanded the definition of a 1960s order allowing the deportation of infiltrators. The new order declares all those who do not hold special permission from Israel infiltrators, making them vulnerable to expulsion and deportation.

Palestinians believe the order targets Gaza residents living in the West Bank, and foreign nationals married to Palestinians. While Palestinian officials have said the order will not see the mass expulsion of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, Israel’s decision to deport a Tulkarem man to Gaza on Wednesday following the completion of his prison term only served to exacerbate tensions.

In its statement, the government of South Africa said it “adds its voice to a growing international condemnation of Israeli actions against Palestine,” and, “in the strongest possible terms calls on Israel to create an environment that is conducive to negotiations and not one that intensifies the mistrusts between Israelis and Palestinians and to honour the commitments it signed up to in the Oslo Peace Accords.”

Ali Abunimah digs up a document from 1988 that reminds us how the US government was as reluctant to impose serious sanctions on South Africa as they are today against apartheid Israel.

Here’s a comment by John C. Whitehead, then Deputy Secretary of State:

Sanctions are the wrong tool because South Africa has the resources to resist an economic siege and has been preparing for such a contingency for many years.