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.”