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…
Showing all posts tagged South Africa
Israel and apartheid South Africa were the best of friends
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…
A mutual love for destruction
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…
Who now can truly deny the love between apartheid South Africa and Israel?
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 days when the Jewish state saw a reliable ally and friend with white supremacists in South Africa
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…
Israel and apartheid South Africa, friends til the end
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…
It’s the racism, stupid
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 gives Israel a few handy tips about race
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…
Don’t think that Washington was all that keen to dismantle apartheid South Africa
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…
Attacking the infrastructure of terror and occupation
I reported yesterday on moves in the US to hold Western multinationals accountable that behaved badly during the apartheid era in South Africa. Marjorie Jobson, the national director of the South African Khulumani Support Group that filed the lawsuit, tells Democracy Now! what the focus is (and why many of us are thinking about similar…