When apartheids of the world united: South Africa and Israel’s secret embrace

“John Vorster Square ... four or five men and then hood and then electric shock, everything. I don’t know ... Angry Hood and torture, breasts, everything. Why? I don’t understand. Why torture? Anyway, it’s sad ... And then me angry so no talk. Why torture? So I don’t talk. So angry. Rape or what. I don’t care. I don’t talk.”

These are the words of South African anti-apartheid activist Joyce Dipale about her detention, torture and rape at the hands of South Africa’s notorious Special Branch in 1976. The torture centre was named after Prime Minister John Vorster, who held office from 1966 to 1978. It was an appropriate name for a violent and blood-soaked building and reflected the political history of the person it was named after.

Vorster not only oversaw more than a decade of apartheid, including the crushing of the Soweto uprising; he had also been a member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War Two. Vorster admired the supremacist politics of Hitler’s Germany and, when he became PM, sought to emulate elements of the Nazi program.

A white supremacist who believed that blacks and whites could not live together, Vorster dressed up his racism as a kind of progressive generosity of spirit. He jokingly welcomed foreign dignitaries to “the happiest police state in the world” while overseeing the implementation of the Bantustan system of segregation, which attempted to quarantine South Africa’s black population into poor, desperate and underfunded zones of control. It was also under Vorster that the South African military participated in a bloody war against the newly decolonised Angola.

In the year that Joyce Dipale was raped and tortured, Vorster was welcomed to Israel. His Nazi past and his crimes against the black and coloured population of South Africa were irrelevant to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fascist Vorster was given a special tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, before being honoured at a state dinner. There, Rabin and other Israeli dignitaries toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”.

Today, amid Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians such history might not seem so surprising. But it is important to note that Israel has not suddenly changed as a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerence and political alliance with his country’s fascist forces. The country was part of a global archipelago of reaction well before the latest atrocities.

Indeed, despite its declared commitment to equality, Israel was a key backer of the apartheid regime in South Africa—and vice versa. Both countries shared a common predicament: they were minority colonial regimes that had achieved their rule through violence and bloodshed. In 1976, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples”.

In South Africa, these “dark peoples” vastly outnumbered the white Boer and British colonial populations; in Israel, the Zionist population ruled (and rules) over an ethno-supremacist Jewish state that expelled much of the Arab population at its founding.

Atomic love

The year after Vorster’s Tel Aviv love-in, the UN voted for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, calling for an end to the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition and military vehicles to the country. Israel quietly defied this prohibition. From the mid-1970s, Tel Aviv helped, in the words of Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, to create “the South African arms industry”:

“They [South Africa] assisted us [Israel] to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together, we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. We were involved in Angola [South Africa never recognized the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal] as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.”

The love affair became nuclear in the late 1970s. Both countries wanted to strengthen their military capacities and become the most significant powers in their own regions. Nuclear weapons were key. South Africa had the uranium, and Israel had the scientists. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that, during this period, Israel purchased 550 tons of uranium from South Africa for its nuclear plant in Dimona.

In exchange, Israel supplied South Africa with weapons design information and materials to increase the power of nuclear warheads. Israeli arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe maintained that South Africa helped Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979. The Israeli government later denied this.

Both countries also required a brutal military infrastructure to police their oppressed populations. By the mid- to late-1970s, a Palestinian resistance movement was gathering strength. Israeli officials travelled to South Africa to learn from the apartheid regime’s counterinsurgency techniques. A Kibbutz called Beit Alfa sold anti-riot vehicles to South Africa and other brutal governments. The vehicles were used against the anti-apartheid movement in the black townships. In 1999, a former South African soldier recounted, for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the force used against the popular uprising against apartheid:

“I know for myself, each guy was carrying at least three hand grenades and 16 magazines, so you had more than enough firepower and then you’ll have two Caspers [armoured vehicles] rocking up with 500 Brownings on the top. So even if there were 10,000 coming at you, you had enough firepower and there was no way they were going to stampede you and they knew that as well.”

Some of the most notorious and violent figures of the Israeli state spent significant time in South Africa. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister in the 1980s, directed the massacres of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanon war. For these and other crimes, he was known as the Butcher of Beirut. In 1981, Sharon secretly visited South Africa and spoke to troops along the border of Angola. Former Israeli Ambassador Avi Primor was part of the Israeli delegation and recalled how impressed Sharon was with the repressive apparatus of the apartheid regime and with the developing Bantustan program. Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told Haaretz in 2003 that Sharon had expounded on the merits of the Bantustan model for Palestine.

The Israeli state has perfected and developed many of the repressive and violent aspects of South African apartheid. The current genocide—the massacres, the starvation, the bombing—has brought levels of brutality that the monsters who ran South African apartheid could only dream of. Indeed, when South African Communist and anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils visited Palestine in 2004, he said:

“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”