Guardian op-eds equate Israel with apartheid South Africa
24 May 2010
The allegations made in today’s Guardian about a supposed Israeli offer to arm apartheid South Africa with nuclear material will no doubt continue in the following days, with the Israeli government asserting that the contents of ‘Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons’ have ‘no basis’. However, it is the attendant opinion pieces supplied by chief reporter of the story, Chris McGreal, and Guardian regular Gary Younge, which call into question the real intention behind the front page splash.
Chris McGreal’s comment, published on page 2 of today’s edition, appeared under the banner headline, ‘Israel and apartheid: a marriage of convenience and military might’. The journalist tried to push the idea that the relationship was grounded in ‘shared ideals’ and not just arms co-operation. He asserts that ‘Israel was quick to underplay its deep military ties with apartheid South Africa as nothing more than a necessity of survival without a flicker of ideological affinity.’ However, the evidence he submits for this, rather than confirming his contention, refutes it:
‘For years after its birth, Israel was publicly critical of apartheid and sought to build alliances with the newly independent African states through the 1960s.
‘But after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, African governments increasingly came to look on the Jewish state as another colonialist power. The government in Jerusalem cast around for new allies and found one in Pretoria. For a start, South Africa was already providing the yellowcake essential for building a nuclear weapon.’
McGreal himself describes a process whereby Israel, isolated after the 1973 war, was left ‘casting around’ for new allies and identifies South Africa’s yellowcake potential, not its racist ideology, as a primary point for co-operation.
The journalist then attempted to present comments made in a diplomatic context by prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and defence minister Shimon Peres as hard proof of an essentially ideological alliance. During a visit to Israel in 1976 by South African prime minister John Vorster, Rabin toasted ‘"the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence"’ at a banquet marking the visit. However, given the ‘marriage of convenience’ painted by McGreal, would it not make just as much sense to read such words as mandatory diplomatic-speak one would expect at such an occasion?
McGreal also elects to treat a letter from Peres to the South African information minister containing generalised and flowery diplomatic language as indicative of a deeper bond between the two nations. As morally wrong as relations with apartheid South Africa may have been, to imply that Israel and the white supremacist regime shared a special ideological bond simply because they did business and spoke in friendly terms would imply that the U.S., France, the UK and all the other countries which traded with the regime also enjoyed such a special alliance.
Whilst McGreal’s central argument is that Israel wasn’t simply going along with South Africa for business reasons, all the evidence presented by him indicate just that.
In ‘Israel's complicity in apartheid crimes undermines its attack on Goldstone’ Guardian columnist Gary Younge draws in the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza and, specifically, the critical reception of South African judge Richard Goldstone by the Israeli government. He cites heated comments by MKs in response to an Israeli newspaper report revealing that the judge sentenced black men to death during the apartheid era.
Leaving his criticism of Goldstone’s complicity in apartheid for the second half of his article, Younge focuses in the main on how such revelations are ‘a cynical ploy by the Israeli government to divert attention from the findings of the UN report’ – this, in spite of the fact that it was the free Israeli press which broke the story and not the government.
He ties in the day’s cover story loosely, contending, ‘For if Goldstone was complicit in apartheid's crimes, then Israel was far more so. Israel was South Africa's principal and most dependable arms dealer.’ Younge cites no evidence to substantiate this assertion and his choice of the term 'dependable' is also strange in this context given that his newspaper demonstrated that Israel did not in fact sell nuclear weapons to the apartheid government.
What both articles have in common is a strong desire to associate Israel with possibly the most notorious regime in the post-war era and thus, position Israel as a pariah nation. Chris McGreal and Gary Younge seek to present Israel as uniquely close in ideology to apartheid South Africa but neither manages to show that this was actually the case.