Israel–South Africa relations

Based on Wikipedia: Israel–South Africa relations

The Strange Bedfellows of Geopolitics

In December 2023, South Africa did something extraordinary: it hauled Israel before the International Court of Justice and accused it of committing genocide against Palestinians. The case sent shockwaves through diplomatic circles worldwide. But perhaps the most striking aspect wasn't the accusation itself—it was who was making it.

South Africa and Israel have one of the most complicated, morally fraught relationships in modern diplomatic history. These two nations have been allies, trading partners, nuclear collaborators, and bitter critics of one another—sometimes all at once. Their entanglement reveals uncomfortable truths about how countries navigate the gap between their stated principles and their practical interests.

This is a story about money, morality, and the messy compromises that nations make when survival feels more important than consistency.

An Unlikely Beginning

The relationship started with a paradox.

In 1947, South Africa voted at the United Nations in favor of creating Israel. Nine days after Israel declared independence in May 1948, the South African government became the seventh country in the world to recognize the new state. The prime minister at the time, Jan Smuts, was a longtime supporter of Zionism and a personal friend of Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel's first president.

But just two days after South Africa recognized Israel, Smuts lost an election. The new government was led by D.F. Malan's National Party, which had campaigned on a platform of legislating apartheid—the system of institutionalized racial segregation that would define South Africa for the next four decades.

Here's where it gets complicated. The National Party had a history of virulent anti-Semitism. Yet once in power, the party apparently set aside these tendencies. Why? One hundred and twenty thousand reasons, at least.

That was the Jewish population of South Africa by 1949. The overwhelming majority were Zionists who had provided crucial financial support to the movement for a Jewish homeland. South African Jews had been sending money to support Jewish settlement in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain endorsed the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

The apartheid government wanted that money to keep flowing. So it granted Israel full diplomatic recognition, allowed Jewish volunteers to serve in Israel's military, and relaxed South Africa's normally rigid currency regulations to permit exports to the new state. In late 1948, the government even helped facilitate a $1.2 million shipment of goods to Israel—a substantial sum in that era, worth roughly $16 million today.

The Moral Tightrope

Israel faced an immediate problem: how do you maintain a profitable friendship with a racist regime while simultaneously positioning yourself as a moral actor on the world stage?

The tension emerged almost immediately. In May 1949, the very week Israel joined the United Nations, it voted to require South Africa to discuss its racial policies with Pakistan and India. An internal memo from Israeli diplomat Michael Comay explained the strategy: "generally refrain from condemnation of South Africa" while also refraining "from any express or implied support for the South African caste system."

In other words: walk the line. Don't endorse apartheid. But don't alienate a wealthy friend.

Comay was refreshingly honest about what this meant. In a letter that same December, he described the Israeli position as trying to "find a compromise between our principles and convictions on matters of racialism, and our desire to maintain friendship with South Africa."

Throughout the 1950s, this resulted in what historian Rotem Giladi calls frequent "equivocation" at the United Nations—though Giladi also notes that Israel's positions were still considerably more progressive than those of many Western nations. The calculus was simple: South African Jews feared anti-Semitic backlash if Israel pushed too hard. The influential South African Jewish Board of Deputies lobbied Israel to tone down its criticism.

Meanwhile, the money kept flowing. Between 1951 and 1961, South African Jews sent more than $19.6 million to Israel. By the late 1950s, annual flows were estimated at $700,000.

The Breaking Point

By the 1960s, Israel had grown bolder in its criticism.

In October 1961, Israel and the Netherlands were the only Western countries to vote for censuring a speech by South African Foreign Minister Eric Louw, who had mounted a vigorous defense of apartheid. The following year, Israel voted for Resolution 1761, a landmark measure that condemned apartheid and called for voluntary sanctions. Israel's parliament, the Knesset, approved this position by a vote of 63 to 11.

Israel then withdrew its top diplomat from South Africa, downgrading its representation. It announced it would enforce a military embargo.

South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd—the man often called the "architect of apartheid"—was furious. He dismissed Israel's criticism with a rhetorical jab that would echo across decades: "Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude. They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."

This accusation—that Israel was itself an apartheid state—would become central to decades of debate. Verwoerd's successor, John Vorster, repeated it.

The South African government retaliated by cutting off the favorable currency arrangements that had allowed money to flow freely to Israel. Eric Louw accused Israel of "hostility and ingratitude."

But here's where rhetoric and reality diverged. Even as diplomatic relations soured, trade increased. By 1967, Israeli exports to South Africa had more than doubled compared to 1961. South Africa had quietly become Israel's largest trading partner in Africa.

Israel's Strategic Concerns

Why was Israel willing to criticize South Africa so publicly in the 1960s, even at the cost of angering a wealthy partner?

Part of the answer was principle. Foreign Minister Golda Meir told the United Nations in 1963 that Israel's opposition to discrimination "stems from our age-old spiritual values, and from our long and tragic historical experience as a victim."

But there was also strategy. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, African nations were gaining independence from colonial powers. Israel saw an opportunity. These new nations were hostile to apartheid and to South Africa's regional dominance. By positioning itself as anti-apartheid, Israel could cultivate friendships across the continent as a counterweight to the hostility it faced from Arab nations and the Soviet bloc.

This African strategy reached an almost absurd peak in 1971, when Israel offered $2,850 in aid to the Organization of African Unity's fund for liberation movements. The donation was rejected—but not before it thoroughly annoyed South Africa.

Everything Changes

Then came 1973, and everything fell apart.

The Yom Kippur War that October dealt Israel a devastating diplomatic blow. Arab nations, flush with oil power, pressured African states to choose sides. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, known as OPEC, had instituted an oil embargo against Israel's Western allies. Suddenly, maintaining good relations with Israel became economically costly for African nations.

By the end of 1973, all but four African countries had severed diplomatic ties with Israel. A decade of careful relationship-building evaporated in months.

Israel found itself internationally isolated in a way it had never been before. Even its relationships with Western nations were strained. And in this moment of vulnerability, it turned back to an old friend.

South Africa.

The Alliance Deepens

What followed was one of the most controversial chapters in both nations' histories.

The conventional explanation is pragmatic: Israel had too few friends to be picky. As journalist Thomas Friedman later observed, Israel adopted a "realpolitik attitude that Israel has too few friends in the world to be choosey about its partners in trade and arms sales."

But there may have been another dimension. Some analysts believe the relationship was part of a strategic triangle involving the United States. At the height of the Cold War, the American policy of containing Soviet influence in Africa was paramount. Using Israel as what The Economist described as "a clandestine conduit to South Africa" allowed the United States to support Pretoria while maintaining plausible distance from an increasingly unpopular regime.

Whatever the motivations, the relationship transformed rapidly.

At the United Nations, Israel began abstaining from key votes affecting South Africa—including the 1972 vote on granting observer status to the African National Congress, the liberation movement led by Nelson Mandela. South Africa reciprocated by abstaining from votes condemning Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem.

In 1974, the same year the UN General Assembly rejected South Africa's credentials, Israel upgraded its South African office to a full embassy. South Africa returned the favor the following year.

In April 1976, Prime Minister Vorster—the same John Vorster who had called Israel an apartheid state—made a formal state visit to Jerusalem. He met with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Later that year, the two countries signed a comprehensive cooperation pact covering military and economic matters. The contents were never made public.

Nuclear Shadows

The military cooperation between Israel and South Africa extended into territory that remains controversial and partly classified to this day: nuclear weapons.

Both countries developed nuclear arsenals outside the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both maintained official ambiguity about their capabilities. And considerable evidence suggests they collaborated.

The full extent of this cooperation is still debated by historians. What's clear is that Israel and South Africa shared defense technology, conducted joint research, and maintained close military ties throughout the apartheid era. For two internationally isolated nations, each facing existential threats as they perceived them, the alliance made a grim kind of sense.

The Economic Embrace

Trade between the countries flourished. By the mid-1980s, the economic relationship was robust, covering everything from agricultural technology to diamonds to military equipment.

But this too would change—and from an unexpected direction.

In 1986, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over President Ronald Reagan's veto. The law imposed sanctions on South Africa and sent a clear message to American allies: distance yourself from Pretoria.

Israel found itself caught. It depended on American support far more than it depended on South African trade. In 1987, bowing to American pressure, Israel imposed sanctions on South Africa.

The decision was pragmatic, not principled. But it marked the beginning of the end of the close relationship.

After Apartheid

When apartheid finally collapsed in 1994, the new South African government under Nelson Mandela brought a different perspective to the relationship with Israel.

Mandela visited Israel. He met with Israeli leaders. But he was openly critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, drawing explicit parallels to the struggle his own people had endured.

For Mandela and the African National Congress, the Palestinian cause had always been linked to the anti-apartheid movement. Both were struggles against what they saw as colonial occupation and racial subjugation. The ANC had maintained ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization throughout the apartheid years.

The new South Africa didn't sever relations with Israel entirely. But the warmth was gone.

The Downward Spiral

Relations continued to deteriorate in the twenty-first century.

In 2019, South Africa downgraded its diplomatic relationship with Israel, citing the killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza. It withdrew its ambassador and reduced its embassy staff.

Then came October 2023 and the Hamas attack on Israel, followed by Israel's military campaign in Gaza. South Africa's response was dramatic: it filed a case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention.

The case is ongoing. Its outcome will be debated for years. But the symbolism was unmistakable: a nation that had experienced one of history's most notorious systems of racial oppression was now accusing Israel of committing the ultimate crime against a people it viewed as similarly oppressed.

The Echoes of History

What makes this story so uncomfortable is how clearly it illustrates the gap between what nations say and what they do.

Israel criticized apartheid while trading with the apartheid regime. It positioned itself as a moral voice against racism while accepting money from South African Jews who feared that very criticism. It cultivated African friendships while simultaneously selling weapons to Africa's pariah state.

South Africa, for its part, maintained friendly relations with a country led by people who had themselves been victims of persecution, even while implementing one of history's most comprehensive systems of racial subjugation.

The United States used Israel as a back channel to support a regime it publicly condemned.

None of this is unique to these countries. Every nation makes compromises between its stated values and its practical interests. The Israel-South Africa relationship is simply more documented than most.

The Accusation That Won't Die

Hendrik Verwoerd's 1961 accusation—that Israel is itself an apartheid state—has proven remarkably durable.

Human rights organizations have debated it for decades. Some, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have applied the apartheid label to Israeli policies in the occupied territories. Israel vehemently rejects this characterization, pointing to the civil rights of Arab citizens within Israel proper and arguing that the situations are fundamentally different.

South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice represents the most dramatic escalation of this long-running argument. Whatever the court decides, the case has already reshaped how many people think about the parallels between these two nations' histories.

Where It Stands

Today, Israel maintains an embassy in Pretoria and a trade office in Johannesburg. South Africa has an embassy in Tel Aviv. But as of January 2024, South Africa officially describes its relationship with Israel as involving only "limited political and diplomatic interaction."

That's diplomatic language for something close to cold war.

The relationship between these two nations has come full circle—from early friendship, through moral criticism, to intimate alliance, and finally to legal confrontation on the world stage. It's a reminder that in international relations, yesterday's partner can become today's adversary, and the moral positions nations stake out often have more to do with circumstance than conviction.

Perhaps the most honest moment in this entire history was that internal memo from 1950, when Israeli diplomat Michael Comay admitted his country was simply trying to balance "principles and convictions" against "the desire to maintain friendship."

Most countries, most of the time, are doing exactly that. Few are as honest about it.