Category Archives: Military

Update II: Comity Confirmed Between Israel & (Old) South Africa

Britain, History, Israel, Military, South-Africa, Trade

The Israel-hating West will begrudge the plucky Jewish State its close relationship with the Old South Africa, but not Barely a Blog and friends. It is common knowledge that Israel worked closely to help South Africa develop a nuclear arsenal. A new book confirms as factual what was previously presumed.

My own book most certainly does not tell “a troubling story of Cold War paranoia, moral compromises, and Israel’s estrangement from the left” (OMIGOD), to quote from the Random-House blurb about one Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s new book “revealing the previously classified details of countless arms deals conducted behind the backs of Israel’s own diplomatic corps and in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Based on extensive archival research and exclusive interviews with former generals and high-level government officials in both countries.”

The South African documents obtained by Polakow-Suransky and published in today’s Guardian, include “top secret” South African minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries as well as direct negotiations in Zurich between Peres and Botha.

The Guardian:

The South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong, who attended the meetings, drew up a memo laying out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Israeli missiles – but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
Polakow-Suransky said the minutes record that at the meeting in Zurich on 4 June 1975, Botha asked Peres about obtaining Jericho missiles, codenamed Chalet, with nuclear warheads.

“Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available,” the minutes said. The document then records that: “Minister Peres said that the correct payload was available in three sizes”.

The use of a euphemism, the “correct payload”, reflects Israeli sensitivity over the nuclear issue. Armstrong’s memorandum makes clear the South Africans were interested in the Jericho missiles solely as a means of delivering nuclear weapons.
The use of euphemisms in a document that otherwise speaks openly about conventional weapons systems also points to the discussion of nuclear weapons.
In the end, South Africa did not buy nuclear warheads from Israel and eventually developed its own atom bomb.
The Israeli authorities tried to prevent South Africa’s post-apartheid government from declassifying the documents.

The documents declassified in The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa have galvanized the festering “international community” even more against Israel. Whereas to me these secret agreements actually demonstrate how responsible both countries were with their arsenal; perceptions differ among UN functionaries, most of whom are either entirely sympathetic to or of the undeveloped world.

Israel will be made to pay for being friend to the ostracized country, as it pretended to abide international boycotts on South Africa. In an attempt to distance the adored Yitzhak Rabin from the deals, the author even floats the theory that Shimon Peres, who brokered the deal, was his own agent, working alone. Darn, those Israelis!

Thanks to Myles Kantor for sending the story, as it appeared in YNetNews:

According to the Guardian report, the documents indicate that the two sides met on March 31, 1975. Polakow-Suransky [“the American academic who uncovered the documents while researching a book on the military and political relationship between the two countries”] wrote in his book, which was published in the United States this week, “Israel’s secret alliance with apartheid South Africa. At the talks Israeli officials formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal.”
Among those who participated in the meeting was the South African military Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong, who prepared a memorandum that lists the benefits of acquiring Jericho missiles, but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
The memo, which was classified as “top secret” and dated the same day as the meeting with the Israeli officials, was exposed in the past, but its context was unclear, as it was unknown that it served as a basis for the Israeli offer made on the same day.
In the memo, Armstrong wrote:” In considering the merits of a weapon system such as the one being offered, certain assumptions have been made: That the missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA (Republic of South Africa) or acquired elsewhere.”

The documents published by the Guardian are of interest, although I find the greatest significance in this warm note Peres, who has always been a conservatively minded individual (most members of the Israeli Old Guard were tough and patriotic), pens to minister Eschel Mostert Rhoodie. In it Peres alludes to
the two countries’ shared determination to resist their enemies. He implies too that South Africa and Israel were both refusing to submit to the injustices against them.

This indeed is most revealing about the sympathy Israel harbored for South Africa. Having resided in both countries during those times, I can attest to the feelings of comity between the two countries.

Update I: Glisson is wrong (see Comments). The facts as they have emerged are significant—in as much as they cement what we know about a long-standing, close collaboration. Writes Jane Hunter, publisher of the monthly journal Israeli Foreign Affairs, in April of 1986:

“Essentially, the two nations pledged themselves to each other’s survival and freedom from foreign interference. Over the years this cooperation has taken on a symbiotic quality: from Israel South Africa gets advanced engineering, including military technology unobtainable elsewhere due to sanctions and embargoes; from South Africa Israel receives strategic raw materials and capital for a variety of purposes.”

Another “real event” ignored by our friend is the fact that, by the time this exchange occurred (1970s), Israel had already cobbled the weapons together. This is an infant country compared to the Afrikaner nation, which had settled the tip of the continent and forged an identity two hundred years prior.

Still, I must be one of the few Jews who’s proud of the fact that Israel, in the person of the tough, laconic Yitzhak Shamir (whom paleos are fond of calling a terrorist for fighting those wicked Britons—I bet a hate for the Brits was another Israeli and Afrikaner uniting factor), told the US it would take no part in its attempts to cripple South Africa:

Israel’s foreign minister, told a New York audience that Israel would not institute sanctions against South Africa. Instead, Shamir said, Israel would leave that task to the great powers and continue its “normal” relations with Pretoria.

Update II (May 26): Given Barbara’s prodigious knowledge and general fairness, I await a follow-up on what the Brits, not beloved by the Afrikaner and Israeli old guard, did to the Jews before they gained independence in Israel. Sink a ship with refugees from Nazi Europe? Quarantine them as the Americans did to the Japanese? Remove weapons intended for self-defense against Arab marauders? Have at it.

Update IV: ‘Elena Kagan As Scholar’ (‘Racist!’)

Affirmative Action, Bush, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Race, The Courts

Eugene Volokh thoroughly and soberly assesses the scholarly record of BHO’s SCOTUS nominee, Elena Kagan, and concludes:

“Kagan, it seems to me, is a successful scholar whose interests have extended beyond scholarship, to government service and to educational institution-building. As a result, she hasn’t written as much as she would have had she only been interested in scholarship (though I suspect that her time in the Clinton Administration helped her produce her administrative law articles). But that reflects the breadth of her interests, and not any intellectual limitations.

… On then to my own evaluation of the First Amendment articles: I think they’re excellent. I disagree with them in significant ways (this article, for instance, reaches results that differ quite a bit from those suggested by Kagan’s Private Speech, Public Purpose article, see, e.g., PDF pp. 8–9). But I like them a lot.

The articles attack difficult and important problems (Private Speech, Public Purpose, for instance, tries to come up with a broad theory to explain much of free speech law). They seriously but calmly criticize the arguments on both sides, and give both sides credit where credit is due. For instance, I particularly liked Kagan’s treatment of both the Scalia R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul majority and the Stevens concurrence, in her Changing Faces of First Amendment Neutrality article.

As importantly, the articles go behind glib generalizations and formalistic distinctions and deal with the actual reality on the ground, such as the actual likely effects of speech restrictions, and of First Amendment doctrine. …

Kagan’s First Amendment work suggests a general acceptance of current free speech law, and an attempt to better understand it and make it more internally consistent rather than to radically change it. I can’t tell for sure whether this flows from a judgment about what’s more useful scholarship, from a largely precedent-respecting temperament, or from agreement with the underlying free speech caselaw. But my guess is that it at least in part reflects a general comfort with the current precedents, and a lack of desire to shift them much.

…On so-called ‘hate speech’ and pornography, the two First Amendment topics on which Kagan has most explicitly written, I likewise see little interest in moving the law much”

[SNIP]

Read the complete post.

“The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend,” writes Stephen Bainbridge, “but she’s probably acceptable”: “I don’t know very much about Elena Kagan other than that a couple of Harvard folks for whom I have a lot of respect think highly of her. When I look at some of the lefties who are opposing her and their reasons for doing so, however, I’m tempted to conclude that she’s the most acceptable–from my perspective–candidate Obama is likely to put forward for the SCOTUS. You can tell a lot about a person from who their enemies are.”

Yes, Old Olby doesn’t much like Kagan.

Update (May 11): The issue of Kagan’s scholarship, although narrow, is relevant as it goes to her intellect. I am pretty sure that if Volokh is impressed—if not necessarily in agreement—with some of her journal papers, that she is intellectually well-equipped. This is more than we can say about SotoSetAsides Mayor.

Kagan’s statism is, on the other hand, guaranteed too. I believe this is a prerequisite for a SCOTUS nomination.

Update II: I’m sorry that Kagan, “as dean of Harvard Law School, … aggressively restricted the U.S. military’s ability to recruit some of the brightest law students in the country” only “because Dean Kagan opposed President Clinton’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

She should have kicked the military bloodsuckers off campus as a matter of principle.

The lawful reach of army recruiters notwithstanding, I’d want to keep those body snatchers away from gullible university kids. The excellent series—it’s non-political but patriotic—“Army Wives” depicts the ugliness of recruitment. Granted, in “Army Wives,” the job of picking up vulnerable poor kids, pumping them up, and shipping them off to serve as cannon fodder in our wars is depicted as a noble one.

Update III (May 12): She’s a racist; the good kind—which is that she is more likely to privilege merit than skin color. And how do we know that she probably sins by trending toward meritocratic hiring? From the fact that as Dean and solicitor for BHO, she has hired few “blacks and browns,” as her detractors refer to themselves.

So that our hopelessly Republicanized and Palinized readers know, the hue and cry over Kagan’s “racism” is coming from the Stupid Party:

“31 of Kagan’s 32 Hires at Harvard Were White,” write the screeches at “RedState.com.” These people have few principles, but worse; they’re bereft of brains.

Besides which, if you are going to be a stickler for quotas, Kagan is probably in the color-coded clear, since her hiring practices no doubt comport, at the very least, with the proportional representation in the general population of the groups she has affronted.

“Wingnuts Furious About …. Kagan Not Hiring Enough Black People/Women,” notes Wonkette. It doesn’t take much—one feeble-minded fem—to recognize Republican frailties.

I quite like that she’s failing the wise Latina test.

Update IV (May 13): What I observed tongue-in-cheek about Bush and the left actually applies to all the actors in the farce of our politics:

“Left-liberals … believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.”

Bush, BHO and their respective political gangs and judicial picks don’t go by the Constitution; they go by judicial precedent. That’s the thing that is revered. To reverse precedent is considered a heretical.

Updated: Palin’s Fiorina Frivoloty

Conservatism, Elections, John McCain, Military, Republicans, Sarah Palin

Perhaps Palin could not abide the fact that Chuck DeVore tempers his pro-military position with skepticism about intervention around the world. Perhaps, as a raving feminist, Palin feels obliged to support a woman over a man. And perhaps her endorsement of Carly Florina “in the GOP contest for the California Senate nomination” is just a bit of the same polite politics she played when campaigning for McMussolini:
 Palin knows Fiorina, “a top surrogate to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign.”

Politico says “Fiorina recently warned against the ‘racist’ tone that has taken over the debate of Arizona’s new immigration law.” That’s the kind of Republican she is.

Whatever Palin is playing at, it is clear she goes with some mysterious flow—menstrual maybe?

DeVore has been called a “Tea Party darling” and a “most reliably Reaganesque representative.”

Update (May 10): The allusion to hormonal fluctuations was humor; meant not to be taken literally, but as a metaphor for Palin’s unreliable nature when it comes to liberty.

Onward Imperialism In Okinawa

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Military

America has been waiting for this for months, says the Economist:

“Japan’s leader, does not exude political gravitas. So it was dispiritingly in-character that when he made an announcement on May 4th that could make or break his premiership, he did so on a national holiday, speaking unpersuasively to the very people most likely to disapprove of what he said.

The bombshell he dropped on his first visit as prime minister to the island of Okinawa was that he was backtracking on what has become the most sensitive promise of last year’s election campaign—to move an American marine base off the island and possibly out of Japan altogether.

His explanation, as far as it went, made sense, though it took a painfully long time to reach. After long deliberation, the prime minister said, he had concluded that the security of a region with a nuclear-armed, reckless North Korea depends, in part, on having some American marines in Okinawa. But instead of seizing the opportunity to explain to Okinawans how American troops help keep the peace, he referred to the soldiers dismissively as a “burden” that had to be shared by Okinawans.”

[SNIP]

American occupation has been quite the burden to bear, especially for one 12-year-old 6th-grade Japanese girl, beaten and raped in 1995 by American GIs. Thirteen years hence two more women that we know of paid a similar price.