He authored ‘The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa’, a newly published book and is a senior editor at the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine.
...Finally, there’s a third group. These are the Israelis who came up in the Revisionist Zionist tradition, high level security types that included Ariel Sharon, Raful Eitan, Eliayahu Lenkin.. All of them made pretty blunt statements of support for South Africa on anti-Communist grounds, on the grounds that ‘one man, one vote’ would be the end of the white South Africans. They didn't have many reservations expressing support on those grounds.
...What I do in the book is to try and trace the element on the Israeli right and the military establishment -- strains of the Revisionist movement and people who went beyond Vladimir Jabotinsky -- that has a lot in common with the basic tenets of Afrikaner nationalist thought.
a. Sharon and Eitan were not Revisionist Zionists. Sharon was in the Hagana and Eitan in the Palmah. True, Sharon joined with the Likud and Eitan with Tehiya but these political frameworks were not the framing basics. They did not "come up" in Revisionism. Lankin did but was Israel Ambassador to South Africa 1981-1985 and was Herut MK only in the first Knesset and so really had nothing to do with the main time period of the book.
b. If there were people who went beyond Jabotinsky, are they Revisionists?
c. No one in Israel has anything in common with the basic tenets of Afrikaaner nationalist thought.
d. Anti-communism as grounds for support? Weird. Israel until the early 1980s was basically a socialist society.
I'll have to search out the book.
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