The South African Connection:
The mining magnate Cecil Rhodes and the British High Commissioner, Lord Alfred Milner instigated the Anglo-Boer War (South African War) of 1899-1902. Their purpose was to secure gold and other natural resources in South Africa with cheap indigenous labour in circumstances akin to slavery, and to extend British domination over the entire African continent “from Cape to Cairo.”
British imperial power had developed the strategy of “divide and rule.” Milner was the main drafter of the 1917 Balfour Declaration offering “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”[6]
With the support of De Beers, the Israeli diamond cutting and polishing industry was established during the Second World War, and by 1975 accounted for almost 40 percent of Israel’s non-agricultural exports.
The diamond industry then became the foundation of Israel’s armaments industry. In turn, arms export sales in 2012 were US$7.5 billion which placed Israel in fourth place, surpassed only by the United States, Russia and France. Thus, Israeli arms exports exceed even those of Britain, Germany and China. An estimated 150 000 Israeli households depend economically on the arms industry.[7]
Yotam Feldman’s award-winning documentary film, The Lab, chillingly focuses upon how the armaments industry markets export sales on Israel’s tried and proven success in dealing with Palestinians. One particularly arrogant character describes the industry as “turning ******* into money.”[8]
Prime Minister John Vorster visited Israel in 1976. In defiance of the 1977 UN arms embargo against apartheid South Africa, he and his successor PW Botha (1978-1989) established close Israeli-South African collaboration in developing nuclear and other weapons.[9]
In the words of Noseweek editor, Martin Welz: “Israel had the brains, but no money. South Africa had the money, but no brains.”[10] With money seemingly to burn to defend apartheid, the “securocrats” instead bankrupted the country. South Africa defaulted on its foreign debts in 1985 after Botha’s infamous “Rubicon Speech.”
Led by church leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the late Dr Beyers Naude and Dr Allan Boesak, the nonviolent international banking sanctions campaign became the tipping point in South Africa’s relatively peaceful transition to constitutional democracy in 1994.[11] It was focussed on New York banks because of the role of the US dollar as settlement currency in foreign exchange markets.
Terry Crawford-Browne is a retired banker, who advised the South African Council of Churches on the banking sanctions campaign against apartheid South Africa. He was secretary of the Cape Town organising committee for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine when it met in Cape Town in November 2011. He is also the author of Eye On The Diamonds published in 2012 by Penguins Books.
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