Into Africa via The Back Door

The daily Johannesburg Star described it as "an enigmatic embrace." Said one South African expert: "Politics make strange bedfellows and fear and loneliness even stranger ones."

That combination of politics, fear and loneliness is probably the best explanation for a blossoming friendship between Israel and South Africa. Trade between the two has multiplied from $3 million in 1961 to $120 million currently. Impressive mutual technical assistance programs are under way. Last year diplomatic relations between Jerusalem and Pretoria were raised to full ambassadorial level. Last week, in a striking climax to these developments, South African Prime Minister John Vorster returned home from a four-day visit to Israel bearing a major trophy: what South Africans described as "the Treaty of Jerusalem," under which economic, scientific and diplomatic dealings are supposed to increase still more.

For Vorster and his National Party, the Israeli trip came at a time when Angolan events had increased South Africa's already deep sense of embattled isolation. The Vorster government has few friends abroad as a result of its apartheid policies; Vorster's most recent official calls have been to Paraguay and Uruguay, two of Latin America's military dictatorships. Thus a trip to Israel was especially exhilarating, particularly since Afrikaners consider Israelis much like themselves--pioneers surrounded by enemies. They are, said the South African Broadcasting Corp. in an editorial applauding Vorster's trek, "the only two Western nations to have established themselves in a predominantly non-white part of the world."

Officially, Israeli leaders described Vorster's visit in glowing terms. They intimated that Israel would sell Kfir fighter planes, Reshef patrol boats and other military hardware to South Africa. In return, Israel would receive such strategic materials as coal, chrome, platinum, titanium and--for the world's latest nuclear power (TIME, April 12)--enriched South African uranium. There was also a diplomatic dividend. Largely because of Arab pressure, 29 of the 33 black African countries that once had diplomatic ties with Israel broke them off at the time of the 1973 Middle East war (only Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius and Swaziland retain such ties). South Africa, said one Israeli diplomat, gives his country an entry to the rest of Africa: "We reach there not through the black door but through the back door."

Upbeat Assessment. Despite these upbeat assessments, Premier Yitzhak Rabin's government attempted to play down Vorster's visit as merely a private call. One reason could have been that the ordinarily astute Israelis appeared to have been taken in: a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, Vorster asked to come on a Lenten pilgrimage and then showed up with an unexpectedly large entourage, which had the effect of turning his visit into an official call. "Israel was taken," a U.S. State Department official said in Washington. "It was a sneaky but clever psychological move."

Some Israelis were outraged that Vorster, who was interned by his own country during World War II as a Nazi sympathizer, was permitted to lay a wreath at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the 6 million dead of the holocaust. Israelis also recalled that before black African friendships dried up, their government consistently opposed apartheid. Premier David Ben-Gurion in 1961 condemned South Africa as a "deplorable regime of racial discrimination." When Israel later decided to give money to black liberation movements, the Pretoria government retaliated by blocking contributions to Israel from South Africa's 130,000 Jews, who are, after their U.S. counterparts, the most generous overseas Jewish group.

Many Israelis worried over what the strange new relationship would do to their image. South Africa was suspended from the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 for apartheid; Arab members last year attempted to punish Israel in similar fashion by equating apartheid and other forms of racism with Zionism. In the wake of Vorster's visit, renewed efforts are almost certain. Said a U.S. analyst specializing in Israeli affairs: "It's only grist for the Zionism-racist mill."

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