Hamid Karout, «Syria Times»
Até hoje Israel nunca confirmou ou negou possuir um arsenal nuclear. Documentos sul-africanos da era do apartheid, revelados pelo jornal The Guardian, mostram que Israel tentou vender ao regime de Pretória armamento nuclear. Os protagonistas foram “Pik” Botha e Shimon Peres e os documentos quanto muito dão uma resposta à existência de armas nucleares em Israel:
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.
The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa‘s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence. […]
Glenn Frankel, na Foreign Policy, escreve sobre o livro de Sasha Polakow-Suransky que mostra que as relações de Israel com o regime do apartheid sul-africano eram mais profundas do que se pensavam e Israel quer reconhecer:
[…] Like many illicit love affairs, the back-door relationship between Israel and the apartheid regime was secret, duplicitous, thrilling for the parties involved — and ultimately damaging to both. Each insisted at the time that theirs was just a minor flirtation, with few regrets or expressions of remorse. Inevitably it ended badly, tainting everyone it touched, including leaders of American Jewish organizations who shredded their credibility by endorsing and parroting the blatant falsehoods they were fed by Israeli officials. And it still hovers like a toxic cloud over Israel’s international reputation, providing ammunition to those who use the comparison between Israel’s 43-year military rule over Palestinians and the now-defunct system of white domination known as apartheid to seek to delegitimize the Jewish state. […]
Mr. Fish, «Clowncrack.com»