Yes, on the measured trade. In the late 1970s South Africa became Israel’s largest arms customer, “responsible for 35% of Israel’s total security exports,” according to Yaron Salman’s peer-reviewed study in Israel Affairs (2026). Declassified South African records, published by The Guardian in May 2010, show the two defence ministers signing a secret military agreement in 1975 and discussing Jericho missiles with the “correct payload” at Zurich on 4 June that year. The records show South Africa did not buy nuclear warheads from Israel, and in 2010 the office of Israel’s president denied that Israel ever negotiated their exchange.
Key Findings
- 35% of Israel’s total security exports went to South Africa in the late 1970s, when it became Israel’s largest arms customer (Salman, 2026). The base is Israel’s own export trade.
- In 1975 the two countries’ defence ministers signed a military agreement, known as Secment, stating that “the very existence of this agreement... shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party” (McGreal, 2010).
- South African minutes of a meeting in Zurich on 4 June 1975 record Botha expressing interest in Jericho missiles “subject to the correct payload being available” and Peres saying it “was available in three sizes” (McGreal, 2010).
- Security Council resolution 418, adopted unanimously on 4 November 1977, required all states to “cease forthwith any provision to South Africa of arms and related matériel of all types” (United Nations Security Council, 1977).
- On 24 May 2010 the office of Israel’s president stated that “Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa,” the party’s own published position (McGreal, McCarthy and Smith, 2010).
How large was Israel’s arms trade with apartheid South Africa?
South Africa accounted for 35% of Israel’s total security exports in the late 1970s, when it became Israel’s largest arms customer, according to Yaron Salman of the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College in “Beyond embargo: Israel–South Africa relations during the apartheid era,” a peer-reviewed study in Israel Affairs published in July 2026 (Salman, 2026). More than a third of what that sector sold abroad in those years went to one customer.
The question readers usually carry is simpler than the record: did Israel stand with a government most of the world was trying to isolate? The export share is the strongest single measurement available on that question. It sizes the relationship from Israel’s side of the ledger.
The figure measures one thing precisely, and its limits are part of reading it correctly. It is a share of value, not a count of systems, and it is not a figure in currency. It is also not a measure of how much of South Africa’s own arms procurement came from Israel. A 35% share tells a reader how much Israel’s defence exports depended on South Africa. It does not tell a reader how much South Africa depended on Israel, and the second figure is not published in any checkable form among the sources cited here.
Salman’s account of why the share mattered comes from interviews he conducted with nine former Israeli officials and from Israeli archival documents. One, a former Israeli military attaché in South Africa, told him South Africa “was a major financing partner” for the defence industries. Another, a former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, wrote that the “huge South African customer... supported tens of thousands of families of military industry workers in Israel.” These are the recollections of former officials, and Salman himself cautions that one such testimony “should be treated cautiously due to its possible retrospective view.”
The timing of the share matters for the sections that follow. The late 1970s were the years of the 1975 agreement between the two defence ministries and of the 1977 mandatory arms embargo. The share is a single figure for the period, so neither event is visible inside it.
Is it often said Israel was apartheid’s closest ally?
It is often said that Israel was one of apartheid South Africa’s closest allies, and the phrase has a dated scholarly anchor. Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s 2010 book is titled The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, and Salman (2026) writes that “In the 1970s, Israel saw South Africa as a major ally.” The measured record supports the closeness in one direction: South Africa took 35% of Israel’s security exports.
On the measured record the claim is directionally supported. A signed 1975 agreement between defence ministries, whose very existence was to be kept secret, is a closer relationship than ordinary trade. A customer taking more than a third of a country’s security exports is a relationship of real weight.
The reframe is the comparison group. The 35% share measures South Africa’s importance to Israel. The claim of a “closest ally” is also a claim about Israel’s importance to South Africa, set against South Africa’s other suppliers and partners. No figure among the sources cited here places Israel’s share of South African arms imports alongside those of other states.
The word “alliance” is itself contested in the scholarship. Yehonatan Alsheh of the University of the Free State, in a 2013 article in the Southern Journal for Contemporary History, surveys five explanations of the ties and concludes that “the current tendency to suggest that there was an Israeli-South African alliance that was underwritten by ideological affinities is essentially garbled” (Alsheh, 2013). He also rejects the idea that the two shared the same international status: “it is simply untrue that Israel was of the same international status as South Africa.”
Both findings stand together. The relationship was large from Israel’s side and secret by design. Whether it was an alliance, and of what kind, is argued in the scholarship rather than settled by a published measurement.
What did the secret 1975 Peres-Botha agreement commit to?
In 1975 Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres and South African Defence Minister P. W. Botha signed a covert agreement governing the military relationship, known as Secment. Its text, as The Guardian quoted it in May 2010, provided: “It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement... shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party.” The agreement also said that neither party could unilaterally renounce it (McGreal, 2010).
These documents are official records of one party to the agreement. The South African government produced them, and its post-apartheid successor released them at the request of Polakow-Suransky, over what The Guardian reports were Israeli objections. The newspaper is the relay, and the South African state is the author of the records.
The agreement bound the two defence ministries rather than private firms or intermediaries, since the ministers who signed it held the defence portfolio in each government. The confidentiality clause is the feature most directly relevant to the question of support. The two governments agreed not only to cooperate but also to keep secret that they had agreed to do so.
The date of signature is stated two ways in the same newspaper’s coverage. The Guardian’s report of May 2010 places the signing “some weeks before” the Zurich meeting of 4 June 1975. A second report, dated 24 May 2010, quotes Polakow-Suransky saying of the payload discussion: “Four days later Peres signed a secrecy agreement with PW Botha” (McGreal, McCarthy and Smith, 2010). The two accounts cannot both be right, and the published text does not print the date; Polakow-Suransky told the newspaper that Israel’s defence ministry had sought to block access to “the signature and the date.” The year is secure; the day is not.
What these records do not supply is also a matter of fact. They are South Africa’s copies and South Africa’s minutes. No Israeli copy of the agreement appears in the sources cited here. The Israeli government’s published response in 2010, examined below, addressed nuclear weapons and did not address the conventional cooperation agreement.
Did Israel offer South Africa nuclear-capable missiles?
South African minutes of a meeting at Zurich on 4 June 1975, published by The Guardian in May 2010, record: “Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available.” They continue: “Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes. Minister Botha expressed his appreciation and said that he would ask for advice” (McGreal, 2010). Chalet was the codename for the Jericho project.
An earlier meeting, on 31 March 1975, is described in Polakow-Suransky’s book, as The Guardian quoted it: Israeli officials “formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal.” A memo drawn up the same day by South Africa’s military chief of staff assumed “That the missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA (Republic of South Africa) or acquired elsewhere.”
Three things in the record must be kept apart, because the evidence differs for each.
The first is a discussion. The Zurich minutes record ministerial talk about Jericho missiles and a payload “in three sizes.” This is documented, dated and attributable to named officials. That “correct payload” meant nuclear warheads is The Guardian’s reading and Polakow-Suransky’s, argued from the South African memo; the minutes use the euphemism and not the word.
The second is an offer to sell nuclear weapons. The Guardian’s headline, “Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons,” is the newspaper’s characterisation of the records. Whether the discussion amounted to an offer is the point Israel disputes.
The third is a transfer. The same reporting states that “South Africa did not buy nuclear warheads from Israel and eventually developed its own atom bomb,” and that “Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost.” The records carry the discussion with specificity. They carry no delivery.
What does Israel’s government say about the nuclear documents?
On 24 May 2010 the office of Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, stated: “Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place,” as The Guardian reported that day (McGreal, McCarthy and Smith, 2010). It added that “there exists no basis in reality” for the claims. This is the party’s own published position, not an independently verified finding.
The denial came one day after the newspaper published the South African minutes. Its speaker adds weight: in 2010 Peres was president of Israel, and in 1975 he was the defence minister recorded in the minutes. The denial therefore comes from the same official whose words the South African records attribute to him.
The statement makes two distinct claims, and each has a different relationship to the documents. The first is substantive: that no negotiation over the exchange of nuclear weapons took place. The second is evidentiary: that no Israeli document or Israeli signature records such negotiations. The second is consistent with the published record, which consists of South African documents. The first is where the parties’ accounts diverge. Polakow-Suransky called the denial “disingenuous,” saying the minutes show “that the South Africans perceived that an explicit offer was on the table.”
The scope of the denial is narrow, and that is a fact about the text. The same report notes that while Peres’s office said no document bearing his signature mentions nuclear weapons, “his signature does appear with Botha’s on an agreement governing the broad conduct of the military relationship.” The denial does not address that agreement, conventional arms sales or the late-1970s export share, and no Israeli government statement on those subjects appears in the sources cited here.
The record is therefore two parties’ accounts of the same meetings. Neither has been tested against the other by an official inquiry in the sources cited here.
Did the 1977 UN arms embargo end the military trade?
Security Council resolution 418, adopted unanimously on 4 November 1977 under Chapter VII, decided that “all States shall cease forthwith any provision to South Africa of arms and related matériel of all types, including the sale or transfer of weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary police equipment, and spare parts” (United Nations Security Council, 1977).
The resolution reached existing deals as well. Paragraph 3 called on all states to review “all existing contractual arrangements with and licences granted to South Africa relating to the manufacture and maintenance of arms... with a view to terminating them.” Paragraph 4 decided that all states “shall refrain from any co-operation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons.” Its preamble recorded that the Council was “Gravely concerned that South Africa is at the threshold of producing nuclear weapons.”
Salman (2026) reads the period as one in which embargoes “had only limited effectiveness in constraining Israeli arms sales to South Africa,” and his title frames the relationship as continuing beyond the embargo. He draws on Israeli telegrams from 1977 and 1987. In one, sent on 8 January 1987 by a senior Foreign Ministry official to the prime minister, the official proposes “to impose in about a month a series of sanctions that have little economic impact, but are meant to keep our word and ease the criticism we may receive on April 1.”
The measured trade and the embargo sit in the same window. The 35% share is a single figure for “the late 1970s” and is not split into the years before and after November 1977, so on its own it cannot show whether trade rose, fell or held steady across the embargo date. The 1975 agreement predates the embargo by two years, and paragraph 3 addresses exactly such arrangements. Whether deliveries after November 1977 fell under earlier contracts is not resolved by any document in the sources cited here. A year-by-year series showing the embargo’s measured effect on Israeli exports is not published in them.
Why do historians disagree about what drove the relationship?
Three peer-reviewed accounts dated 2013 to 2026 explain the same documented ties in different ways. The disagreement concerns motive and structure; the core documents are not in dispute among them.
Salman (2026), working from Israeli archives and nine elite interviews, finds three drivers: “the need to establish an independent military industry following the 1973 war” as “a central strategic consideration,” Israel’s diplomatic isolation in Africa after 1973, and the South African Jewish community, whose role he describes as “primarily only for Israel’s national benefit rather than the community’s own welfare.” He calls his study largely “a reinforcement of the existing research.”
Alsheh (2013) places the ties within United States strategy. On his reading, the concept of the “pariah state” was an ideological construct that let Washington keep supporting embarrassing client regimes, and “Both states were effectively forced into this damning relationship, so that other, more powerful, states could maintain a better wholesome façade. In this sense, both states were dirty scapegoats.” He finds the industrial-military explanation plausible in part but says it is “hardly possible to determine” that the arms complexes forced the relationship on their states.
Gillian Hart, in a 2026 essay in the Wiley journal Antipode, “Apartheid South Africa and Israel: Cold War Outposts of US Empire,” argues that both states “operated as outposts of US imperialism during the Cold War” (Hart, 2026). Her abstract states the essay’s purpose as contributing to “practices and processes of left solidarity” and calls the comparison “directly relevant to the imperative of solidarity with Palestine”; the framing is the author’s own.
Two of the three readings, Alsheh’s and Hart’s, locate the relationship inside United States Cold War strategy; Salman locates it in Israel’s own economic and diplomatic interests. None of the three disputes that the 1975 agreement and the payload discussions took place. They disagree about what drove them.
Did Israel and South Africa test a nuclear device together?
No official investigation named in the sources cited here has established a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test. The 2010 reporting records that South Africa “eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance,” a newspaper characterisation that stops short of a joint test (McGreal, 2010).
One of the sources carries a testimony that goes further. Among the reasons for the relationship, Salman (2026) reports that Naomi Chazan, a former member of the Knesset he interviewed, mentioned the “vast test spaces that South Africa offered to Israel’s defence industries, including ‘a nuclear test as part of the nuclear cooperation between the two countries’.” That is one former legislator’s statement in an interview, reported by a scholar, not a documentary record or an official finding, and Salman does not develop it further in the passages read for this report.
This rung marks where the documented evidence thins. The earlier sections establish an arms trade measured at 35% of Israel’s security exports, a secret ministerial agreement in 1975, and a ministerial discussion of a Jericho payload at Zurich on 4 June 1975. Each of those rests on a dated record. A joint nuclear test rests on no record of that kind among the sources cited here, only on the recollection quoted above.
What would settle the question is identifiable. It would take an official determination by a government investigation, or a declassified government finding, from either state or from a third government that monitored the period. South Africa’s post-apartheid government released the 1975 minutes; no comparable release establishing or refuting a joint test appears in the sources cited here, and Israel’s 2010 statement addresses negotiation over nuclear weapons, not testing.
The absence is the finding for this rung. The documented relationship was extensive and partly nuclear in its discussions; the claim that it extended to a joint test remains unestablished by any official body named in the record.
Methodology and limitations
This report draws on four kinds of source, each labelled by type where it is used.
Peer-reviewed research supplies the measured trade figure and the three historical readings. The 35% share comes from Salman (2026), which also draws on Israeli archival telegrams and interviews with nine former officials; interview testimony is the interviewees’ recollection. The interpretive readings come from Salman, from Alsheh (2013) and from Hart (2026), whose essay states a solidarity purpose. Only Hart’s abstract was read.
Official records of a party supply the 1975 agreement and the Zurich minutes. These are South African government documents, released by the post-apartheid government, and they reach the reader through The Guardian’s publication of May 2010, so the newspaper is named as the relay. The meeting of 31 March 1975 is carried as described in Polakow-Suransky’s book and quoted by the newspaper. The two reports disagree on when the agreement was signed, and both versions are given.
A party’s own published position supplies Israel’s 2010 denial, as reported by The Guardian on 24 May 2010. It is attributed as the Israeli government’s own account and is not presented as verified.
The official instrument is Security Council resolution 418, quoted from its adopted text.
Several limits bind the findings. The 35% share is a share of value in Israel’s exports, is not split by year across the 1977 embargo, and does not measure South Africa’s import dependence. The nuclear evidence consists of one party’s minutes and the other party’s denial, with no official inquiry reconciling them. The reading of “correct payload” as nuclear warheads is the newspaper’s and Polakow-Suransky’s, not a word in the minutes.
Conclusion
So did Israel support apartheid South Africa’s regime? On the documented record, yes, in the material sense the question asks. South Africa became Israel’s largest arms customer, taking 35% of its security exports in the late 1970s, according to Salman (2026).
The portrait the record draws has four parts. The relationship was formal: two defence ministers signed an agreement in 1975. It was secret by design: that agreement required that its own existence stay confidential. It reached nuclear subjects: at Zurich on 4 June 1975 the ministers discussed Jericho missiles and a “correct payload” in three sizes. And it stopped short of what the most dramatic accounts claim: South Africa did not buy warheads, and no joint test is established by any official record. It also continued past a unanimous Security Council embargo whose terms reached existing contracts, on Salman’s reading of the Israeli telegrams.
The hardest thing the record raises is what a relationship of this kind means for the question as people now ask it. A trade conducted in secret half a century ago, documented largely from one government’s archive and denied in part by the other, now circulates in arguments about the present. If the record is this specific about what happened and this silent about what did not, which version will people carry forward, and does it change once they learn that the export share measured Israel’s dependence on South Africa rather than the reverse? A separate question, whether Israel’s own rule meets the treaty definition of apartheid, turns on different instruments entirely.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who released the South African documents about Israel?
South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassified the records at the request of the researcher Sasha Polakow-Suransky, and The Guardian published the key 1975 minutes and agreement in May 2010 (McGreal, 2010). The newspaper reports that Israeli authorities tried to stop the declassification. The documents are records of one party to the relationship.
Where was the 35% export figure published?
The figure appears in Yaron Salman’s “Beyond embargo: Israel–South Africa relations during the apartheid era,” a peer-reviewed study in the journal Israel Affairs, published in July 2026 (Salman, 2026). It is a share of Israel’s total security exports in the late 1970s, not a share of South Africa’s arms imports.
What did resolution 418 say about nuclear cooperation?
Paragraph 4 decided that all states “shall refrain from any co-operation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons” (United Nations Security Council, 1977). The resolution was adopted unanimously on 4 November 1977.
What did apartheid South Africa’s statute book contain?
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission listed the country’s discriminatory legislation in Volume One, Chapter 13 of its 1998 report (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, 1998). Part I contains 120 entries naming Acts of Parliament, a count of the list rather than a total the Commission prints, beginning with statutes such as the Population Registration Act No 30 of 1950.
How does this history relate to claims that Israel itself practises apartheid?
It is a separate question with separate evidence. John Dugard and John Reynolds argued in 2013 that “there are indeed strong grounds to conclude that a system of apartheid has developed in the occupied Palestinian territory,” and Yaffa Zilbershats published a peer-reviewed reply in the same issue (Dugard and Reynolds, 2013; Zilbershats, 2013). For how the two systems are compared statute by statute, see the comparison of the two statute books.
Does Israel’s 2010 denial cover the conventional arms trade?
No. The statement from Peres’s office on 24 May 2010 addresses negotiation over the exchange of nuclear weapons (McGreal, McCarthy and Smith, 2010). It does not address the 1975 cooperation agreement or conventional arms exports, and no Israeli government statement on those subjects appears in the sources cited here.
Sources
- Alsheh, Y., 2013. Dirty scapegoats: Explaining Israel’s ties with South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. Southern Journal for Contemporary History 38(1), 22 to 40. University of the Free State. DOI 10.38140/sjch.v38i1.243. Peer-reviewed.
- Dugard, J., and Reynolds, J., 2013. Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. European Journal of International Law 24(3), 867 to 913. DOI 10.1093/ejil/cht045. Peer-reviewed (legal argument).
- Hart, G., 2026. Apartheid South Africa and Israel: Cold War Outposts of US Empire. Antipode, Wiley. DOI 10.1111/anti.70206. Peer-reviewed (essay; abstract-sourced).
- McGreal, C., 2010. Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons. The Guardian, May 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons. International press relaying declassified South African government records.
- McGreal, C., McCarthy, R., and Smith, D., 2010. Israeli president denies offering nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. The Guardian, 24 May 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/24/israel-shimon-peres-nuclear-weapons. International press carrying a party’s own published position.
- Salman, Y., 2026. Beyond embargo: Israel–South Africa relations during the apartheid era. Israel Affairs, Routledge, published online July 2026. DOI 10.1080/13537121.2026.2659626. Peer-reviewed.
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, 1998. Report, Volume One, Chapter 13: Apartheid Legislation. South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%201.pdf. Official record.
- United Nations Security Council, 1977. Resolution 418 (1977), 4 November 1977, adopted unanimously at the 2046th meeting. S/RES/418 (1977). Official record (resolution text).
- Zilbershats, Y., 2013. Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A Reply to John Dugard and John Reynolds. European Journal of International Law 24(3), 915 to 928. DOI 10.1093/ejil/cht043. Peer-reviewed (legal argument).