Israel Needs Time on S. Africa : 4 Years Required to Wind Up Contracts, Paper Says

Israel needs four years to gradually wind up its existing military-industrial contracts with South Africa’s white regime or else it could lose $500 million in business and “hundreds of millions of dollars” more in lawsuits, a leading Israeli publication reported Friday.

The special investigative report on Israeli-South African relations published by the Hebrew-language Davar newspaper outlined an extensive network of deals and said that the greatest damage from any immediate severance of ties would be to Israel’s aircraft and other defense industries.

Corroborating a Feb. 12 report in the Los Angeles Times, Davar said that Israeli leaders have decided on a policy of gradual “disengagement” from South Africa. It said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, currently on an official visit to the United States, had as a key goal of his talks with the Reagan Administration and congressional leaders to convince them that this is the only way Israel can distance itself from the Pretoria government without damaging its own “vital interests.”

Legal Action Feared

“(Shamir) is stressing that Israel does not intend to renew contracts with South Africa when they lapse, but that until then, it cannot take the chance of violating existing contracts because of the possibility of lawsuits that could cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars,” Davar reported.

Israel’s complex and controversial ties to South Africa are a particular concern here now because of the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act passed last October.

Under that law, Reagan is to receive by April 1 a report from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research outlining arms sales to South Africa by other nations. Countries found to be selling military equipment to Pretoria face a possible cutoff of U.S. military aid--which, in Israel’s case, amounts to $1.8 billion annually.

The Davar report was jointly written by its political reporter Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, a CBS correspondent, formerly based in Tel Aviv, whose press credentials were canceled several years ago after he violated Israeli censorship by reporting that Israel and South Africa had jointly tested an atomic bomb. Raviv, who is now based in London, also collaborated with Melman recently on an investigative report concerning Israel’s secret dealings with China.

Labor’s Newspaper

Davar is the newspaper of the Labor Alignment, the political grouping headed by Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister and alternate prime minister. Labor also includes among its leaders Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The social-democratic Labor Alignment controls Israel’s powerful Histadrut trade union federation, which has been among the most vocal critics here of Jerusalem’s ties with Pretoria. However, Melman noted in a telephone interview, the network of Israeli ties with South Africa underlines the Histadrut’s “double standard” in dealing with the issue.

While the union’s Afro-Asian Institute is currently cooperating in a program to train black South Africans in hopes of establishing ties with a potential future leadership, Melman noted, the Histadrut’s industrial arm is profiting from deals with the white regime.

He pointed to the Histadrut-owned Koor Industries firm--Israel’s largest industrial corporation--which buys South African steel and processes it here into finished products sold both to the Israeli defense industry and to Western European customers under a joint venture.

Kibbutz Tied to Embargo

Davar also reported that a factory operated by the Hanita kibbutz is among those Israeli organizations that help South Africa bypass an anti-apartheid trade embargo. The kibbutz, which is also part of the Labor movement, buys drills and other small tools from South Africa and re-exports them to Japan, South Korea, the European Economic Community and the United States, the newspaper reported. The products are sold with no marks to identify them as either Israeli or South African.

While Israel’s ties with South Africa date from shortly after the creation of the Jewish state, Davar reported, relations matured quickly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when most of black Africa cut its contacts with Israel.

Davar quoted a former head of South African state security as defining the basis of military and strategic cooperation between the two countries in this way: “You are few. We are few. You are surrounded by millions of enemies. We are surrounded by millions of enemies. The Arabs want to throw you into the ocean. The blacks want to chase us out of Africa. You have won in the past and will win again because you’ve got no choice. We will also win because we’ve got no choice.”

Contacts Date From 1976

The newspaper said many of Israel’s military-industrial contracts with South Africa are rooted in a secret 1976 visit by then-Defense Minister Peres to Pretoria and a follow-up trip here the same year by former South African Prime Minister John Vorster.

Under a memorandum on scientific and technological cooperation dating from those visits, Davar reported, the two countries exchange nuclear information and physicist study programs, and South Africa sells uranium to Israel.

The newspaper said military cooperation has grown in the last decade under agreements in which South Africa helps fund development of new Israeli weapon systems and in return receives licenses and technology to produce the new systems. Pretoria makes Uzi submachine guns, Galil assault rifles, guided missile boats and the Scorpion naval missile under such agreements, it said.

According to Davar, former Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman in 1980 tried to interest the South African regime in participating in developing the new Lavi fighter-bomber. While Pretoria turned down the offer, it instead signed an agreement to finance part of the aeronautics for Israel’s older Kfir fighter in return for help in producing its own recently introduced Cheetah aircraft, the newspaper reported.

Experts Sent to S. Africa

Israel has also sent experts to help train South African security forces in anti-guerrilla warfare techniques, Davar said.

It quoted an unnamed senior Israeli official as saying that the connections between the two countries “are like a knot that will take a long time to untie.”