While South African leader Nelson Mandela is remembered as an icon who defeated apartheid, ongoing conflict in the Middle East means history might not be so kind to late Israeli statesman Shimon Peres.Istanbul (dpa) - In 1993, Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk went to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring an end to racial oppression in South Africa.Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat got their turn a year later, with the hope that Israelis and Palestinians would also resolve their differences.As the leaders from these two disparate regions, with remarkably similar histories, accepted their prizes, there was a sense of optimism that both could now also match when it came to peace."The destinies of the two countries are ... so alike in a much more meaningful sense than any enemy propagandist could conceive," wrote Jewish Affairs magazine after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and South Africa‘s strong support for the Jewish state.Peres, a dominant force in Israeli politics for decades who died this week at 93, was there at many key junctures, as the two countries‘ fates first intertwined, then unraveled, taking very different paths.Both were often at odds with their neighbours and much of the world, even as they allied against Communism and with the West.Israel‘s nuclear programme, which Peres founded, played a key role in building up the relationship. During the Cold War, the two nations refused to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), leaving them outside the consensus.The year 1948 was seminal: Israel was created as a Jewish state, while South Africa formally introduced its apartheid laws of systemic racism. The United Nations eventually decried the apartheid system, and later Zionism as well.While some on the Israeli right were open advocates of South Africa, Peres and Rabin, from the Labour movement, were more reticent on the apartheid regime. However, they pragmatically saw in it a business partner to boost Israel‘s economy and ensure security cooperation."Because [Peres] was not an ideological cheerleader, and he was a key architect and advocate of the relationship, he was by necessity a hypocrite when talking about South Africa in public," says Sasha Polakow-Suransky, whose book, "The Unspoken Alliance," explores the under-reported relationship between the two nations.Israel and the apartheid regime began to tighten their cooperation, especially in the defence sector, as they were isolated by growing segments of the world and found themselves in repeated wars with their neighbours.Meanwhile the Palestinians and the African liberation movement in South Africa grew closer, seeing themselves as anti-colonial brothers-in-arms."Israel cooperated with the apartheid regime," Mandela said bluntly. He also famously declared: "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."Mineral-rich South Africa supplied Israel with yellowcake and other minerals for its nuclear programme, Polakow-Suransky explained. Israel, including while under Peres‘ leadership, gave weapons technology to the apartheid regime, including nuclear know-how.Polakow-Suransky argues that the countries‘ affair came to end due to the collapse of the Cold War and the rise of Mandela."The Israeli defence establishment, which had for so long banked on the survival of white minority rule, had to accept that a new era was dawning," he wrote.South Africa held its first ever all-race elections quickly after the Nobel win, with Mandela becoming the country‘s black president. Reconciliation in the "rainbow nation" was under way.The government had already given up its nuclear weapons programme, the first nation in the world to take such a step, and signed up to the NPT. Israel, however, refuses to join the treaty, despite an admission by former US secretary of state Colin Powell that the country has 200 nuclear weapons.For the Israelis and Palestinians, however, the peace process stuttered and then stopped, in part owing to the assassination of Rabin, then the Israeli prime minister, by a Jewish extremist.In 2000, the same year Mandela was entering the final phase of his life as a global icon of peace, after having stepped down as president, the Israelis and the Palestinians returned to violence.Israel remains at odds with most of the Arab and Muslim world, and faces ongoing efforts to see its products boycotted by leftists in the West, who say they are inspired by the economic isolation of the apartheid regime in the 1980s.Meanwhile, sanctions on South Africa were dropped, and Mandela even lived to see his once ostracized country host the World Cup of football in 2010.His legacy as a reconciler even lived on past his death. At Mandela‘s funeral in Johannesburg, US President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro shook hands in public, signalling a new era in relations.Peres‘ funeral will hardly see swords turned to ploughshares as most Arab leaders are expected to stay away.
