WHEN the state of Israel was created in 1948, albeit under dubious circumstances involving the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their traditional homes, it enjoyed global sympathy and goodwill.

As the horrendous facts of the Holocaust became better known at the end of the war, a haven for the Jewish people was widely seen as an appropriate and justified solution to prevent such horrors from happening again.

That goodwill has, over time, become strained and misused. Israel’s role in oppressing the Palestinians but also in aiding and abetting some of the most reactionary forces in the world has more than tarnished its image.

The latter role, though, has been kept largely hidden from the public eye. Israeli co-operation with reactionary forces began very soon after its establishment as a state.

In March​ 1960, West Germany’s first post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer held a meeting with Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion in New York. Adenauer’s words were unambiguous: “Israel is a fortress of the West… and I can already now tell you that we will help you.” West Germany agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel.

Six decades on, Israel’s security is integral to Germany’s “staatsrason” (a state obligation), as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked by German leaders in the weeks since the Hamas attack on October 7.

However, when in 1960 Adenauer was meeting Ben-Gurion he was also presiding over a systematic reversal of de-Nazification and suppressing the details of the Holocaust. Old Nazis had been welcomed back into their old jobs with no questions asked.

Adenauer justified this by asserting that the Germans had also been victims of Hitler. He realised that the road to full integration with the West could best be achieved through Israel.

West Germany moved fast after 1960 to become the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. In the West German press, Israelis were described as Aryan warriors  —  Moshe Dayan was compared with Erwin Rommel by the Bild newspaper.

When Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina by Mossad and put on trial, Adenauer made Israel a major loan and supplied military equipment “dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial.”

He had been shocked to learn of Mossad’s arrest of Eichmann only weeks after his meeting with Ben-Gurion and feared what Eichmann might reveal. Adenauer went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his then chief of staff, Hans Globke (the man responsible for the drafting of the infamous anti-semitic Nuremberg Race Laws), would not be mentioned in the trial.

Israel was happy to go along with this whitewash. Many other sordid details in connection with the trial remain locked up and are classified.

Israel appeared to be happy to give moral absolution to a German state still very much in the hands of unreconstructed Nazis in return for cash and weapons.

It also suited both countries at the time to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (“Hitler on the Nile,”) as the true embodiments of Nazism.

The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating a Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of observer Hannah Arendt, who wrote that Globke “had more right than the ex-mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis.”

In his book Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Ozyurek describes the way German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendancy, have been cranking up the old mechanism for sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims.

Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s effective post-war efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he made the unsubstantiated claim that the grand mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews.

Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine.

He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their “valiant struggle against anti-semitism.” Clearly, his sympathies for right-wing regimes trump his need to defend Jews against anti-semitism.

Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel had secured, with US blessing, its largest-ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported that German arms sales to Israel have surged since October 7: the figure for 2023 is more than 10 times that of the previous year.

As Israel began the devastating bombing of Gaza, and Israeli Cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, German Chancellor Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy that “Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.” As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the German Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv and hailed the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots.

In a more unnerving illustration of the post-war German-Israeli symbiosis, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach approvingly retweeted a video in which Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas.

Israeli collaboration with the odious apartheid system in South Africa is also little known. Both countries worked together on developing nuclear weapons; Israel had the scientific know-how and South Africa had access to Namibia’s uranium mines.

Secret South African documents revealed that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.

The top-secret minutes of meetings between senior officials from both countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israeli defence minister, 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 (reported in the Guardian May 24 2010).

Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government from declassifying the documents as the revelations would be an embarrassment, particularly during the nuclear non-proliferation talks.

In June 1975, Peres and Botha met again in Zurich and formalised the Jericho project, codenamed Chalet, about the joint development of nuclear weapons. South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, almost certainly with Israeli assistance. However, the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years.

South Africa provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons. Some weeks before Peres made his offer of nuclear warheads to Botha, the two defence ministers signed a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment.

It was so secret that it included a denial of its own existence. Israel has also been intimately involved in the suppression of progressive forces in Latin America.

Under president Carter, the US had begun putting more emphasis on human rights in its international relations and had imposed an arms embargo on a number of Latin American countries with terrible human rights records.

To circumvent the embargo, the CIA and the US military-industrial complex turned to close US allies like Israel and Taiwan to plug the gap and supply armaments and logistical support to such regimes.

Countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were readily supplied by Israel, which also supported the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

I was able to witness this covert Israeli support while filming in Central America during the 1980s; the brutal regimes there were using Israeli Uzi machine guns and Israeli agents were involved in training these regimes’ security forces, who were carrying out political abductions, killings and massacres of indigenous people and using torture methods as a matter of course.

In the ’80s the US had launched a covert campaign to oust the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua by setting up and financing terrorist organisations, using mercenary forces called the Contras.

This campaign was entirely financed by the US using funds from the lucrative drug trade and, aided by Israeli arms dealers, selling missiles to Iran at exorbitant prices and diverting the profits.

Knowing this history, it is little wonder that Israel itself is waging the most brutal, racist and inhuman attack on the Palestinians and that it is being given full support by the leading Western powers.