In the 1980s, when the State of Israel was the main arms supplier to the apartheid regime in South Africa, no one believed Israel’s denials and attempts to remove responsibility from itself to private Israeli companies.
Since September 1979, Israel’s representative to the United Nations repeatedly announced in written statements that the State of Israel was complying with the UN Security Council’s arms embargo on South Africa.
For decades, Israel followed its policy of silence. For example, the deputy director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hanan Bar-On, wrote in his telegram to the ministry director, David Kimchi, on August 29, 1984, “The Israeli policy … is that we do not in any way admit [such sales] to an Israeli or to a foreign actor and certainly not to an American Congressman, even if he is considered a friend and the relationship with him is supposedly intimate.”
When Israel received international criticism about its military and economic involvement in the Bantustans in South Africa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered all its spokespersons in Israeli embassies around the globe to tell the press that the State of Israel does not recognise the Bantustans, and that all transactions were carried out by commercial private entities, with the Israeli government having no involvement or part in the transactions on all its systems, and that the government has no authority to prevent
— source thewire.in | Eitay Mack | 18/Jul/2022