"President [Roosevelt] told [mideast envoy Lt. Col. Harold] Hoskins that he 'fully agreed that a Jewish state in Palestine could be installed and maintained only by force.'"
Roosevelt made the statement a month before he died in 1945, when he was determined to create a "trusteeship" in Palestine that would give rights to Jews and Arabs. FDR had lately met Saudi King Ibn Saud, and been impressed by Arab opposition to the idea of a Jewish state."
Indeed, Roosevelt said to Congress, “I learned more about the whole problem, the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.” The "injudicious" statement caused "an uproar in Zionist circles," Wilson reports. "Rabbi [Stephen] Wise asked for an early interview with the President."
Philip Weiss(Mondoweiss)
The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, 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.
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