ABSTRACT

Leading Israeli politicians, having apparently learned exactly nothing from the earlier Jacobo Timerman episode about the extreme risks involved in prying Jewish radicals loose from the jails in which they sit for assorted crimes against reactionary regimes in the Diaspora, succeeded in February 1985 in bringing to Israel the South African insurrectionary, Denis Goldberg. Goldberg arrived after twenty-two years of imprisonment in South Africa on 189 counts of sabotage and terror alleged to have been committed by him between December 1960 and July 1964. The first reports of Goldberg’s arrival from Pretoria barely mentioned, and even then fleetingly and in the vaguest terms, his application of his engineering expertise to the production of explosives for terrorists. The stress was rather on the “humanitarian” aspect of the rescue, and on the reunion of Goldberg with his daughter, who had lived at an Upper Galilee kibbutz for two years, and his wife, who flew in from London for the occasion.