Arthur Goldreich was an undercover ANC operative and close collaborator of Nelson Mandela until he was caught and imprisoned by the South African government in 1963. He soon escaped custody and fled to Israel, where he remained a vocal opponent of apartheid. In 1976, when South African Prime Minister John Vorster made his first visit to the Jewish state, Goldreich took action. Among other things, he plastered telephone poles in Jerusalem with posters juxtaposing Vorster's name with swastikas. While he was busy doing this, a Holocaust survivor with a number tattooed on his arm approached him, angrily spat on one of the posters, and proclaimed, "We will make agreements with the devil to save Jews from persecution and to secure the future of this state." Goldreich, Sasha Polakow-Suransky informs us, was left speechless.

Who knew better, Goldreich or the anonymous survivor? Polakow-Suransky unmistakably identifies more with the former's fully justified moral indignation than with the latter's cold and amoral realism. But he does not rush to judgment. While he provides abundant proof of what he surely sees as Israel's deplorable closeness to apartheid-era South Africa, he also supplies no small amount of evidence that its leaders acted consistently with their country's best interests when they chose in this case to "deal with the devil." His book ends on a surprisingly ambiguous note. Instead of voicing a clear opinion regarding how Israel should have handled the morally charged political choices it faced in dealing with South Africa, he changes the subject from Israel's relation to the apartheid regime to what he supposes to be its growing resemblance to it. Just why he does this is not entirely clear.

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