April/May 1992, Page 7, 8, 97

Special Report

Altered States: Will Technology Stealing Charges Against Israel Change the U.S.-Israeli Relationship

"Administration officials have confirmed a detailed report by The Wall Street Journal, which said this week that the State Department's inspector general, Sherman Funk, had determined in a draft report that Israel has re-exported certain advanced American arms technologies to third countries without American permission. Israel has denied doing anything illegal."
-Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, March 15, 1992

The latest serious charges that Israel has turned the selling of America's military high technology to Third World dictatorships and human rights violaters into a major foreign-exchange-earning industry have directed U.S. media attention into three areas.

Critics of Israel seek to focus on the substance of the charges, prompted by numerous intelligence reports and subsequently investigated by a CIA-chaired inter-agency committee, the State Department's inspector general, the RAND Corporation under contract to the Pentagon and, most recently, a joint Defense, State and Commerce Department tem sent to Israel.

Israeli officials deny the newest charges, which echo persistent allegations over the past 20 years, and maintain that all Israeli technology transfers and arms sales for at least the past 12 years have been carried out with U.S. knowledge and implied consent.

For their part, Israel's U.S. media defenders focus on the motive of U.S. government officials for "leaking" allegations that are certain to put yet another rip in the fraying fabric of U.S.-Israeli relations.

In fact, the U.S. charges, Israeli allegations of past U.S. government acquiescence, and the state of the 44-year-old U.S.-Israeli relationship itself all bear re-examination.

The Patriot Missile Charge: Heart of the Matter or Just a Symbol?

"A recent RAND Corp. report prepared for the Pentagon called Israel a 'back door' by which China obtained Western military technology. The report said Israel became China's preeminent foreign supplier of defense equipment when the United States suspended military sales after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. . . The report follows evidence that Israel last year illegally diverted missile technology from the joint U.S.-Israeli Arrow antimissile program to Israel's Jericho II offensive ballistic missile project, then shared the technology with South Africa."
-John M. Broder, Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1992

The latest round of charges that Israel steals and sells U.S. technology to countries in such bad repute that they cannot buy U.S. arms directly was touched off by a report in the March 12 Washington Times that the United States "is investigating intelligence reports that Israel secretly supplied a U.S. Patriot missile or its technology to China in a major illegal diversion of the world's only battle-tested anti-missile system."

The story sent shock waves through Israel's American lobby which, at the time it appeared, was quietly coordinating unpublicized face-to-face meetings by 3,000 "volunteer lobbyists" from all over the United States with their own representatives in Congress and with members of key committees. It was a last-ditch effort on behalf of Israel's request for $10 billion over five years in unconditional loan guarantees over and above Israel's normal $3 billion to $5 billion in annual U.S. military and economic aid.

The Patriot missile accusation touched off a flurry of denials by Israeli government spokesmen and by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens when he arrived in Washington for a previously scheduled visit. Arens is the Israeli government official most closely tied to the reports of secret Israeli-Chinese weapons technology collaboration.

New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb fingered "anti-Israeli Pentagon leakers" as the source of the unconfirmed report. Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden absolved Secretary of State James Baker 3rd of responsibility for surfacing the charge by attributing it to "the perfidious WASPs of Foggy Bottom," meaning career foreign service officers.

New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal charged fellow columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak with misrepresenting as American the Israeli missile technology involved in other transfers to China. Evans and Novak responded with even more detailed charges that the Israelis were compromising highly classified U.S. technology added to weapons jointly developed by the U.S. and Israel.

When a Defense, State and Commerce Department team went to Israel during the last week in March to inspect the two batteries of Patriot missiles turned over to Israel during the Gulf war, Israel charged Saudi Arabia was responsible for Chinese acquisition of the technology. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney dismissed the accusation, saying that while Patriot batteries in Israel were manned by Israeli crews, the batteries in Saudi Arabia were American-manned.

A spate of revelations that surfaced following the Patriot theft charge brought the American public, for the first time, face-to-face with long-standing but muted American suspicions of wholesale violations by Israel of its agreements with the U.S.

State Department, RAND Corporation, and CIA Charges of Systematic Israeli Violations

"Information obtained from government officials during a six-week investigation by this newspaper suggests Israel uses several schemes to transfer, or re-export, U.S. items to other countries. In some cases, they say, the Israelis acquire U.S. components, install them in their own systems and sell the finished products to third countries. In others, Israel employs reverse engineering-disassembling a weapon to acquire its design secrets-and then copies it with changes before selling the item to another country."
-Edward T. Pound, The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 1992

Only a day after The Washington Times published its Patriot missile allegation, the March 13 Wall Street Journal published revelations from a draft report by State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk summarizing intelligence reports of a series of apparent violations by Israel of its agreements with the United States.

Funk, who is Jewish, undertook in 1990 an examination of how effective the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has been in dealing with allegations of unauthorized diversions of U.S. arms and technology by companies in Brazil, South Korea, Singapore and other countries as well as Israel. The State Department report "eventually focused on Israel because, in the words of one senior American official, 'bucketsful of intelligence data' tied companies owned by the Israeli government to illicit sales," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Funk briefed Secretary of State James Baker 3rd and Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger last June on his findings and criticized Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Richard Clarke.

In an Aug. 24 memo Eagleburger authorized further investigations. Subsequently he briefed congressional leaders and the State Department began holding up some export licenses for Israel. It also issued a warning to Israel against further weapons or technology transfers without U.S. approval.

"The only public hint of this tug-of-war came last October, when Mr. Bush slapped Israel on the wrist after the U.S. discovered that an Israeli-owned company had exported ballistic missile components to a South African government firm," The Wall Street Journal reported. "Mr. Bush imposed trading sanctions on the South African firm, but waived them for the Israeli company."

The Israeli company was Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), which is Israel's largest exporter of military hardware and the prime contractor on Israel's U.S.-financed Arrow ground-to-air defense missile. It was only one of the Israeli companies named in the draft State Department report, and in a report commissioned by the Pentagon from the RAND Corporation.

Other Israeli companies named were Rafael, managed by Israel's Ministry of Defense, and another Israeli government-owned company, Israeli Military Industries (IMI). Rafael was said to have sold its Python 3 air-to-air missile to China and Thailand and is suspected of having sold the missile to South Africa, according to The Wall Street Journal. It said the Python 3 was adapted from the U.S. AIM-9L Sidewinder, using a "high degree" of U.S. technology.

China, Israel's largest arms customer, is itself a major world arms exporter and has sold its own version of the Python 3, called the PL-8, to Iraq. Thus U.S. missile technology may have found its way via Israel and China to Iraqi forces for use against American aircraft during the Gulf war.

Other charges are contained in the reports, and in a classified September 1990 report entitled "Israel: Marketing U.S. Strategic Technology" prepared by the Technology Transfer Intelligence Committee, headed by the CIA and including representatives of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Security Council and the FBI. That report charged that Israel sold weaponry containing U.S. technology to South Africa, China, Venezuela, Chile, Ethiopia and Thailand.

IMI, according to The Wall Street Journal's compilation of these various reports, sold its Mapats anti-tank missile to South Africa and Venezuela and is suspected of having sold it to China. The Mapats is said to be a close copy of Hughes Aircraft's TOW-2 missile. The reports also alleged IMI violations of agreements with the U.S. in sales of cluster bombs to Chile, South Africa and Ethiopia, and other sales of aircraft, airborne electronic countermeasures systems, and sophisticated electronics equipment.

Re-exports of military technology acquired by foreign countries from U.S. sources are forbidden by the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, unless specifically approved by the U.S. The law requires the State Department to report to Congress any reliable information on violations.

The State Department bureau headed by Clarke had maintained in response to criticism in a 1989 State Department inspection that the reporting requirements applied only to re-export of equipment furnished directly by the U.S. government, and not on commercial transactions.

A State Department Reprimand

Using CIA information and a 1991 request by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to review all requests approved by the State Department in an effort to crack down on Israel, State Department auditors last spring reviewed the performance of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

They found that checks to be sure that foreign users listed in license applications actually receive the items authorized for shipment had improved markedly, except in the case of authorizations secured by Israeli users. Nothing the lack of follow-up on sales to Israel in contrast to careful monitoring of sales to other countries, Funk recommended disciplinary action against Clarke, a civil service officer, who subsequently has been transferred from his position.

Israeli officials have long deflected criticism of such discrepancies by saying that they had received tacit approval from the Reagan administration to re-export U.S. equipment without seeking specific U.S. approvals. This, The Wall Street Journal reported, has been denied by Reagan administration Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his assistant secretary for international security affairs, Richard Armitage, now a State Department official.

Airing of charges in the media, and the public refutation of Israeli explanations, mark a new turn in the 44-year history of publicly harmonious and often privately acrimonious U.S.-Israeli relations.

The American-Israeli Relationship: Moral, Strategic, Political or Just U.S. Domestic Politics?

"When it gets down to just the American Jewish community as the only ones ready to go out and fight Israel's battles, that is very dangerous for Israel and for the role of American Jews in American society."

-Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis, March 21, 1992

There is no question as divisive in international diplomacy as well as in U.S. domestic politics as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. To its partisans, Israel has become the subject of an unfair worldwide conspiracy against the Jewish state, just because it's Jewish. Israel, they complain, is held to a "different standard" than other Middle Eastern states, in many of which human rights violations are routine.

Critics respond that it is Israel that has created the double standard. It regularly cites murderous persecution of Jews in past eras and other parts of the world as justification for its current brutalization of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and for its continuing refusal to return land seized by force from its Arab neighbors. Similar aggressive acts by an Arab state such as Iraq are not tolerated by the international community.

It is no surprise, therefore, that historians differ on the nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It is certain, however, that the U.N. Security Council would not have voted in 1947 to partition Palestine, giving 53 percent to its 650,000 Jewish inhabitants and 47 percent to its 1,300,000 Arab inhabitants, without heavy U.S. pressure. This amounted to economic blackmail of America's World War II allies and of poor and emerging nations-all heavily dependent upon the promise of U.S. economic and political assistance.

Without U.S. pressure, few of those countries would have voted for the partition of Palestine, which only promised more turmoil and warfare in a world sick of both. None would have voted for such a patently unfair division of the land among its inhabitants. Even U.S. diplomats advised President Harry Truman against partition, correctly predicting a bloodbath.

It is U.S. motives, therefore, that are disputed. Most historians say Truman's decision to support creation of a Jewish state was motivated by advice from domestic political advisers like Clark Clifford that it would ensure that the "Jewish vote" would go to Democratic congressional candidates, and to Truman, in the 1948 elections.

Truman's writings at the time, and much of what Clifford has written since, support that view. Proponents of the other view, that Truman supported Israel for altruistic reasons, find substantiation in his subsequent statements to Israeli and American Jewish organizations.

Regardless of U.S. motivation, a "moral obligation" incurred when the U.S. played midwife to the birth of Israel into a hostile world was generally cited as the basis for U.S. support during Israel's first 20 years of existence. It was likened to the obligation incurred by parents for the nurturing and educating of a child they have brought into the world.

In 1967, however, Israel "came of age" with its June 5 attack on Egypt and Syria. Within six days it had defeated and occupied lands belonging to both, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, seized from Jordan after it entered the war in support of its Egyptian and Syrian allies.

Israel's victory altered the relationship. It had disregarded U.S. advice by reacting to Arab threats with a surprise attack instead of awaiting international mediation. It then refused to enter into a land-for-peace settlement with its Arab neighbors in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. That resolution, supported by the U.S., the Western powers, the former U.S.S.R. and, eventually, Arab League member states as well, calls upon the Arabs to acknowledge Israel's "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries" in return for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict." Such a withdrawal would leave Israel in possession of 78 percent of Palestine-far more that it was awarded in 1947.

As it became increasingly clear that Israel had no intention of entering into such a peace, Israel's American supporters subtly shifted the public rationale for the close U.S.-Israeli relationship from "moral obligation" to depiction of Israel as "the only working democracy in the Middle East."

It took several years for Americans to begin to understand that Israel was a democracy that "worked" only for Jews. Israeli "nationality" was available only to its Jewish citizens. Those who did not possess it were barred from owning or working in 93 percent of the land within Israel's pre-1967 borders. The Middle East's "only working democracy" did not work like any Western democracies.

By the beginning of the Reagan administration, this no longer mattered. It was then, for the first time, that government officials publicly accepted the concept of Israel as a "strategic asset." It made no sense, however, to anyone familiar with the area.

Israel was too small and too remote from the Soviet Union to play a role in the U.S.-U.S.S.R. confrontation. Nor did the U.S. have serious problems with any Arab country, or even any hostile Islamic country like Iran, that did not stem, directly or indirectly, from uncritical U.S. support of Israel.

No one sought to explain how Israel could be a "strategic asset" when its refusal to withdraw from lands occupied in 1967 was alienating inhabitants of an unbroken Arab arc extending from Morocco on the Atlantic to Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf, and continuing through the Islamic world to Malaysia and Indonesia on the Pacific.

Instead, partisans of Israel would refer to Israeli "sharing of intelligence" and "testing of U.S. weaponry" on Israel's enemies, a concept sickening to all but the most fanatic Cold Warriors. Those who advanced these lame arguments became the "neo-cons," partisans of Israel who refused to admit that it was possible for Israeli and U.S. interests to diverge.

However, the improvised "strategic" underpinning for the U.S.-Israeli relationship collapsed irrevocably along with the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the former Soviet Union. As a result, Israel's partisans have been reduced to a portion of the U.S. Jewish community and to fringe Christian fundamentalists typified by Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, and Oliver North.

These die-hards have resuscitated the "working democracy" rationale for a close U.S.-Israeli relationship. Public opinion polls show, however, that the concept isn't working.

In the aftermath of the destabilizing Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Iran-Contra revelations of Israeli weapons sales to Khomeini's Iran, the brutal suppression of the Palestinian intifada, the Pollard espionage, and settlement building by Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon to foreclose a Middle East peace settlement, the damage seems irreversible. The surfacing of allegations of Israeli sales of stolen U.S. technology add nothing but public certainty that a "normalization" of the over-politicized U.S.-Israeli relationship can only be of benefit to all concerned.

The Charges, the Loan Guarantees, and the Future Relationship

"If Shamir wins and insists on this policy of de facto annexation of the occupied territories, then I foresee nothing but trouble. But if there is a change of regime or a coaltion with Rabin in a strong position to influence Israel's settlement policy, relations with Bush could be restored very quickly."

-Former National Security Council Middle East Adviser Geoffrey Kemp, March 24, 1992

"We have definitely reached a turning point. Even if the Democrats win the next elections, our relations with the Americans are never going to be the way they used to be."

-Specialist in U.S.-Israeli Relations Gabriel Sheffer, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, March 20, 1992

Close U.S.-Israeli relations cannot be restored by a change in Israeli leadership, but only by serious Israeli participation in a land-for-peace settlement to end the Palestinian-Israeli dispute after more than half a century of bloodshed. Nor will a change in U.S. leadership give Israel an automatic license to resume its present self-destructive course. Despite campaign rhetoric, both Republican and Democratic administrations tend to pick up the Middle East peace process where their predecessors leave it, and continue in the same direction.

Virtually every American political leader understands that the Israeli-Palestinian problem has to be solved equitably, or the U.S. will bear sole responsibility for continuing instability in oil-producing areas upon which the entire industrialized world depends.

Therefore, when such groups as the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations alternately threaten and plead with Congress and the Bush administration to "unlink" U.S. aid to Israel and Israeli freezing of all settlement activity, they succeed only in alienating their fellow citizens.

When moderate U.S. Jews re-examine administration policies, not all are unhappy with what they see. Author Leonard Fein speaks for what may be a "silent majority" within the American Jewish community. Writing in the liberal New York Jewish weekly Forward of March 6, before the technology theft charges were aired, he said of the loan guarantees:

"Most American Jews heard Secretary Baker say 'no.' They weren't listening carefully. In fact, he said 'yes' to the full shot-$2 billion a year for five years. True, he added a condition-no more settlement activity-and true, Israel's government is not disposed to meet that condition. But as the secretary testified the other day, the choice is Israel's. And why not? Neither logic nor morality places the choice in America's lap. American aid has always been an instrument of American policy, and that policy with regard to the settlements has been clear all along."

Richard Curtiss, a retired U.S. foreign service officer, is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

< Prev		Next >