Israel Put on Defensive Over Its Planned Military Deal With China

Israel and the United States are among the closest allies on the planet, but they are at loggerheads over an Israeli plan to supply sophisticated aerial spy technology to China.

Israel finds itself torn between the United States, which gave it more than $3 billion in aid last year and enormous political support, and China, a principal market for the Jewish state’s vital defense industry.

Washington has repeatedly protested what it calls Israel’s “deepening defense relationship” with China and has raised specific objections to the impending $250-million sale to Beijing of an advanced airborne radar system--especially since that could give an edge to China precisely as tensions with Taiwan escalate.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is scheduled to meet with President Clinton in Washington this week, has indicated that the sale will go through despite U.S. concerns.

President Jiang Zemin will make the first state visit of a Chinese leader to Israel at midweek, and there is speculation that he will confirm additional orders of the new radar, an Israeli-developed Falcon early-warning system being installed on a Chinese-owned, Russian-built Ilyushin transport plane.

For Israel, the China sale builds on a relationship that goes back more than 15 years, when the Jewish state, secretly at first, began selling arms to Beijing. The defense relationship became the basis for diplomatic ties that the two countries formally established in 1992.

Military-industrial production, considered the engine that drives Israel’s economy, is a major provider of jobs and constitutes a powerful domestic lobby. And at hundreds of millions of dollars, China, by at least one estimate, accounts for about one-quarter of Israel’s arms exports. (Exact figures are hard to come by because much of such information remains classified.)

It was after the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 that China began to replace Tehran as one of Israel’s leading military markets, and today Beijing is especially important because so many other markets, particularly the arms-hungry countries of the Arab world, are off limits to the Jewish state.

Canceling the impending sale would harm these ties with China, Israeli defense officials maintain, and scare off future business partners who would see Israel bowing to the demands of an outside power, they say--in this case, the United States.

Israel’s defense establishment argues that the country’s flourishing arms industry is crucial to its staying several steps ahead of its well-armed Arab neighbors.

But the debate in Israel over the propriety of the sale is intensifying.

“Even if local defense industries are a critical component in staying ahead in a U.S.-fueled Mideast arms race, it would be foolhardy for Israel to harm the U.S. position in Asia,” the Jerusalem Post said in an editorial last week. “Israel cannot be insensitive to the intersection of moral and strategic interests.”

Gerald Steinberg, an arms expert at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University, said the dilemma for Israeli policymakers is made deeper by the possibility that Israeli technology could in theory help a huge power like China crush a small neighbor like Taiwan.

“A lot of Israelis could see themselves in Taiwan’s position,” he said.

U.S. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, in Israel last week, warned Barak and other Israeli officials that Washington considers arms sales to China “counterproductive” because they threaten to change the strategic balance in Asia.

Washington also believes that the arms sales to China make it more difficult to maintain support for Israel in the Republican-controlled Congress. Israel was expected to seek a $17-billion military aid package if it reached a peace deal with Syria. With those talks at an impasse, that anticipated request is on hold.

Last week, Rep. Sonny Callahan (R-Ala.) threatened to block $250 million in aid to Israel if the radar sale goes ahead.

“Every member of Congress I’ve talked to is very distressed by this move,” said Callahan, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee’s foreign operations panel.

Barak, who joined the visiting Cohen at a news conference, said he would take Israel’s special relationship with the United States “into account” but did not offer to cancel the sale.

“We are aware of the sensitivity in the United States with regard to China,” Barak said. But, he added, “we are, of course, aware of our commitments in contracts that we signed.”