Complaints by the US Congress that Israel is still supplying arms and military technology originating in the US to China are recycled, and are based mostly on old Israeli media reports, sources in the Israeli embassy in Washington told “Globes” yesterday.
A House of Representatives Select Committee on US National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China report published yesterday, stated that Israel was second only to Russia as a supplier of weapons and a pipeline for the transfer of sophisticated military technologies to China, as had been noted in the Select Committee’s 2002 report.
The current report added that the committee was disturbed that Israel continues to transfer technologies originating in the US to China.
Israeli embassy sources said that Israel had never transferred US technologies to China. “The US may have cause to be angry about the use that China may make of technologies, but Israel does not require a license to export Israeli technologies,” one source said. “The US is perfectly well aware that Israel’s export control is among the best in the world, and all the US technologies in its possession are well protected.”
The source added, “As the report itself states, Israel acceded to a US request by suspending all negotiations to export weapons and military equipment to China in January 2003… The fact that the section on Israel takes up less than one page of a 296-page report speaks for itself.”
Other sources said that some Select Committee members were hostile towards China, and regarded it as the next major enemy of the US. They automatically classified any country having security ties with China as an enemy of the US.
One of the Select Committee’s recommendations included a threat to non-US defense industries doing business with China, a category that includes Israeli defense industries. The Select Committee recommended that Congress direct the US administration to impose restrictions on foreign military contractors selling sensitive technologies with possible military uses to China, and bar these contractors from participating in US research, development, and manufacturing of defense products.
The committee said that such restrictions on cooperation with such companies could be designed to apply only to the technologies that the companies are suspected of selling to China.
Select Committee vice chairman Dick D’Amato told the “Reuters” news agency that this recommendation should not apply to Israel. He said that the US should negotiate separately with Israel concerning problems related to its cooperation with China.
At the same time, D’Amato severely criticized Israel. He said that the US had made “strenuous” efforts to restrain Israel from selling arms to China, but, “There’s still not the level of cooperation and assurance that has relieved our concerns.”
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on June 16, 2004