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U.S. aid to Israel subsidizes a potent weapons exporter
Wed Jun 19, 9:37 PM ET
By JIM KRANE, AP Technology Writer
NEW YORK - At an arms trade fair in Paris this week, Israel showed the world's
military shoppers fruits of its high-tech arms industry, including its Merkava tank,
unmanned spy planes and the planet's most sophisticated missile defense system.
With its tourist industry all but shuttered by a 21-month Palestinian uprising and
high-tech in a slump, the Jewish state depends deeply on the foreign currency
earnings of its weapons industry, now the world's 10th largest.
Deftly marketed missiles, radar and other products from Israeli companies now
compete with those of top-tier arms producers including the United States, reaping
about dlrs 2 billion of a dlrs 27 billion yearly worldwide market, said Kuti Mor,
deputy
director general of Israel's Ministry of Defense.
In France, Turkey, The Netherlands and Finland, Israeli companies have edged
such U.S. firms as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics out of arms
deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.
The irony, experts say, is that tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars and transfers of
American military technology helped create and nurture Israel's industry, in effect
subsidizing a foreign competitor.
No other country receives as much U.S. aid or freedom to plow it into its own export
industries as Israel, say experts in academia, industry and the U.S. government.
It's allowed them to advance faster than Lockheed or Boeing or Hughes would
have liked, said David Lewis, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University who has
researched Israel's defense industry for a forthcoming book.
While the United States gets certain benefits from its 50-year partnership with Israel
political leverage, a proving ground for new weapons and intelligence
cooperation among them critics point to a serious downside.
It's a new concept for most people. said Joel Johnson, a vice president at the
Aerospace Industries Association of America, which represents many of the largest
U.S. arms producers. We give them money to build stuff for themselves and the
U.S. taxpayer gets nothing in return.
The rationale, said Richard Fisher, a defense analyst with the Jamestown
Foundation, is that Washington is willing to sacrifice some defense industry
competitiveness in order to give Israel incentive to make peace.
Supporters of Israel tend to view the transfers of U.S. technology and funds as good
for both countries' economies, akin to post-World War II assistance for Europe and
Japan.
It's true that Israel sometimes competes with the U.S., but so do all those
countries, said Mark Regev, a spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington,
D.C. Is it that different than American aid to Japan, or the Marshall Plan in western
Europe?
Beyond competing with U.S. armaments, Israeli weapons also flow to countries off-
limits to American companies. Its weapons buttress the arsenals of nations such as
China that the United States considers strategic competitors, alarming U.S. military
planners.
Last year, U.S. surveillance planes flying along China's coast were threatened by
Chinese fighter jets armed with Israeli missiles.
During the series of airborne confrontations, a Chinese jet crashed after colliding
with a U.S. spy plane, killing the Chinese pilot and disabling the U.S. plane. The
incident sparked a bitter diplomatic row as China detained the American crew for 11
days.
Had Chinese fighter pilots been given the order to fire, they could have brought
down the U.S. planes with Israeli Python III missiles.
U.S. technology given to the Israelis in the form of the Sidewinder missile was used
in the development of the Python, said Larry Wortzel, former U.S. Army attache in
Beijing and now a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
U.S. defense chiefs say Israel sold China the missiles without informing the United
States.
Generally speaking, we're not in favor of such capable weapons systems being
proliferated to a variety of nations around the world, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said
in a Pentagon ( news - web sites) briefing last year. That's a good missile, and its
capabilities are considerable.
In 2000, Israel bowed to U.S. pressure and canceled the sale to China of its
AWACS-style airborne early warning radar planes. The director general of Israel's
finance ministry, Ohad Marani, said Israel typically discusses arms sales with the
Americans.
We don't sell systems that upset the Pentagon, Marani said.
Israel's arms industry nevertheless continues to put great emphasis on the Chinese
market, hawking its spy planes and radar systems at recent trade shows in Beijing
and Singapore.
China may unveil as early as this year its new J-10 jet fighter, which experts say is
modeled on Israel's Lavi. The Lavi, now discontinued,
