Trouble with Washington

Thursday, December 16, 2004

By this morning, the details of the affair were known – and while the Americans have yet to comment publicly, the Israelis were combining an admission that relations between the Pentagon and Defense Ministry have been soured, there is no U.S. demand for the resignation of Yaron (whom the Israelis say is getting full backing from Prime Minister Sharon and Defense Minister Mofaz). Indeed, according to the Israeli side of the story, the entire scandal is a matter of a misunderstanding resulting from a bureaucratic failure inside the Pentagon.

The broads outline of the affair is as follows. After a few years of applying subtle pressure, by 2000, the U.S. lost its patience with Israel, which had worked out a joint deal with the Russians to sell the Chinese a highly sophisticated airborne radar system known as the Phalcon, based on a Russian plane loaded with advanced Israeli aeronautics. Indeed, in 2000, then president Clinton had to phone then-premier Ehud Barak to tell him on the eve of the Camp David summit that if Israel did not immediately cancel the deal with the Chinese, Washington would cancel the summit. Embarrassed, Barak did not make a personal call to the Chinese president, who had only a few months earlier spent eight full days touring Israel, something no Chinese president had ever done, in any country. Instead, Barak asked then ambassador Ora Namir to deliver the message that the deal was being shut down. The Chinese were furious. The American anger over the affair included a demand that Israel cease all weapons deals with China, which Israel promised to do.

But a few months ago, during a routine conversation between Yaron and Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon, Yaron and chief Israeli weapons procurement director in the U.S. retired Brigadier General Yehutiel Mor made an incidental mention of a routine Israeli resupply of parts for a Harpy unmanned airborne vehicle system Israel sold for about $55 million to the Chinese in the mid-1990s, long before the Phalcon deal was foiled by American intervention. Feith was shocked to hear about the resupply, understanding (or in the Israeli version, misunderstanding) that Israel had broken its promise to stop selling strategic weapons to the Chinese. Yaron was just as shocked that the Americans were unaware of the Harpy deal, and looking back in Defense Ministry records found that the Israeli sale was duly reported by ‘professional level’ Israeli officials to their counterparts back in the 1990s.

Perhaps. In any case, ever since the Pollard affair, admiration in the Pentagon for Israeli military prowess has been tainted with degrees of distrust of Israelis (and as the Larry Franlin-SAIPAC affair nowadays shows) and of American Jewish ‘dual loyalty.’ There have been ups and downs in the levels of that distrust since that 80s Pollard espionage case in the 1980s, and with almost routine regularity, just as things seem to get back on course, another scandal breaks out, testing the strength of the ties between the two defense establishments. As of this morning, the affair seems to be somewhat less dramatic than originally reported last night, but it nonetheless is another scar on the body of the relationship. The Israelis, by the way, paid off the Chinese some $100 million in canceled contract fees, but are recouping the money by selling the Phalcon (with U.S. permission) to India.

Back on the local political and diplomatic front: the new coalition talks between Likud and Labor seemed stalled in last minute brinkmanship as the final deal is on the verge of being wrapped up, but a Sharon meeting with Shimon Peres, either by phone or in person is likely to clear things up by the weekend. Meanwhile, Likud and Shas seem to be working out a deal that would have Shas join the government after the Palestinian presidential elections, because then, instead of a unilateral disengagement, to which Shas leader Rabbi Ovadia Ysef objects, there would be a disengagement coordinated with the Palestinians, which Yosef apparently believes is safer for the Jews. United Torah Judaism is also ready to shake hands on their deal with the Likud – though there are still some last minute hitches connected with the specific powers of a UTJ deputy minister for religious affairs who will be stationed in the Prime Minister’s Office.

On the Palestinian front, Mahmoud Abbas’ reiterations of his opposition to the armed intifada, his explicit descriptions of armed attacks on Israelis as detrimental to the Palestinian cause – and perhaps most of all, his low-key style of rhetoric that is forceful because it is so understated – has Israelis taking him more seriously than when he briefly served as prime minister in 2003. Nonetheless, Israel may be on the verge of making the same mistake it made in 2003, when it believed it was offering a goodwill gesture to the Palestinians by releasing a couple of hundred petty Palestinian criminals held in Israeli prisons and thinking that would help Abbas’ stature. Because of their insistence on not releasing any prisoners ‘with blood on their hands’ – or any Palestinians held without trial in administrative detention on suspicion of being involved in terror planning – Israel is preparing to once again release about 200 prisoners, and all are due for release anyway in the coming weeks and months and none are high profile figures in the Palestinian prisoner hierarchy, the most prestigious extra-parliamentary and governmental political hierarchy in Palestinian politics. The current prisoner release, due next week or the week after, is ostensibly being made in response to an Egyptian request in the wake of the release of Azzam Azzam, the Israeli Druze textile technician who was jailed for 8 years in Egypt on trumped-up espionage charges.

Abbas’ rhetoric, whether it’s called pragmatic or moderate, not only reflects a newfound trend in Palestinian public opinion in favor of direct negotiations with Israel, it has also opened some breaches in the Israeli political arena. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who denies he feels threatened by Peres’ impending arrival in the government, yesterday broke with the prime minister by calling for an international Middle East peace conference along the lines of the 2003 Aqaba Conference. Shalom said the new conference would be all about shoring up international support for a new Palestinian government and it coincides (or clashes) with British plans for such a conference. Sharon, who strongly believes that the most Israel and the Palestinians can hope for is an interim agreement, is vehemently opposed to any conference that could be used to leapfrog the initial stages of the roadmap, which call for an end to Palestinian violence and Israeli settlement expansion. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have followed through on the first stage of the roadmap, of course, with each side saying the other should start. But the Abbas rhetoric is being regarded by some in Israel as more than lip service to his long-held position against what he has called ‘the military intifada.’ By implication, Shalom’s proposal is an indication that he is ready to regard Abbas’ statements as a form of action, a deliberate policy position that is being taken by the man that everyone now knows will be Palestinian president on January 10th.

And it’s not only because he is the only Fateh candidate after Marwan Baghouti dropped out. While some Israelis, particularly on the Right, are mocking Abbas for ‘running away’ from the election campaign in the PA territories, saying that he is afraid to speak so moderately directly to the Palestinian electorate, others note that in the space of a few weeks he has won financial aid from Kuwait (which expelled all its Palestinians avfter the first Gulf War because Yasser Arafat sided with Sadddam Hussein), has been welcomed as a head of state in Syria (which has been boycotting the PLO since the Oslo accords – and Abbas is one of the architects of that deal), and in Lebanon, for the first time since Arafat was expelled by the Israelis in 1982, the PLO chairman has been received by the government and has ventured into Palestinian refugee camps – where he did not promise a return to their homes, only to Palestine. True, the Hamas’ official line is against any ceasefire before the Palestinian elections and a pan-Palestinian agreement for such, but the pressure in the Palestinian street say reports even in the Israeli press seem nowadays to be mostly for a return to normalcy, not war. It’s not yet ‘the new Middle East,’ but it certainly isn’t the same Middle East of only a few months ago.

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