Unbridled trade in arms
By Yossi Melman
Haaretz, December 23, 2004
Shimon Naor (Hershkowitz) was a colonel in the manpower section of the Navy. In the 1990s, after he received the authorization of the Defense Ministry, he became an international arms dealer. In 1999 Naor was arrested in Romania for arms smuggling to the UNITA rebels (National Union for Total Independence of Angola), for using forged documents, and contravening a United Nations arms embargo.
The United Nations asked Israel, through the Foreign Ministry, to assist in the investigation but was confronted by a decisive cold shoulder from the senior triad in charge of arms sales at the Defense Ministry: Director General Amos Yaron, his deputy and the person in charge of internal security Yehiel Horev, and Yossi Ben-Hanan, head of foreign military assistance (SIBAT), who is also responsible for issuing permits for exports of military sales.
The deputy defense minister at the time, Ephraim Sneh, tried to assist Naor, but the Romanians refused to release him. In the end, Naor managed to gain his release on bail and fled to Israel. In Romania he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in absentia, and is considered a fugitive from justice. Still, he continues to trade in arms.
Naor's name was mentioned last Thursday in a story published in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, the Arabic-language daily based in London. It was one of four reports this month that dealt with the role of Israel in controversial, or illegal, arms deals around the world. According to the story, two Israelis were arrested in Jordan on suspicion of smuggling arms and training rebels in Sudan. The report claimed that those arrested had mentioned the names of three arms dealers and security consultants from Israel: the son of the former chief of the Mossad, MK Danny Yatom, Shimon Naor, and Amos Golan. The latter two denied the veracity of the report, as did Yatom on behalf of his son. Golan has a factory that manufactures pistols capable of firing around corners, and was a colonel and commander of the undercover IDF Duvdevan unit, which specializes in disguising themselves as Arabs. In recent years he has been busy selling arms in Africa. One of his business partners was Meir Dagan, prior to being appointed head of the Mossad.
By chance, news agencies and the American media announced the same day that Leib Kohn, a Jewish businessman from New York, had pleaded guilty in an American court of attempting to smuggle components for the Hawk surface-to-air missile to Israel. The prosecution alleged that the final destination of the components was Iran. The deal was allegedly to have taken place through two Israeli arms dealers, Eli Cohen and Avichai Weinstein, who for years have denied that they are selling arms to Iran. Cohen served a jail term in an American prison in 1995 for an attempt to sell arms to Iran, and on the basis of similar suspicions he and Weinstein have since been arrested and questioned three times in Israel.
A number of days after the publication of the story, it was reported that the U.S. administration was furious about the sale to China of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in the 1990s. A month ago, the government of France protested the continued arms sales from Israel to the Ivory Coast, which endangers French troops there.
These four cases are a genuine reflection of the unbridled arms exports policy of the Defense Ministry, under the leadership of Yaron, Horev and Ben Hanan, which is based on the ambition to sell as much as possible, at any cost, and to any interested buyer. The result has been that in 2003 Israel's military sales abroad reached the $3 billion mark, about 10 percent of the overall arms trade in the world. These figures place Israel in fifth or sixth place on the list of the largest arms exporting countries in the world. The estimates of the Defense Ministry for 2004 are for revenues of $4 billion. This estimate does not take into account the serious damage the arms trade causes to Israel's image, with its affiliation with sinister regimes where human rights are crushed with brutality.
The Defense Ministry has always had an extremely independent policy, which ignores the existence of the Foreign Ministry. As early as the 1950s, foreign minister Golda Meir complained that Shimon Peres, then director general at the Defense Ministry, had kept secret the initiatives carried out in France for acquiring military equipment and a nuclear reactor in exchange for the collusion resulting in the Sinai War.
Since then, Defense Ministry officials, backed by the various defense ministers, have adopted an attitude that has permitted the secret sale of arms to the worst dictators. They did this with full knowledge that if the matter were to be revealed, it would be forgiven. The Foreign Ministry occasionally sought to moderate this attitude and became involved in the decision-making process. But in the past decade the relative apathy of the foreign ministers regarding the aggressive sales policy of the Defense Ministry has reached new heights.
In practice there is nearly no oversight - neither by the government nor the Knesset - on the decisions of senior officials in the Defense Ministry. They enjoy the blind trust of Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who has nearly no involvement in their calculations. Whoever tries to check this approach is marked by them as a "bleeding heart liberal," and he is told that if we do not sell, someone else will, and in any case, military exports provide jobs. It is no surprise that thousands retiring from the IDF, the General Security Service and the Mossad have become arms dealers in recent years, or security consultants. Naturally, this situation is fertile ground for diplomatic crises and embarrassments, like those of the past month.
