WASHINGTON — The initial furor over Israel’s sale of a radar system to China appears to have quieted, but the issue has renewed worries in Congress that U.S. allies are selling advanced military technology to Beijing.
Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House International Relations Committee, said this week he is worried that the technology could wind up in the hands of countries like Iran.
The State Department said it does not believe Israel sold U.S. technology to China, and several Jewish activists said they believe the issue will fade because no laws were broken.
But some U.S. lawmakers are still concerned.
Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he is worried about China acquiring advanced radar technology.
Despite Israel’s announcement of the deal, China denied on Tuesday that it planned to buy the radar system.
“We don’t have defense cooperation with Israel,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yunxi, said when asked to comment on the reported $250 million deal, according to Reuters.
Israel’s defense establishment was conspicuously silent about China’s flat denial.
The United States has barred the sale of U.S. military equipment to China since Beijing crushed the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Israel’s relationship with China was mentioned in a major report released earlier this year by a House committee investigating Chinese espionage and acquisition of U.S. technology.
The report, spearheaded by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), said Israel has been one of China’s leading suppliers of American technology during the 1990s.
“Significant transfers of U.S. military technology have also taken place in the mid-1990s through the re-export by Israel of advanced technology transferred to it by the United States, including avionics and missile guidance useful for the F-10 fighter,” the report states. “Congress and several executive agencies have also investigated allegations that Israel has provided U.S.-origin cruise, air-to-air and ground-to-air missile technology” to China.
The declassified sections of the Cox report do not provide any details about these “significant” transfers allegedly made by Israel. A large piece of the report remains classified.
An earlier Bush administration investigated whether Israel illegally transferred Patriot missile launch systems technology to China, but the investigation did not confirm that such a transfer occurred.
Shoshana Bryen, the director of special projects for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, said problems arise between the United States and Israel concerning such deals because of the close working relationship the countries have in developing weapons technology.
“The Israelis tinker with everything they buy from us,” she said, noting that there are differences on where American technology stops and Israeli technology begins.
Mark Regev, the Israeli Embassy’s spokesman, said in a prepared statement that “Israel has an elaborate system of checks and controls in regard to defense related exports by Israeli corporations which, of course, takes into very high consideration the special strategic and political relationship with the United States.”
Israel has had a long tradition of quiet, even clandestine defense relations with China, with sales of billions of dollars in weapons in the 1980s. Defense trade, however, has declined this decade, but now appears to be on the upswing following last year’s visit to China by then defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai.