JERUSALEM -- Israel will not cancel the sale of a sophisticated early warning plane to China despite a "steamroller" of U.S. pressure aimed at edging Israel out of the international arms market, the deputy defense minister said Wednesday in an unusually blunt statement.
Shortly after deputy minister Ephraim Sneh spoke, Chinese President Jiang Zemin arrived in Israel for a historic state visit.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was en route back from a 19-hour trip to Washington, was reportedly urged by President Clinton to cancel the deal. The chairman of the House Foreign Aid Committee threatened last week to deduct Israeli earnings from the sale of the planes from U.S. aid to Israel.
Sneh, a retired general, scoffed at arguments that the sale of the PHALCON airborne surveillance system to China could pose a threat to Taiwan, a U.S. ally. He said one early warning plane cannot change the military balance in Asia.
Sneh said that when Washington sold similar early warning, or AWACS, planes to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, it assured Israel that they are purely defensive. Sneh said he did not believe the aircraft had changed its character today.
"Every elected representative, whether he is in the American Congress or in the Israeli Knesset tries to protect the jobs of his voters," the deputy minister said.
Sneh said the U.S. presidential campaign was also a factor. Noting that the Israel-China deal was signed three years ago, Sneh said: "Now, of all times, the issue has become hot, to no small degree because the entire Chinese issue has become a burning issue in domestic American politics."
Sneh said that in the past the United States has "brutally thrown Israel out" of other international arms markets.
"In this market of the defense industries of the world, in this competition, there are no friends," he told Israel radio. "Everyone is competing without mercy against everyone."
Israel is completing production of one early warning plane for China, and the Chinese have an option on three to seven additional planes.
Sneh also accused the United States of applying one standard to Israel and a different one to other friendly countries, such as Britain and France, which also competed for the Chinese contract, but were beaten by the Israeli bid.
"I'm not sure that Britain, for example, was subjected to the steamroller which is being applied to us today," Sneh said. "They (the Americans) don't have the leverage on Britain which they have on us."
Sneh said Israel would honor its contract to deliver the first plane to China but would "take account" of American sensibilities with regard to additional planes.