Israel supplied cluster bombs to Ethiopia prior to 1979, former Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin revealed last week.
According to highly reliable sources, Rabin made the disclosure privately last Friday in New York, where he was attending the National Commission meeting of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
His comments came in response to a request from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to clarify a recent account of Israel’s military tics to Ethiopia given to members of Congress by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Moshe Arad.
Several lawmakers, including Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) and Reps. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.), had met with Arad and later with Thomas Dine, AIPAC’s executive director, to express concern about reports that Israel was supplying deadly weapons to the Ethiopian government.
The matter has been of particular concern lately because of the recent escalation of violence in Ethiopia’s decades-long civil war. News reports have blamed cluster bombs dropped by government forces for inflicting massive casualties on the civilian population.
A cluster bomb scatters over a wide area smaller bombs carrying special charges designed to penetrate armor. It can expand the range of a conventional bomb by a factor of 40 times.
On June 14, NBC News showed a videotape, apparently supplied by an Eritrean rebel group, of victims of cluster bombs allegedly supplied by Israel. NBC also reported that Israel has been training Ethiopian security forces.
A day after the report, Rabin told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that there were no Israeli military advisers now in Ethiopia. But the same day, he disclosed privately that Israel had sold cluster bombs to the Marxist government until 1979.
NO SUCH SALES NOW
However, when questioned about the matter Thursday, Oded Eran, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United States, said he was unaware of any such sales to Ethiopia.
“We do not sell cluster bombs to Ethiopia, so therefore we’ve notified the administration exactly what we’ve done with Ethiopia, and that’s a far cry from the cluster bombs.”
But Eran did not specifically deny that cluster bombs had been sold in the past.
A pro-Israel lobbyist here said it is “certainly possible” that the cluster bombs being used now were supplied by Israel in the 1970s, because they do not degrade in that span.
The 1979 date is significant, because it was the first full year that a section of the Arms Export Control Act went into effect requiring an end to U.S. military aid to Israel if cluster bombs provided after that date to the Jewish state were used against civilians.
The United States continued to sell cluster bombs to Israel until mid-1982, when President Reagan notified Congress that Israel may have violated that policy by using them against populated areas during the invasion of Lebanon. Reagan resumed cluster bomb sales to Israel in 1988.
Last week, Yediot Achronot cited a State Department document as saying Israel supplied 100 cluster bombs to Ethiopia in October 1989.
A State Department official, responding to both the NBC and Yediot Achronot reports, said he had “no basis” to say the reports are true.
The official said that in recent months, the only weapons Israel has provided to Ethiopia have been “a small amount of small arms, but nothing beyond that.” An Israeli Embassy official said the small arms consisted of a few hundred rifles.
REPORTS ABOUT CHINA, SOUTH AFRICA
Rabin’s disclosure about past cluster bombs sales comes in the wake of a barrage of media reports linking the Jewish state to arms sales to belligerent nations around the globe.
Israel’s defense establishment has been angered by the reports, which Israeli officials blame on leaks from the State Department.
Israeli officials say U.S. officials, particularly in the State Department, are unfairly blaming Israel for an arms shipment to Antigua that ended up in the hands of Colombian drug traffickers.
They are also upset with reports quoting anonymous U.S. officials as alleging that Israel provided aircraft technology to China after the United States banned such shipments in the wake of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Earlier there were reports that Israel had provided South Africa with the technology to build nuclear-tipped missiles.
Only in one of those cases have the allegations been confirmed publicly by the United States or Israel: that of Israel’s sale to Antigua of $200.000 worth of Uzi submachine guns, Galil assault rifles and ammunition diverted to Colombia, reportedly without Israel’s knowledge.
In virtually all of the cases, the accusations against Israel are “specious,” said a pro-Israel lobbyist here. But at the same time, at least in the case of Ethiopia, the lobbyist said, there appear to be “legitimate” unexplained questions.
On China, the Los Angeles Times last week quoted a senior U.S. official as saying that Israel is supplying the People’s Republic with military technology “over our objections.”
‘NO EVIDENCE’ OF VIOLATIONS
If Israel did provide such technology to China, it would not be alone. A State Department official said Wednesday that Britain has publicly acknowledged providing avionics technology to China following the U.S. ban.
The department official would not confirm or deny the allegations against Israel. But he said he was unaware of any country that was supplying U.S. technology to China following the 1989 ban, which would most directly violate U.S. policy.
The Pentagon and Israel’s Defense Ministry refuse to comment on the Times report, because it deals with intelligence matters.
Despite the range of allegations against Israel, they have yet to amount to any major public crisis. The Pentagon, said spokesman Lt. Col. Steven Roy, has “no evidence that Israel has conducted anything in violation of what we are concerned about.”
(JTA correspondent Hugh Orgel in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
