Israel maintains robust arms trade with rogue regimes

HUMAN rights activists are stepping up efforts to expose Israel’s long and covert history of supplying weapons and military training to regimes while they actively commit massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The issue of Israel’s trade with rogue regimes has been thrust into the spotlight again after revelations that it is sending weapons to Myanmar, in defiance of the US and European arms embargo.

Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar was condemned last month by the United Nations for conducting what it called a “textbook ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are reported to have fled to neighboring Bangladesh in recent weeks, after evidence of the torching of entire villages, massacres, and systematic rapes.

Israel has not divulged details of its ties to Myanmar’s military government, but public records show that it has sold the military there armed patrol boats, guns and surveillance equipment. Myanmar’s special forces have also been trained by Israelis.

Human rights groups are set to stage a protest outside Israel’s parliament on October 30, calling for an immediate halt to the weapons sales to Myanmar.

Israeli firms have also broken with the United States and Europe by supplying weapons and surveillance equipment to militias in South Sudan, where a civil war has raged since late 2013. Some 300,000 Sudanese are believed to have been killed in the fighting.

Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer, has submitted a spate of petitions to the Israeli courts in an attempt to bring to light details of Israel’s trade with such regimes. He said the cases were designed to hasten war crimes investigations of the officials and contractors involved.

“Many Western states sell arms, but what’s unique about Israel is that, wherever war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed, you find Israel is present,” Mack told Al Jazeera.

“The companies selling the weapons, and the officials who quietly approve the trade, must be held accountable. Otherwise, why would this ever stop?”

Mack said that Israel’s collusion with Myanmar’s military was part of a pattern of aiding rogue regimes that went back decades and reflected the importance of the arms trade to Israel’s economy.

Over the summer, it was revealed that Israeli defense officials approve 99.8 percent of all requests for arms export licenses.

As well as fuelling the current violence in Myanmar and South Sudan, Israel has been accused of clandestinely providing arms used in notorious past episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in places such as Rwanda, the Balkans, Chile, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Haiti, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Israel also cultivated close ties to apartheid South Africa, Mack noted.

Yair Auron, a genocide researcher at Israel’s Open University, said that Israel’s supply of weapons to regimes such as Myanmar should be compared to the sending of arms to Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

“These sales turn me and all Israelis into criminals because they are sent in our name,” he told Al Jazeera. “We are abetting genocide.”

Efforts by human rights groups to shed light on Israel’s collusion with Myanmar have so far been frustrated by Israeli authorities and the courts.

The Haaretz daily accused Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman of “lying” when he claimed in parliament last month that Israel’s policy in Myanmar accorded with that of the “enlightened world”.

Officials refused to disclose information on arms exports to the military government during a hearing at Israel’s Supreme Court last month on a petition to halt the sales. Lawyers for the state insisted on closed-door sessions when discussing relations with Myanmar.

The three judges hearing the case issued a gag order to prevent publication of their decision, widely assumed to have approved the continuation of arms sales. They justified the blackout on the grounds that publicity risked damaging Israel’s foreign relations.

Late last year, the same court rejected a petition demanding that officials release documents showing Israel’s role in arming Serbian forces that carried out massacres of Bosnians in the 1990s.

Campaigners are waiting on hearings in a host of other cases concerning South Sudan, Rwanda, Chile, Haiti, and Argentina.

In August, Israeli officials argued before the Supreme Court that its exports to militias in South Sudan were “lawful”.

Evidence suggests that Israel sold rifles and surveillance equipment to militias and the army in South Sudan. A UN report found that the Israeli-made Ace and Galil rifles were in widespread use there.