The South Sudanese army, armed and trained by Israel, is committing systematic
rights abuses, according to the UN.
Goran Tomasevic / Reuters
Israeli weapons are fueling atrocities in
South
Sudan, according to a
United Nations report that sheds new light on the secretive
Israeli arms trade in Africa.
Authored by an investigative team assembled by the UN Security
Council, the report cites photographic evidence of automatic rifles
made by Israel Military Industries (IMI) being in the arsenal of
South Sudan’s army and police. Known as Galil ACE, the guns have
particularly been used by bodyguards of high-ranking politicians and
by senior army officers.
South Sudan was granted independence in 2011 following a civil
war that lasted for decades. Within days of its establishment,
leading figures in the Israeli weapons industry
rushed to advance their interests in the new
ally against
Iran’s influence in Sudan.
Since its secession in 2011, South Sudan has descended into
civil war between
opposing political factions.
The Israeli-armed South Sudanese military and government-aligned
militias are employing a “scorched earth policy” characterized by
the systematic rape of women and children, indiscriminate killings
and the burning down of entire villages with families inside their
homes, according to the UN report.
South Sudan is not the only African country in which the Israeli
arms industry is profiting from bloodshed.
According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Israel
does
not disclose detailed information about its arms deals, most of
which are brokered by shady intermediaries, typically retired
Israeli military personnel or civilian expatriates.
However, occasional news reports, public statements from
officials and investigations by nongovernmental organizations have
drawn back the curtain in recent years, revealing military
involvement in more corners of
Africa than
can be detailed in a single article.
Using those sources, SIPRI was able to document the sale of major
Israeli weapons to Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho,
Nigeria, Rwanda, the Seychelles, South Africa and Uganda from 2006
to 2010.
Champion arms dealer
Despite its small size, for decades Israel has ranked among the
world’s top 10 arms exporters, an impressive feat for a nation no
geographically bigger than New Jersey.
This is partly due to Israel’s use of the occupied
West Bank
and Gaza as
laboratories to test and refine weapons and methods of
domination and control. This dynamic allows Israeli military firms
to market their products as “battle-tested” and “combat proven” —
coveted labels that give the nation a competitive edge in the
international arms trade.
Israel’s success is also attributable to its willingness to do
business with repressive regimes that even the United States and
European countries avoid arming directly.
In the case of South Sudan, the magnitude of atrocities compelled
the European Union to
impose
an arms embargo and
issue sanctions against the country’s military leaders.
The US has similarly
suspended military aid and
issued sanctions, though it should be noted that the Obama
administration enthusiastically
aided the build-up of the South Sudanese army, despite knowing
that it had several thousand child soldiers within its ranks.
Israel, meanwhile,
hosted South Sudan at a weapons expo as recently as June.
Aiding genocide
Acting as a weapons conduit to murderous regimes is hardly a new
phenomenon for Israel.
Under the leadership of
Yitzhak
Rabin, then prime minister, and
Shimon
Peres, then foreign minister, Israel
supplied the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government forces as well as
the
rebel army led by Paul Kagame with bullets, rifles and grenades
as genocide was underway in that country during the 1990s.
In addition to arming the killers, Israel
trained the Rwandan military and paramilitary forces in the
years leading up to the bloodbath.
After touring the killing fields, an Israeli arms dealer
reportedly lauded himself as a humanitarian for helping the
victims die quickly with bullets instead of machetes. “I’m actually
a doctor,” he
remarked.
As Israeli weapons contracts from the US and Europe decline due
to reduced defense budgets, developing countries in Latin America
and Africa have become Israel’s
fastest-growing markets.
Israeli arms sales to Africa
doubled between 2012 and 2013 and ballooned another
40 percent in 2014, reaching $318 million that year.
It’s unclear whether these totals account for the weapons and
military training Israel provided to
Uganda and possibly
Rwanda as compensation for agreeing to take in African refugees
expelled from Israel.
While Israel has no qualms contributing to turmoil in African
countries, it
refuses to grant asylum to Africans on its soil, preferring
instead to imprison and
deport them back to the horrors they escaped. Some have been
imprisoned, tortured and even killed since their expulsion.
What is clear is that Israel’s African customers comprise a who’s
who of undemocratic regimes that brutally oppress their citizens.
Cameroon’s Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), which engages in
routine extrajudicial
assassinations and “disappearances”, is
trained by a retired Israeli army commander, Mayer Heretz.
Cameroon’s
notoriously brutal presidential guard unit, which is vital to
maintaining the 33-year rule of dictator
Paul Biya, was
trained by another retired Israeli army commander, Avi Sivan.
Prolonging the rule of repressive regimes in Africa is a
long-held Israeli tradition.
Israel
equipped the South African
apartheid
regime with weapons in the 1970s and ’80s in violation of
international sanctions.
Safeguarding corporate plunder
Decades of stealing and colonizing Palestinian land and resources
has qualified Israel with unique expertise in subduing resistance
and maintaining colonial plunder.
As Jimmy Johnson, an activist and researcher on Israel’s arms
trade, has
explained, “The 19th century ethnocentric nationalism that drove
the creation of Israel … often obscures the fact that the
dispossession of Palestinians has included a massive upward transfer
of wealth from colonized to colonizer and from occupied to
occupier.”
Israel isn’t just delivering arms to Africa. It is offering a
successful model for securing the spoils of neocolonialism from a
growing underclass dispossessed and abandoned by the ravages of
globalized capitalism.
Israel’s occupation is “exported to fight the redistribution of
wealth,” as Johnson has noted.
Equatorial Guinea is home to one of the most
unequal societies in the world.
The former Spanish colony’s ruthless dictator, Teodoro Obiang,
has enriched himself with handsome
payments from US oil companies, which in turn exploit the
country’s massive oil reserves without hindrance.
In 2008, Israel secured an estimated
$100 million weapons deal with Equatorial Guinea, which involved
the purchase of four IMI Shaldag patrol boats and a Saar missile
boat manufactured by Israel Shipyards. “IMI’s boats are intended to
secure the oil rigs at sea,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
These are the same vessels used by the Israeli navy to
enforce the sea blockade of Gaza and
fire on its inhabitants.
While Israel helps US oil companies and the Obiang family cash
in, 1 in 10 children in Equatorial Guinea
dies
before his or her fifth birthday. Moreover, less than half the
country’s citizens have access to clean drinking water.
In Angola’s Cabinda province, Aerostar, a
drone made
by the Israeli company Aeronautics Defense Systems,
safeguards offshore oil rigs for private companies,
including
Chevron.
In the Niger Delta, an assortment of Israeli surveillance
vehicles, including the
Aerostar and Seastar from Aeronautics and the
Shaldag patrol boat from Israel Shipyards, protect Chevron’s oil
platforms from potential obstacles to the corporate pillaging of
Nigeria’s resources.
This is in addition to Nigeria’s Internet surveillance system,
installed by Israel’s largest military firm,
Elbit Systems,
in 2013.
Exporting “war on terror”
With the rise of Boko Haram,
Nigeria
has in recent years adopted the “war on terror” doctrine
first pushed by Israel to justify its ongoing conquest of
Palestine.
“Israel has been a crucial and loyal ally in our fight against
Boko Haram,” a Nigerian government official was
quoted as saying early this year.
“It is a sad reality that Israel has a great deal of experience
confronting terrorism. Our Israeli partners have used that
experience, and the unique expertise gained over years of fighting
terror within its own borders, to assist us,” added the official,
conflating Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial violence with
terrorism perpetrated by a militant group to which Palestinians have
no relation.
Fully supportive of his government’s conduct, one Nigerian
Christian activist told The Jerusalem Post, “I am like an
Israeli settler in the West Bank in the midst of Palestinians.”
This attitude has been nothing short of disastrous.
Since 2012, under the cover of routing Boko Haram, the Nigerian
military has extrajudicially
executed 1,200 people and arbitrarily arrested 20,000 boys and
young men, at least 7,000 of whom died in military detention from
starvation, medical neglect and overcrowding.
Kenyan death squads in the General Service Unit, the paramilitary
wing of that country’s police and military, have similarly adopted
the “Israeli rulebook” for extrajudicial killings of outspoken
Muslim clerics.
Death squad officers interviewed by Al Jazeera last year revealed
that their units are
trained by
Israel.
“Exporting the experience of Zionism”
In his 1987 book The Israeli Connection, Benjamin
Beit-Hallahmi
characterized Israel’s support for tyrants in developing
countries as “a direct outgrowth of what it has done at home.”
“What Israel is doing in the Third World,” asserted
Beit-Hallahmi, “is simply to export the Middle East experience of
Zionism,” characterized by conquest and pacification.
Israel is exporting “not just a technology of domination, but a
worldview that undergirds that technology,” he added.
It is exporting “the logic of the oppressor … a certain frame of
mind, a feeling that the Third World can be controlled and
dominated, that radical movements in the Third World can be stopped,
that modern Crusaders still have a future.”
This is precisely what Israel is doing in Africa today, with
predictably deadly consequences.
Rania Khalek is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada.
