(EI Illustration)
Israeli army spokesperson Brig. Gen. Avi Benayahu recently returned from a trip to China where he met with his Chinese counterparts and other officials. The goal was to deepen Sino-Israeli ties on political, security and military levels. This is only the latest in a burgeoning security relationship between Israel and China that includes drone technology, crowd control training, surveillance, intelligence gathering and more. This raises the question of how China’s official support for Palestinian self-determination will coincide with its ongoing procurement of the tools of Palestinian pacification. Similarly, how does it threaten the rights of Uighurs, Tibetans, and others under the control of the Chinese state by bringing Israel’s apparatuses of occupation and apartheid?
China, in recent years, has faced growing rebellions in Tibet, East Turkestan, and most prominently in the ongoing labor unrest focused in China’s south where strikes and protests are occurring at an unprecedented rate. Despite attempts at controlling what information comes and goes, the Chinese government has learned that complete suppression is impossible. Its political relationships with Uighurs, Tibetans and especially workers are different than that of Israel to Palestinians. Tibetans and Uighurs have certain protected statuses and rights both as minorities and as Chinese citizens, and the state, since 2008, has been supportive to a degree of improving workplace conditions and reducing the income gap in favor of the protesting working class.
But with the most visible of Uighur and Tibetan activism and resistance focusing on self-determination, China faces a likely insurmountable battle to convince already mobilized populations that they should accept Chinese control. The strong police responses to unrest in 2008 in Tibet and 2009 in East Turkestan, combined with China’s long record of authoritarian crackdowns on civil liberties, indicate any demands outside of those deemed acceptable by the state will be met harshly.
Sino-Israeli relations were generally distant prior to the 1980s but that decade saw the beginning of significant Israeli arms and technology transfers to China. Early efforts included the 1982 transfer of missile technology and the upgrading of China’s tank fleet despite closer political and diplomatic relations being hindered by Cold War and Non-Aligned Movement politics, especially Israel’s close military and political relationship with Taiwan. Yet by 1990 Israel was “a very major supplier” of defense technology to China (“Israeli Arms Technology Aids China” Los Angeles Times, 13 June 1990). Moreover, a closer relationship was built when Israel proved itself to be a reliable arms supplier during the period after the Tiananmen Square massacre when many international suppliers imposed an arms embargo in response. At the time Israel was selling arms to many repressive regimes including ones restricted by official arms embargoes such as apartheid South Africa.
The two nations only established official diplomatic relations in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Conference when the stigma of the oppression of the Palestinians was largely ameliorated by the beginning of public Israeli-Palestinian talks, presented at the time as the the precursor to Palestinian self-determination. Post-Cold War, Israel and China have developed extensive trade and military relations, despite occasional US skepticism and intervention, most notably blocking sales of advanced military systems and hardware over the past two decades.Â
Israel’s own Lavi fighter jet project was
ended in the mid-1980s but some of the
technology developed for it has made its way
into China’s Jian-10 (Chengdu) jets. The
transfer of Lavi technology and Chinese
funding of Israeli missile projects
accompanied larger sales such as the 1994
sale of around 100 Harpy unmanned aerial
vehicles to China. Another aspect of their
relationship started during this time too,
China’s interest in Israel’s experience with
Palestinian and Lebanese pacification.
Since 2004 a large number of Israeli
“homeland security” and pacification systems
have been deployed in China. The Israeli
company On Track Innovations (OTI)
began to deliver “smart cards” as part of
China’s national ID
card system with some of the same biometric
technology it provides to ID systems at major checkpoints in
the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Magal
Systems, whose detection systems are
deployed on Israel’s wall in the West Bank,
has installed nine perimeter detection
systems at airports throughout the China,
with two more pending.Â
Such transfers could well be used in
innocuous, or in the case of smart cards
potentially beneficial, ways such as “smart”
ID cards carrying
information useful in medical emergencies.
But their genesis as technologies of
occupation and pacification deserves a
critical interpretation. Numerous other
surveillance and homeland security contracts
to Israeli firms Nice Systems, Dr. Frucht
Systems and others must be seen in a similar
light.
Less innocuous is the Israeli private
security firm International Security and
Defense Systems’ (ISDS)
training of Chinese security personnel in
the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
ISDS “was asked to
provide know-how and situation reports about
international terror, mainly regarding
threats of extremist Muslim groups in Asia”
(Israeli
security expert takes pride in his role at
the Olympics” Haaretz, 10
August 2008). The declared threat of armed
attacks concerned mostly organizations
associated with Uighur nationalism, Islamism
and East Turkestan independence, the latter
being the geographic center of the other
two. With the international eye on China
during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, China
was especially concerned about any actions
that might distract from the pageantry and
bring attention to various causes in
opposition to the status quo.
China was also concerned with other kinds of
resistance. ISDS
head Leo Glaser told Haaretz, “The
Chinese fear, among other things, that some
demonstrators’ group might try to take
advantage of the worldwide attention to
carry out a non-violent but provocative act
to disgrace the Chinese organizers” (Israeli
security expert takes pride in his role at
the Olympics” Haaretz, 10
August 2008).Â
In addition to potential Uighur and
Tibetan protest, Beijing police were
preparing for protest by some of the 1.25
million people forcibly displaced to build
the Olympic infrastructure. To this end the
Israeli police trained members of China’s
police force in a six-week course that
included, as reported in Haaretz,
“how to deal with a crowd that riots on the
playing field, and how to protect VIPs and
remove demonstrators from main traffic
arteries” (“Israeli
police trained Chinese counterparts prior to
Olympics,” Haaretz, 29
September 2008). The article noted that
“although the main focus of the training was
to give the Chinese police the tools
necessary to handle terrorist attacks, they
also learned how to handle mass civilian
demonstrations.” The thousands upon
thousands of Palestinian protests, marches,
riots and acts of civil disobedience — which
Israel routinely confronts with lethal force
— have made Israel a go-to destination for
such training.
The rising unrest in China and Tibet, along
with China’s ever-increasing economic and
political efforts outside its border, have
already started to bring more press
attention to the collective rights and
conditions of workers, Uighurs, Tibetans and
others in addition to the common historical
criticisms of China’s poor record on civil
freedoms. China’s studying of Israeli hasbara (the Hebrew term meaning
“explanation” but commonly translated as
“propaganda”) pairs ideologically with its
ongoing pacification efforts. China’s record
will need some explaining and the October
visit of Benayahu and his public relations
delegation follows the March 2010 visit of
Sen. Col. Xeuping and a Chinese
PR delegation that
visited Israel to learn “the
public-relations lessons learnt during the
Second Lebanon War and during Operation Cast
Lead” (“IDF
Spokesperson Visits China,”
IDF, 20 October
2010). The delegation also studied “the
IDF [Israeli army]
School for Media’s training system and the
integration of spokesmanship and operational
planning.”
Xeuping said of the most recent visit that “IDF
Spokesperson’s Unit is very effective and
up-to-date, especially in times of
emergency.” With regular unrest throughout
China, “times of emergency” to deploy
Israeli hasbara are on the rise.
And China’s adoption of Israeli security
technologies means the Chinese response will
be built from Israel’s industry of
Palestinian pacification.
Jimmy Johnson is a proud uncle and
tap-dance enthusiast. He lives in Detroit,
MI with his books
and can be reached at johnson [dot] jimmy
[at] gmail [dot] com.
