Still no major American media coverage of the big tussle between the Pentagon and Israel over an Israeli contract to upgrade a weapons system for China. Here's the latest from Ha'aretz. I am baffled. A story that has Douglas Feith, Tel Aviv, arms sales, and a hardening neoconservative policy towards Beijing in one place, and one doesn't see a single mention in the NYT, the Washington Post, or the LA Times.

Update: Some great coverage today in the Forward by reporter Marc Perelman. For those unfamiliar with the case, it involves an alleged dispute between the Pentagon and the director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Amos Yaron, over an Israeli contract to upgrade the Harpy drone for the Chinese. Perelman advances background on Yaron:

Yaron remains controversial in Washington for his role as the brigadier general in charge of the Beirut brigade that controlled the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps at the time of the infamous September 1982 massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians allied to Israel. He was formally censured for his role, but was promoted to major general shortly afterward. In 1986 he was sent to Washington as military attaché and was there during the so-called Lavi Affair, the first major crisis between the Pentagon and Israel's government-owned arms industry.

The latest crisis comes just one month after the release of the first major strategy paper issued by the so-called Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank chaired by former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross. The paper urges strongly that China, as the world's next superpower — and a major nation with no prior conceptions, positive or negative, about Judaism — be sought out by the Diaspora Jewish community for an institutionalized, free-standing relationship, independent of both American and Israeli policy interests.

The study, written by French academic Shalom Salomon Wald, notes that China appears receptive to such an initiative in part because it sees the American Jewish community as a significant player in Washington that could help China improve its standing in the United States.

Ross's project would seem to be ideologically incompatable with the increasingly strident tone coming from neoconservatives who have been railing in the media and think tankdom against China's growing footprint in the Middle East and Africa.

Posted by Laura at December 22, 2004 12:35 AM