Is This Baby Ours?

By Yoel Marcus

This baby called the sale of military equipment to Khomeini's Iran is indeed all ours. It was born in our country about six years before Reagan even dreamed of issuing a presidential order for the arms deal with Iran. The rights of paternity belong entirely to then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. It's all been in the newspapers. The question they haven't answered is: Where on earth did Sharon get this strange idea?

Among his first moves as defense minister, Sharon decided to emphasize military exports, believing that these could be doubled or even tripled within a short period by finding new markets. He then came up with (or adopted) the idea of cultivating a trade link with military personnel in Khomeini's Iran. Only after this idea had been dressed up in a political theory—i.e., the encouragement of an anti-Khomeini uprising—was the US brought into the picture. This newspaper's archives show that the skimming off and sale of military equipment to Iran went on intermittently for more than six years.

Despite all the denials, the arms weren't shipped without tacit US agreement, at least to some of the shipments. But who decided things at this end, when, and why? Were the arms dealers acting at the nation's behest, or was the nation acting at the urging of the arms dealers? To this there is a clear answer: The decision-making organ of the state, the cabinet, was never in the picture. At the start, Sharon obtained some sort of approval from Menachem Begin, and those who came after him, premiers and defense ministers alike, simply followed in Sharon's footsteps. True, it wasn't bringing in a lot of money for the state (though the same cannot be said for the arms dealers themselves), but everyone hoped it would prove to be a worthwhile long-term military and political investment. But was it? Who knows? After all, the issue of supplying military equipment to Iran was never debated or decided on in any government forum, whether secret or not—neither in the ministerial defense committee nor in the inner cabinet. Meanwhile, the war in Lebanon broke out, and Shiites were going after Jewish blood with Khomeini's portrait in their pockets. Thus Israel, the main target of Islamic terrorism and the leader in the war against terrorism, found itself providing military assistance to a nation whose sons and disciples were engaged in terrorist actions against us on our northern border. If that's not an outrage, I don't know what is.

The Americans used our services in the deal with Iran because the bright idea got its start here and was passed on to the White House, whether by some official agency or by Israeli international arms dealers. They used us, above all, because we had the ties and were specialists at supplying arms to Iran.

It is not very flattering, but it's a fact. The decision to get involved was made by Peres together with Shamir and Rabin, without the inner cabinet or any other ministerial forum being put in the know. Thus Israel got itself embroiled in the American scandal just as it did throughout all the years of its relations with Iran: Without debate, without cabinet decision. What Schwimmer, Nimrodi, Khashoggi, et al. were privileged to know, Ministers Ezer Weizmann and Haim Bar-Lev were not to know!

This article from the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz was translated by Dr. Israel Shahak. The Washington Report periodically reprints Dr. Shahak's translations from Israel's Hebrew Press.