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Jiang plans landmark Israel trip, arms sale looms

BEIJING: Chinese President Jiang Zemin embarks on an historic visit to the Middle East on Wednesday to enhance Beijing's symbolic presence in the peace process and to try to clinch an Israeli radar sale Washington strongly opposes.

The trip is the first ever to Israel and the Palestinian Authority by a Chinese head of state, underscoring how sturdy ties have grown with the Jewish state despite Beijing's steadfast support of an independent Palestinian homeland.

Jiang will also visit Egypt, Turkey, Greece and South Africa during the April 12-27 tour.

Washington has been lobbying Israel to scrap the sale of advanced airborne radar systems to China which could be used to track and help shoot down Taiwanese and U.S. fighters if war broke out in the Taiwan strait.

Israel has already inked a contract estimated at $250 million to deliver one Russian-built aircraft bursting with the Phalcon radar equipment, which is comparable to technology aboard American airborne command centres known as AWACS.

China has also signed options with Israel to fit several more aircraft with the system.

WASHINGTON UPSET BY SALES

U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen pressed Israel to kill the sale during a visit earlier this month, and a key congressman is threatening to block $250 million in aid to Israel.

The radar is the latest of several alleged Israeli military technology transfers to China that have chagrined Washington.

U.S. intelligence reports have said Israel illegally supplied airframe and radar technology in the 1980s that China has used to build its J10, an advanced fighter designed to match the American F-16 and which is scheduled for service around mid-decade.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said he would consider U.S. opposition to the Phalcon sale, but Israeli officials have stood up for the deal, saying radar is defensive, not deadly.

"The United States has been aware of this deal for a long time," an Israeli official told Reuters.

"Had Israel not agreed to sell it, European countries and U.S. allies stood ready to provide China with high tech assistance," the official said, referring to a reported bid by Britain to provide a similar system to China.

China is billing the visit as a chance to make in-depth exchanges of views on the Middle East peace process.

Diplomats said they doubted Jiang would offer concrete proposals or seek to upstage Washington's role as the main broker of difficult talks aimed at a peace settlement.

But the trip was sure to elevate China's status as a symbolic champion for peace and to bolster its unique equilibrium between Israel, with which it forged ties in 1992, and the Palestinians.

China was among the first nations to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1964, and to recognise Palestinian independence when a state was declared from exile in 1988.

But China's desire to extract itself from decades of radical isolationism and its acquired taste for military and civilian technology have made its bonds with Israel at least as important.

"The Chinese stand in the middle," said Palestinian minister councellor to China, Sadi Jaber. "To the Israelis they say 'You have to give the Palestinians their national rights', to us they say 'You have to be pragmatic'. This always helps."

ISRAEL DOMINATES STATE VISITS

Israel dominates Jiang's agenda. Out of the first seven days of his trip, Jiang will spend one day and night in Bethlehem in a Palestinian-controlled area of the West Bank, holding talks with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and one day in Alexandria, Egypt, for a meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

He will deliver a 30 million yuan ($3.62 million) aid package to Palestinian authorities and investment in a Gaza hospital and a computer training centre in Jericho.

The rest of that time will be spent in Israel, meeting Barak and key members of parliament, inspecting a collective farm's agricultural techniques, and visiting telecommunications firms.

Israel is seeking to boost non-military trade with China to $1.0 billion from $600 million last year, and to correct a $200 billion trade deficit with Beijing.

Jiang will lay flowers at the Yad Veshem Holocaust memorial, dedicated to the six million Jews who perished in Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War.

China's coastal city of Shanghai provided safe haven for 30,000 Jews fleeing the genocide - one of the only cities in the world to do so.

Like Pope John Paul who visited last month, Jiang would balance his visits to holy sites, visiting the Wailing Wall, Judaism's holiest site, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's most important site in Jerusalem.

He will also visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where tradition holds that Jesus was crucified buried and rose from the dead. President Ezer Weizman, the ceremonial head of state, will accompany Jiang for most of his time in Israel.

Jiang will leave for Turkey on April 18 and go on to Greece and South Africa.-Reuters