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The UAE Port Deal Would Irreparably Harm
Israel
By Fred Taub
March 1, 2006
 We have all heard the Bush administration
telling us not to worry about the deal to allow the Arab Emirates owned Dubai
Ports World Company run major US ports. There is one important factor people
should all be worrying about - how the deal affects Israel. Let's examine the
facts.
The Bush administration claims the company
managing the ports is not responsible for the security of the ports and then
says the job is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security and
the US Coast Guard. The fact is everyone working at ports has security
responsibility just as individuals are responsible for locking their cars and
homes, not the police. The company managing the ports does, however, have
special access to all shipments, timetables, routes, container content, bills
of lading, secured holding areas and, most worrisome to intelligence analysts,
access to information about secret US shipments around the world including
where such items are being shipped to and from. The information gathered by any
port operator, placed in the wrong hands, can easily be offered to foreign
agents without the US knowing it, thus foreign management can create an
intelligence security nightmare for the US.
While the
United Arab Emirates is friendly to the US and allows US Naval ships to dock
there, there is more to the UAE story than just that.
The UAE was formed in 1971 and is a federation of
seven Emirates, including Dubai. The UAE has limited federal powers, leaving
many governmental powers to member emirates, and not all member Emirates are
part of the federation court system which has both civil and Islamic courts.
The Islamic courts rule over all family matters and women do not have the right
to vote anywhere in the UAE. This raises questions about human rights. Should
our ports be operated by a nation that denies women the right to vote? Will US
unions go on immediate strike demanding the right of women to vote before
working for DPW? Considering that women working US docks are union members, I
would expect to hear from Unions on this topic and a strike would not surprise
me.
The UAE is a major drug transshipment point for
Southwest Asian drug producing countries and, being a major financial center,
this makes the UAE ideal for money laundering which is often associated with
the drug trade. The UAE has undefined and open borders with Saudi Arabia and
Oman, thus allowing drugs and other goods, including weapons, to be moved
between those countries without scrutiny. A Middle East open-borders crisis
occurred in 2002 when North Korean Scud missiles were shipped to Yemen and then
vanished. Considering that the UAE has open borders and would control ports on
both ends of a single shipment, we need to be concerned with UAE control of our
ports.
The UAE is a member of the Arab League and is
signatory member of the Arab boycott of Israel. The Syrian-based Central Office
for the Boycott of Israel, a.k.a. the Central Boycott Office, enforces the
pan-Arab boycott of Israel on 3 levels. CBO-enforced primary boycotts forbid
Israeli products into any Arab country, including Israeli components in
finished goods. Arabs were upset, for example, when they found Israeli
batteries in Apple computers and demanded the suppliers remove all such
batteries from future shipments.
Secondary and
tertiary boycotts are generally boycotts of companies which work with companies
that have other business with Israel, regardless if any element of a shipment
emanates from Israel. In a global economy, such boycotts are harder to enforce
on a wide scale. These elements of the Arab boycott of Israel are, however,
managed by the CBO which goes as far as banning any ship that ever docked in
any Israeli port from any future docking at an Arab country port. The official
boycott list is tightly held and is estimated to include more than 200,000
companies. Recent Arab League meetings have included agreements to strengthen
the Arab boycott of Israel, thus the Arab boycott of Israel is very active.
A recent US Trade Representative report on trade
barriers states that although the UAE no longer enforces the secondary and
tertiary aspects of the boycott, the UAE enforces the primary boycott and
"occasional government contracts continue to contain pro forma provisions
requiring a contractual obligation to 'observe all regulations and instructions
enforced from time to time by the League of Arab States regarding the boycott
of Israel especially those related to blacklisted companies, ships, and
persons.' "
In 1977, the US passed a law creating the
Office of Antiboycott Compliance in the Department of Commerce in order to
prevent any US persons from joining into foreign sanctioned boycotts against
nations friendly to the US, thus preventing individuals from creating de facto
foreign policy. This law primarily applies to the Arab boycott of Israel,
making it illegal to take actions in furtherance of that boycott. The OAC
primarily concerns itself with prosecuting businesses that supply information
about Israeli product content and other business dealings with Israel to
boycotting nations. To get around the secondary aspects of this law, Arab
countries simply require declarations that the goods shipped are 100% US made,
thus Arab importers accomplish their boycott goals by assuring the product
contains no Israeli components. OAC-imposed fines for supplying information
about Israeli product content to boycotting nations can be hundreds of
thousands of dollars, plus denial of future export licenses.
The bill of lading is documentation about every
shipment via truck, train or ship and contains detailed information about the
shipment content, quantities, origin and destination. With this information,
the UAE via Dubai Ports World would be able to examine detailed information
about shipments to and from Israel, a nation the UAE actively boycotts. Even if
such information is guaranteed to remain in the US, digital copies of such data
can be made and emailed globally. The DPW deal would therefore facilitate the
supply of information contained in the bills of lading of commercial products
to be used by the Arab leagues nations to offer alternative products to US
buyers, thus creating a trade barrier for Israeli exporters. In fact, by Dubai
having this information, the Arab world would be able to launch a full-scale
economic war against Israel by using shipping information to enact total
disruption of Israeli exports in the US and around the world.
This is not a cloak and dagger fantasy. The Arab
League and its members have been running several campaigns to ruin Israel
economically on a global scale for years. The first such campaign was the Arab
League boycott which started as early as 1921, twenty-seven years before Israel
was a state, and which is still in full force today. Second, a
divest-from-Israel campaign was enacted to, in the words of its organizers,
make Israel 'economically unbalanced' and to create a 'one state solution'
meaning a Palestinian state without Israel. A third such campaign, which was
enacted while the Palestinian Authority was claiming to negotiate with Israel
in good faith for a Palestinian state, is the PA organized economic blockade of
Israel in Malaysia.
Having DPW-managed ports would
also make shipping military goods to Israel difficult. Tanks, trucks and other
large military hardware do not fit into shipping containers, thus they can not
be hidden, even by the CIA. This is not information the US or Israel wants in
the hands of countries sworn to Israel's destruction.
Since the DPW deal would facilitate the bill of
lading information for all shipments through DPW-managed ports to Israel to be
given to directly to every Arab nation that is sworn to the destruction of
Israel, the DPW deal should ring alarm bells.
On the
terror front, since the UAE is a major drug port and DPW will have access to
secured shipping areas, we may potentially be opening US ports to a new channel
of drug and weapons imports, including terror weapons imports and money
laundering. Yes, the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security are
responsible for port security, but when the same company runs both the import
and export port for a single shipment, security can more easily be compromised.
For that same reason, we should not allow, for example, Columbian or Mexican
ports operating company having operational access to US ports for shipments to
and from those countries either.
The US Antiboycott
laws are vital to prevent boycotts from being used to create de facto foreign
policy. The DPW deal would cause irreparable harm to Israel's economy. Although
US ships visit many foreign ports, we have to ask ourselves if we want to bring
economic harm and possibly devastating harm to another ally, namely Israel.
Some pundits have argued that DPW can manage the
ports more inexpensively than any US company can, but the price of those
savings is too high. It is time to stand up for America - demand that American
companies run American ports.
Fred Taub is the
President of Boycott Watch (www.boycottwatch.org) which monitors and reports about
consumer boycotts, and Divestment Watch (www.divestmentwatch.com) which exposed the illegal nature
of the divest-from-Israel campaign as well as why it is bad for the US and is
anti-peace.
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