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0 The badly-kept secret of Israel's trade throughout the Muslim world


There's a good chance that Iran's computer systems, the electricity in Indonesian PM's office and the body armor protecting Saudi soldiers came Israel.




Motti (not his real name ), a businessman with connections in Arab countries, was stunned several months ago when representatives of a well-known Israeli food company asked him to check the possibility of exporting to Iran. They told him an Iranian company had approached them through contacts abroad.
Motti refused. He didn't want to violate the embargo. But since then, he says, he's discovered that quite a few local companies and businessmen trade indirectly with Israel's number one enemy. So he wasn't shocked by a Bloomberg News story three weeks ago about Allot Communications selling Internet surveillance and monitoring equipment to Iran over five years through a Danish distributor.
Libya, Tripoli port, trade, business - AP - 12.9.11
Employees working at the Tripoli port.
Photo by: AP
According to the article, Allot sent the equipment to Denmark where workers removed the labels and repackaged it to hide its Israeli origin. It was then passed along to an intermediary who sold it to Iran. Three former Allot employees told Bloomberg that the equipment's Iranian destination was an open secret, but the company denied giving its approval or having any knowledge of its products winding up there.
"Trade with Iran is an ancient story," says Prof. Uri Bialer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert in international relations who has researched ties between Israel and Iran. "Money has no smell. Iranians always try to do business, and there have always been Israelis with an eye for making money."
Nachum Shiloh, an expert on Iran and owner of GMI - Gulf Markets Intelligence - says that for some Iranian businessmen it makes sense to import from Israel. "Here we view Iran as the enemy, a demon," he explains, "but not every Iranian gets up every morning thinking of ways to destroy Israel. Iran has a large segment of businessmen who are not fanatics, people who want to make money and further their businesses - if they could only trade, even indirectly, with businesspeople and companies from Israel."

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