CAIRO â Staff members at a Riyadh hospital got a surprise when they looked at the fine print on the paper cups they were using. Workers in a storeroom at another Gulf hospital were similarly shocked when they took a close look at the tags on a large shipment of uniforms, towels and sheets. The labels said âMade in Israel,â according to recent newspaper reports.
| "Eeeek! Nurse! There's a Zionist in my sheets!" |
Experts say the camouflaged trade â just a small portion of such imports that have received publicity â has been going on for years between Israel and its officially hostile Arab neighbours. The hidden trade is worth about US$400 million a year â about two and a half times what Israel sold to its official Arab trading partners, Egypt and Jordan, in 2004 â said Gil Feiler, the director of Info-Prod Research, a Tel Aviv consultancy specialising in Arab markets, and an economic professor at Bar Ilan University.
Others say such estimates are significantly inflated. âAll the figures are very sexy for the Press, but the reality is much less than what is written,â said Dan Catarivas, foreign trade director at the Israeli Manufacturersâ Association.
The true amount of Arab imports from Israel is impossible to establish because neither side makes it public, with Israeli-made goods moving to Arab customers through third countries â Cyprus or the Netherlands, for example, which list the shipments as local exports. |