IFF, it means "Identify, Friend or Foe"

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Japan hopes for Israel arms halt:
"Japan has asked Israel to stop selling arms to its regional rivals, the country's foreign minister said during a visit to Jerusalem."

IFF is the system used by our combat air controllers which reads aircraft transponder signals and assigns them as combatant or not and as friend or foe. It's fairly straightforward, an aircraft squawks friend or it is foe. It is harder to sort out friend from foe in international politics, even the brightest people in the world (our government and other peoples' governments) seem to have trouble doing it. In particular, Israel seems to have trouble in this regard.

Without US support at critical junctures, Israel might not exist today. And, what we have done for Israel has been at considerable cost politically as well as economically. Yet we find Israel continually provoking one crisis after another in our bi-lateral relationship.

As this story from the BBC notes, there was a recent controversy with the US over Israel selling pilotless aircraft technology to Red China. Previously we had to stop Israel from selling an AWACS-type system to the Chicoms. Now we find, not surprisingly that Japan - our key ally in East Asia - is also concerned about the cozy relations between Israel's arms industry and Japan's likely regional adversaries.