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Green light for Mideast violence that respects no red light
NEW YORK - The Middle East has never been a level killing field proving that everything is unfair - if not in love, at least in modern-day warfare. As one of the most over-armed countries in the world permanently surviving on US military dole, Israel has a battlefield superiority that is overwhelmingly obscene.

The heavily one-sided fighting, which continues in the West Bank and Gaza was best described by a UN diplomat last week as a military confrontation between "a 800-pound gorilla versus sheep slumbering their way to a slaughter house." "Let's have a level playing field," he said. "Let's give the Palestinians the basic weapons and see how they fare against the Israelis. They are now fighting with one hand tied behind their backs."
Chris Toensing, editor of the Washington-based Middle East Report says the home-made mortars and rockets of Hamas and other militant groups are firecrackers compared to Israeli battle tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships.

Israel's primary arms suppliers are Western nations, but mainly the United States.
Currently, Israel spends an average of $2.8 billion on arms purchases annually, with more than $2.6 billion coming from a single source: the United States. According to a September 2001 study by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the watchdog body of the US Congress, the United States provided $74 billion worth of equipment and training to Middle Eastern nations from 1991 to 2000.

Over a 10-year period, the three largest arms buyers were Saudi Arabia ($33.5 billion), Israel ($18.8 billion) and Egypt ($12.7 billion). But only the Saudis were cash customers while both Israel and Egypt received virtually all of their weapons as free military aid.
The generous military grants for the two countries date from the 1989 Camp David peace agreement brokered by the United States under President Jimmy Carter.

Since then, Israel has received an average of $1.8 billion in outright military grants and $1.2 billion in economic grants for a total of $3 billion in US aid every year. In 1999, the annual military grant was increased to $1.9 billion, with increments of $60 million until it reaches $2.4 billion dollars by 2008.

Israel has used the grants to purchase some of the most sophisticated US weapons systems, including state-of-the-art F-16 fighter planes, Cobra and Apache combat helicopters, fast patrol boats, air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles, armoured personnel carriers and battle tanks - most of which are now being deployed against Palestinians. The Palestinians, who are barred from importing weapons, are armed mostly with sniper rifles, pipe bombs, landmines - and suicide bombers.

Last month, the Israelis confiscated about 50 tons of small arms being smuggled by Palestinian militant groups.

The 172,500-member Israeli military, including 36,000 air force personnel, is strong enough to face any combination of conventional Arab armed forces. According to the latest issue of "Middle East Military Balance", published by the Jaffa Centre for Strategic Studies in Israel, the Israelis have 624 fighter aircraft in their inventory, compared to Syria's 520, Egypt's 498 and Jordan's 91.

Israel also has 289 combat helicopters, versus Syria's larger fleet of 295, Egypt's 224 and Jordan's 68. On land, Israel has 3,895 battle tanks against Syria's 3,700, Egypt's 2,535 and Jordan's 872. Lev Grinberg, a political sociologist and director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben Gurion University, says Israel's "state terrorism" is predicated on its military superiority.

While suicide bombings that kill innocent citizens must be unequivocally condemned as immoral acts and their perpetrators sent to jail, they cannot be compared to state terrorism carried out by the Israeli Government, he argues. "The former are individual acts of despair of a people that see no future, vastly ignored by an unfair and distorted international public opinion," says Grinberg.

"The latter are cold and rational decisions of a state and a military apparatus of occupation, well equipped, financed and backed by the only superpower in the world," he adds. Responding to criticism from the European Union and US allies in the Arab world, President Bush made a key policy statement on Thursday demanding that Israel withdraw from all Palestinian cities and stop building Jewish settlements. The statement was a departure from a policy that implicitly encouraged the Israelis to continue their military rampage in occupied territories.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell is due in the Middle East next week to ensure that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is reined in. But how far will Powell succeed?
When the US was accused of giving the "green light" to Sharon, one cynical observer commented: Why would Sharon need any green lights. He doesn't even stop at a red light.

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