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The Middle East region, battered by wars and adjoining
humanitarian crises that have left millions of people
stateless, hungry and diseased, is in urgent need for peace,
security and reconstruction. Thanks to the US, Russian,
French, Israeli and other weapons manufacturers, however, it
is now the dumping ground for military hardware, an ominous
sign for the years ahead.
Data
released by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) on March 9, paints a grim picture of the
world, in general, and the Middle East, in particular.
According to the report, the demand for weapons in the
warring region has increased by a whopping 61% between 2015
and 2019.
The correlation between arms, war, and
casualty count needs no elaborate algorithm to be
deciphered, as facts on the ground amply demonstrate. Syria
remains the epicenter of conflict in the Middle East, with
Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, and South Sudan trailing, but
not far behind.
The top five merchants of death,
according to SIPRI, are the United States, Russia, France,
Germany, and China. Interestingly, while US arms exports
have increased exponentially by 76% in the last five years,
Russia’s arms exports fell by 18%.
The US market is
in constant expansion as it now includes 96 client
countries, while Russia has, essentially, lost one of its
most significant clients, India.
Ruled by a right-wing
Hindu nationalist government, Delhi has found in Tel Aviv a
more ideologically like-minded supplier. The special
‘friendship’ between India’s Narendra Modi and
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has made India Israel’s
largest weapons market.
In 2017, Israel’s arms
exports reached a record high of $9 billion dollars,
following the signing of a $2 billion deal with India. The
contracts awarded to the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)
were
considered the “single largest deal ever signed by the
Israeli arms industry.”
With India becoming the
largest importer of Israeli arms in the world, Israel is now
a secondary party in the protracted conflict between India
and Pakistan. The two nuclear-armed countries
edged closer to the abyss of a full-blown war in March
2019. Naturally, Israeli weapons, now featured prominently
in India’s military arsenal, will play a major role in
sustaining any future conflict.
According to the
newly-released data, Israel is only second to South Korea in
terms of the vast expansion of weapons exports, as
Israel’s weapons manufacturing industry has experienced an
unprecedented boom in recent years. SIPRI puts that increase
at 77%.
Last year, the International Defense
Cooperation Directorate of the Israeli Ministry of Defense
(SIBAT), which is the cornerstone of Israel’s weapon
manufacturing, testing and export,
released a comprehensive plan aimed at the expansion of
Israel’s global weapons market, with due focus on the US,
Finland and India.
What makes Israeli weapons more
attractive than others is the fact that they are not
accompanied by any political price tag. In other words,
Israel is willing to sell weapons to any country, or even
non-state actors, openly or secretly, regardless of how
these weapons are used and whether their use violates human
rights or not.
In May 2019, Amnesty International’s
Israeli chapter
released an in-depth report that examined Israel’s
weapons export markets. Contrary to the claim by Rachel
Chen, head of the Israeli Defense Export Controls Agency,
that “we will carefully examine the state of human rights
in each country before approving export licenses for selling
them weapons,” Israel is known for peddling its weapons to
the world’s most notorious human rights violators. The
list includes Myanmar, Philippines, South Sudan, and Sri
Lanka.
A damning proof to the above claim is a
statement made by Philippines President, Rodrigo Duterte,
who is known for his dismal human rights record, on
September 4, 2018, during his highly touted visit to Israel.
Duterte
told Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, that the
Philippines “would henceforth only buy weapons from Israel
due to its lack of restrictions,” ‘Times of Israel’
reported.
The US is “a good friend,” Duterte said,
but like Germany and China, US weapons come with certain
“limitations”.
Considering that Washington
provides Israel with over $3 billion worth of weapons
annually that are used freely against occupied Palestinians
and other Arab nations with no regard whatsoever for
international or humanitarian law, one has to marvel at
Duterte’s statement.
It is logical to assume that a
country that sells weapons to civil war-torn and extremely
impoverished South Sudan, has not an iota of regulations,
let alone moral standards.
What is unique about the
export of Israel’s weapons and so-called ‘security
technology’ to the rest of the world, is that they often
appear in regions where people are most oppressed and
vulnerable. For example, Israeli companies have for years
stood
at the forefront of successive US administrations’ war
on undocumented immigrants.
Moreover, recent years
have witnessed the infusion of brutal Israeli military
tactics in many aspects of American society, including the
militarization of American police, thousands of whom
received training in Israel.
Similarly, in 2018,
Israeli war technology
was incorporated to the European Union’s security
apparatus. One such contract was awarded to the Israeli
company Elbit, estimated at $68 million, to provide maritime
unmanned aircraft system (UAS) services. This technology,
which relies on the Hermes 900 Maritime Patrol system,
allows Frontex – the European Border and Coast Guard Agency
– to intercept war refugees and migrants in their attempts
to cross into safer European
territories.
Interestingly, the EU has purchased from
Israel the same deadly technology that the Israeli army has
used against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip during
Israel’s so-called ‘Protective
Edge’ war of 2014.
The latter fact represents
the backbone of Israel’s marketing strategy. Branding its
military products as ‘combat-proven’, Tel Aviv is able
to obtain top dollar for its bloody technology, as it is
able to demonstrate, using actual footage, how its armed
drones, for example, can flatten whole Palestinian
neighborhoods in seconds and return safely to their bases
inside Israel.
SIPRI and Amnesty International are
right in exposing Israel’s thriving weapons exports
market, while emphasizing the fact that much of these
weapons proliferate freely among human rights violators. But
far greater focus should be placed on the fact that Israel
is, itself, a notorious human rights violator that should be
held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians, who
are often used as
guinea pigs in the testing stage of Israel’s
technology of death.
– Ramzy Baroud is a
journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is
the author of five books. His latest is “
: Palestinian Stories
of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity
Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior
Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs
(CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website
is
www.ramzybaroud.net
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