Saudi newspaper: "Unfortunately, Israel is a country that deserves respect"

This article appeared in today's Al Riyadh newspaper, by Fahad Amir Ahmadi. Here are the parts I could understand via auto-translate:

This is the painful truth, gentlemen ...

You can differ with me however you like .. But the truth is established by objectively comparing the numbers ..

Israel is better than all the Arab and Islamic countries with regard to democracy and political integrity (evidenced by the annual lists issued by various organizations of the world)...

For lack of space I will just focus on technical and military superiority.

At a time when the Arab peoples suffered from illiteracy, Israel was engaged in building the Dimona nuclear reactor and the formation of the first agency for space research in 1959 .. In spite of our superiority in encrypting our satellite TV channels (!) Israel has always excelled in sophisticated security technologies. While our efforts have failed to raise the women's cloak from the shoulder of the head, Israel succeeded in raising the missile "Horizon" and "Amos" above the atmosphere ...

Today, Israel is in third place globally in the export of weapons, and first place in the world in the production of drones (even with their small size and small population) .. It is also the smallest country that can produce tanks and fighter planes, and the fifth state in terms of possessing nuclear bombs, in fact, twenty years ago and I hear they had between 300 to 400 nuclear warheads, and between 2500 to 3000 missiles. (God alone knows how many they have nowadays)!

I personally believe that the Zionist plan for the transfer of technology is going today with the same momentum, which began sixty years ago .. In the area of space, for example, Israeli scientists participated since the sixties in the U.S. programs and build the first station to monitor their own space in 1964. In 1976, Jewish scientists from America contributed to the construction of the first Israeli satellite .. At the beginning of the seventies they had developed a missile, "Shavit" and "Tonan" .. In 1983, the re-structuring of space institutions and resulted in the establishment of the Israel Space Agency (Sala) ..

Israel exploited the collapse of the Soviet Union, attracted by Russian scientists in the manufacture of rockets. ...

All this made it possible for Israel in 1988 to launch the first of its own spy satellite Horizon 1, and in 1990 Horizon 2. Then, in 1995 Horizon 3 and Amos 4 military communications satellites... And it continues to launch these satellites, which was a dream cherished since the 1973 war when they relied on American satellites to monitor the Arab armies!!

... In fact, the best description is in this article written in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, the day after the launch of spy satellite Horizon 3:

"The gap between Israel and the Arabs in the technology space are measured in light years. While Israel is able to launch rockets orbiting Earth, ... the most developed country among the Arab countries, Iraq, is producing crude rockets using World War II-era technology!"

[Remember,] this was written 15 years ago.