- Israel, without the United States, would probably not
exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October
1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the
Suez Canal and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American
military transport planes came to the rescue.
-
- They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered
Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war
as over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military
aid.The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC
oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was
perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system
the United States has provided to the Jewish state.
-
- Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. Recognized
the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a
deadly embrace ever since.Washington, at the beginning of the relationship,
was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower
demanded and got Israel's withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in
1956.
-
- During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed
the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. Flag and stationed 15 miles
off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications
from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. Sailors and wounded
171.
-
- The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington's
enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps,
soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel
lobby that set out to merge Israel and American foreign policy in the Middle
East.
-
- Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance.
It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. Direct economic and military
assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually,
roughly one-fifth of the U.S. Foreign aid budget. Although most American
foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to
be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent
of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry.
It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the
aid money.
-
- And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish
settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories
and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million
a mile.The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated
pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the
barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of
Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967
war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion
and the barrier, it also funds them.
-
- The U.S. Has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to
develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated
items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters
and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence
it denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest
as the Israelis built the region's first nuclear weapons program.
-
- U.S. Foreign policy, especially under the current Bush
administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign
policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions
critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the
other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council
resolutions it claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw
from the occupied territories.
-
- There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at
this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between
Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals
speak of U.S. Support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the
United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship
are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with
Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played
out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel,
one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable.
-
- The U.S. Foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling.
And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of
a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.
-
- There were many in the American foreign policy establishment
and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw
our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one
with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman's
secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a
backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich
region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest
strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right.
-
- The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security
and created the kindling for a regional conflagration.The alliance, which
makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through
the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force
in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican,
dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department
of Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests
were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of
dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel.
-
- They have brutally punished those who strayed, including
the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his
defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House
did not forget.George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like
his father. Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently
advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct
Israeli involvement in American military operations in the Middle East
is impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel.
-
- The United States, which during the Cold War avoided
direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding
of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf
War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.President
Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel
up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea
plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed
the French colonizers during the war of liberation.'In Israel,' Bush said
recently, 'terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide
attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's
not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good
indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq.'
-
- Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the
world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this
isolation. U.S. 'spin' paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but
Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.Israel is reaping
economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state.
-
- In the 'gated community' market it has begun to sell
systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel,
in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products -- well over a billion
dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown
into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has
come in the so-called homeland security sector.'The key products and services,'
as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, 'are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones,
biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling
and prisoner interrogation systems-precisely the tools and technologies
Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.
-
- And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the
region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost
it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching
its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as
a half-century head start in the 'global war on terror.' 'The United States,
at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable
Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well
beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel's
enemies are our enemies is not that simple.'Terrorism is not a single adversary,'
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books,
'but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist
organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except
when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982).
-
- Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence
directed against Israel or 'the West'; it is largely a response to Israel's
prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important,
saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has
the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good
part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.'Middle
Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close
ties to the Israel lobby in many cases with dual citizenship.
-
- Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position,
such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped
down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with
its array of Israeli-first Middle East experts, including special Middle
East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most
powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like
Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however
unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel.
-
- The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing
of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians
or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include
Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis 'Scooter'
Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.Washington was once
willing to stay Israel's hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most
extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed
on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier
in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis,
to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.The few tepid
attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all
ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure.
-
- When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied
the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
to 'halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.' It never happened. After
a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel's allies in Congress,
meaning just about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling
Sharon 'a man of peace.'
-
- It was a humiliating moment for the United Sates, a clear
sign of who pulled the strings.There were several reasons for the war in
Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington
could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear
of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was also
strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for
the United States.
-
- Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence,
in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq's
alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken
in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an
attack on Syria.
-
- The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part
because the Americans don't have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much
less launch a new occupation.Israel is currently lobbying the United States
to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel's
iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable
that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take
place.
-
- The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic
means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the
United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to
Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters
only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.
-
- The alliance between Israel and the United States has
culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle
East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is
unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are
dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in
the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress
have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli
interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This
is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential
candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich.
-
- The political cost for those who challenge Israel is
too high.This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S.
and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on
a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the ultimate end
of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.The weakening of the United
States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power.
-
- The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq
war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese
holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth
$825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even
in part, it would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the
collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave
of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment.
-
- The growing dependence on China has been accompanied
by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world's
major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The
Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.The
future is ominous. Not only do Israel's foreign policy objectives not coincide
with American interests, they actively hurt them.
-
- The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls
for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq
have all given an opening, where there was none before, to America's rivals.
It is not in Israel's interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not
in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in
the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed
at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.
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- http://www.charobim.com/
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- http://3rdofmoreontherapidslideofzionism.blogspot.com/
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