By John Whitbeck
May 12, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
- "CP"
- In the wake of the recent
Human Rights Watch report on Israeli
apartheid and persecution and the ongoing
Israeli brutalities in Jerusalem, a slowly
growing handful of brave American
politicians is daring to defy President
Biden’s publicly proclaimed assertion that
it would be “absolutely
outrageous” to ever condition American
“aid” to Israel on any Israeli behavior and
to assert that such “aid” should indeed be
conditioned, at least to some degree, on
Israeli violations of human rights,
international law and America’s own laws
with respect to the use of American-provided
weapons.
While this modest trend in principled
support for human rights and international
law by even a mere handful of American
politicians must be viewed as encouraging,
the tradition of characterizing the U.S.
government’s payments to Israel — currently
a baseline minimum of $3.8 Billion per year,
negotiated and agreed by a departing
President Obama for the next ten-year
payment cycle, inevitably supplemented by
numerous add-ons — as “aid” should also be
questioned.
Israel is not a poor country. In the
latest UN rankings, its annual per capita
GDP of $46,376 ranked it 19th among the UN’s
193 member states, ahead of Germany (20th),
the United Kingdom (24th), France (26th) and
Saudi Arabia (41st).
The guaranteed payments which U.S.
governments negotiate with Israeli
governments and commit to pay to Israel are
not negotiated and paid because Israel needs
the money.
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They are negotiated and paid as public
manifestations of American submission and
subservience.
The accurate and proper word for such
payments is “tribute”, for which the
dictionary definition is “a payment made
periodically by one state or ruler to
another, especially as a sign of
dependence.”
Ever since Israel attacked the aptly
named USS Liberty in 1967, killing 34
Americans, wounding another 171 and
inflicting 821 rocket and machine-gun holes
in the ship, and President Johnson ordered a
cover-up which constituted a virtual
surrender, the U.S. government has been
taking orders from and paying tribute to
Israel, with consequences for America’s
reputation and its role in the world vastly
more costly than mere money.
Indeed, the American relationship with
Israel deprives the United States of any
credibility when it accuses countries that
it dislikes for other reasons of violations
of human rights or international law.
If popular perceptions and discourse in
the United States could be transformed so as
to recognize that the U.S. government’s
payment commitments to Israel constitute
tribute to a dominant power rather than
“aid” to a needy nation, there might be some
hope for a long overdue American declaration
of independence and a more constructive and
honorable American role in the world.