The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Watching Trump and Clinton debate
was
as predictable as it was absurd
By Robert Fisk
September 29, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"
- Watching
them both yacking on about the
Middle East as a pink dawn glowed
from behind the Lebanese mountains
above Beirut, I found the
Trump-Clinton show a grimly
instructive experience. In the few
hundred miles east and south of
Lebanon, hundreds are dying every
week – in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq –
and yet there were the terrible
twins playing “I can beat Isis
better than you can beat Isis”. Was
this what the Arab world really
meant to the reality show
participants at the
unpronounceable university campus on
Long Island?
What was it Trump said to Clinton?
“You’ve been fighting Isis your
entire adult life!” And what did
Clinton say? “Well at least I have a
plan to fight Isis!” After an hour,
I was praying that the Lebanese
slept on amid the mountains. Please
God there would be electricity cuts
in Aleppo and Baghdad and Sanaa –
just for these 90 minutes, you
understand – so that the people
enduring the Middle East tragedy did
not witness how the next US
president was using their homelands
as a movie back-lot.
“He has no plan to defeat Isis,”
quoth Madame Clinton. But does
anyone? It’s a pity, for example,
that they didn’t outline “plans” for
justice, freedom and dignity in the
Middle East and an end to the policy
of bombing, bombing, bombing and
more bombing that now seems to
equal political initiative in the
Arab world. But of course they did
not, for all this was slotted
into the last bit of the CNN show,
the climax which was – wearingly and
predictably – entitled “American
security”.
There was a very brief mention by
Trump of “Bibi Netanyahu” that must
have left many
American viewers completely
floored – save for those supporters
of Israel to whom, of course, it was
addressed – but that was all we
heard about another small conflict
in the Middle East. Cliché and
banality rubbed up against each
other. Clinton claimed that Obama
had stopped those “centrifuges that
were whirling away” in Iran – I’m
not sure that centrifuges do
“whirl”, though Clinton may have
been talking about the “whirling
dervishes” who also live in the
region. And then Trump came up with
his apple pie throwaway.
“The Middle East is a total mess,”
and Iran would soon be a “major
power” – as if Iran was not already
a major power in the region, as it
has been for around 3,000 years. But
what particular “mess” was he
talking about? The “mess” in the
hospitals of eastern Aleppo? The
“mess” of Egypt’s civil rights –
though I do suspect that
Brigadier-General-President al-Sissi’s
version would rather appeal to Trump
– or the “mess” left behind by the
bombing of the Médecins Sans
Frontières hospital in Afghanistan?
Or perhaps the “mess” of Palestine –
another word that mercifully was not
dwelt upon by the duo who both plan
to rule America? Didn’t “Bibi”
mention that to Trump? Or the “mess”
of Nato, whose killing of Serbs (and
quite a few Kosovo Muslims) in 1999
was followed by the Alliance’s
support for the Afghan war but
which, according to Trump, “does not
focus on terror”?
“We have to knock the hell out of
Isis – and we have to do it fast,”
the great man told the world. Well,
sure, but haven’t we all been
knocking the hell out of
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria,
even Lebanon (a few years ago), and
achieving the constant rebirth of
ever more vicious warriors, of which
Isis – heaven spare us the thought –
may soon generate another, even
worse progeny? Trump apparently
believed that Isis would not exist
if Obama had left 10,000 US troops
in Iraq – a strategy Isis
would surely have applauded – while
Clinton moaned on about how the
Iraqi government “would not protect
American troops”.
And there you have it, I suppose. It
is the Arab world’s job, isn’t it,
to “protect” America in its various
military occupations, or – at the
very least – the task (yes, this old
chestnut was indeed produced) of
“our friends in the Middle East”.
And who were they, I wondered? Those
fantastic Saudis who gave us 15 of
the 9/11 hijackers? About the only
nonsense left unuttered by Trump
and Clinton was that Isis was born
outside the United States. There
they would have been on safe ground.
Or would they? For I suspect there
may be a growing number of Arabs who
believe that Isis is indeed a child
born in America.
