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
Shimon Peres Was No Peacemaker
I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood
and burning bodies at Qana.
By Robert Fisk
Peres said the massacre came as a
‘bitter surprise’. It was a lie: the UN
had repeatedly told Israel the camp was
packed with refugees.
September 30, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"
-
When
the world heard that Shimon Peres had died,
it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when I heard
that Peres was dead, I thought of blood and
fire and slaughter.
I
saw the results: babies torn apart,
shrieking refugees, smouldering bodies. It
was a place called Qana and most of the 106
bodies – half of them children – now
lie beneath the
UN camp where they were torn to
pieces by
Israeli shells in 1996. I had
been on a UN aid convoy just outside the
south Lebanese village. Those shells swished
right over our heads and into the refugees
packed below us. It lasted for 17 minutes.
Shimon Peres, standing for election as
Israel’s prime minister – a post he
inherited when his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin
was assassinated – decided to increase his
military credentials before polling day by
assaulting Lebanon. The
joint Nobel Peace Prize holder
used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha
rockets over the Lebanese border by the
Hezbollah. In fact, their rockets
were retaliation for the killing of a small
Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they
suspected had been left by an Israeli
patrol. It mattered not.
A
few days later, Israeli troops inside
Lebanon came under attack close
to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into
the village. Their first shells hit a
cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew
directly into the UN Fijian army camp where
hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres
announced that “we did not know that several
hundred people were concentrated in that
camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”
It
was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana
for years after their 1982 invasion, they
had video film of the camp, they were even
flying a drone over the camp during the 1996
massacre – a fact they denied until a UN
soldier gave me his video of the drone,
frames from which we published in The
Independent. The UN had repeatedly told
Israel that the camp was packed with
refugees.
This was Peres’s contribution to Lebanese
peace. He lost the election and probably
never thought much more about Qana. But I
never forgot it.
When I reached the UN gates, blood was
pouring through them in torrents. I could
smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck
to them like glue. There were legs and arms,
babies without heads, old men’s heads
without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in
two pieces in a burning tree. What was left
of him was on fire.
On
the steps of the barracks, a girl sat
holding a man with grey hair, her arm round
his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and
forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at
her. She was keening and weeping and crying,
over and over: “My father, my father.” If
she is still alive – and there was to be
another Qana massacre in the years to come,
this time from the Israeli air force – I
doubt if the word “peacemaker” will be
crossing her lips.
There was a UN enquiry which stated in its
bland way that it did not believe the
slaughter was an accident. The UN report was
accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a
brave Israeli magazine published an
interview with the artillery soldiers who
fired at Qana. An officer had referred to
the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in
Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no
harm in that,” he was quoted as saying.
Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally
carefree: “I don’t know any other rules of
the game, either for the [Israeli] army or
for civilians…”
Peres called his Lebanese invasion
“Operation Grapes of Wrath”, which – if it
wasn’t inspired by John Steinbeck – must
have come from the Book of Deuteronomy.
“The sword without and terror within,” it
says in Chapter 32, “shall destroy both the
young man and the virgin, the suckling also
with the man of grey hairs.” Could there be
a better description of those 17 minutes at
Qana?
Yes, of course, Peres changed in later
years. They claimed that Ariel Sharon –
whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra
and Chatila camps in 1982 by their Lebanese
Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker”
when he died. At least he didn’t receive the
Nobel Prize.
Peres later became an advocate of a “two
state solution”, even as the Jewish colonies
on Palestinian land – which he once so
fervently supported – continued to grow.
Now
we must call him a “peacemaker”. And count,
if you can, how often the word “peace” is
used in the Peres obituaries over the next
few days. Then count how many times the word
Qana appears.
Abbas & Netanyahu
exchange historic handshake at Peres funeral
(VIDEO) ;
Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, had
not met Abbas face-to-face in six years and
acknowledged the significance of his
attendance, saying: "It's something that I
appreciate very much on behalf of our people
and on behalf of us." |
