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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

The US Presidential Debate and the War Plans of the Ruling Class

By Patrick Martin

September 30, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "WSWS" -  Monday night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump plumbed new depths in the degradation of American politics. A billionaire and a multi-millionaire, both widely hated, traded false promises, platitudes, attack lines and reactionary bromides without seriously addressing any of the pressing issues facing the American people.

On social policy, Trump combined calls for trade war with a program of sweeping corporate tax cuts and the elimination of all regulations on business, at one point boasting of his own evasion of federal income taxes. Responding to Clinton’s criticism that he benefited personally from the housing market collapse, he declared, “That’s called business.”

Clinton, who has the closest ties to Wall Street, said the financial crisis of 2008 was the product of “tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off Wall Street.” She evidently hoped that no one would pick up on the fact that her husband’s administration and the Democratic Party as a whole played a central role in this process.

But the heart of the debate, as far as the ruling class is concerned, lay in foreign and military policy, where Clinton has focused the majority of her attacks on Trump, presenting herself as a more ruthless and militaristic future commander-in-chief.

Clinton continued the war-mongering diatribes against Russia that have dominated her campaign since the run-up to the Democratic National Convention in July, along with her attacks on Trump from the right, branding him a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She repeated the claim, never substantiated, that Putin was responsible for hacking the email of the Democratic National Committee.

In response to alleged cyber attacks by “Russia, China, Iran or anybody else,” she declared, “We are not going to sit idly by… and we’re going to have to make it clear that we don’t want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don’t want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country. And the Russians need to understand that.”

This language echoes her remark at a September 7 forum on national security policy in New York City, where she declared that a Clinton administration would treat cyber attacks as acts of war and respond with military force.

Besides suggesting war with Russia—possessor of the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons—Clinton called for stepped-up US military operations in the Middle East, including intensified air strikes on ISIS and the wider use of drone missile assassinations, targeting, in particular, ISIS leader Abu Baker al-Baghdadi. Such state killings should become “one of our organizing principles,” Clinton concluded.

Trump was typically bombastic in his threats of military action in the Middle East, but less explicit about war against more formidable targets such as Russia and China. But the logic of his “Fortress America” appeals to economic nationalism and trade war, and his identification of Mexico, China and other countries as US enemies, leads inexorably to the same program of global military aggression.

Moderator Lester Holt of NBC News did not ask Clinton how many millions of lives she was prepared to sacrifice in a potential war with Russia. However, indicative of discussions going on behind the scenes, he did ask the candidates’ opinions on reports that Obama “considered changing the nation’s longstanding policy on first use” of nuclear weapons. This was a reference to articles revealing that Obama had considered adopting an explicit no-first-use nuclear policy, a proposal he ultimately discarded after it came under attack from within his own administration.

Trump first said that he would “not do first strike,” before adding, “I can’t take anything off the table.” Clinton pointedly did not reply to the question.

In the aftermath of the debate, the media and most of the political establishment declared Clinton the “winner.” This is because she is seen as the more reliable instrument of US imperialism’s aggressive global policy, involving a vast escalation of military violence after the election.

Clinton is seeking to mobilize behind this policy privileged, pro-war sections of the upper-middle class who support the Democratic Party on the basis of identity politics. This was the essential significance of her pointed reference (in relation to police violence) to “systemic racism” in the United States.

The 2016 election campaign was dominated for many months by explosive popular disaffection with the whole political and corporate establishment. But it has concluded in a contest between two candidates who personify that establishment—one a billionaire from the criminal world of real-estate swindling, the other the consensus choice of the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street.

This outcome has an objective character. The two-party system is a political monopoly of the capitalist class. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are political instruments of big business. The claims of Bernie Sanders and his pseudo-left apologists that it is possible to reform or pressure the Democrats—and even carry out a “political revolution” through it—have proven to be lies.

With six weeks to go until Election Day, it is more clear than ever that whoever wins, the people of the United States and the entire world confront immense dangers, including the threat of a military conflict involving nuclear powers such as Russia and China. The greatest danger, however, is the gulf that exists between the advanced state of the war plans of the ruling class and the level of popular consciousness. Everything must be done to alert workers and young people to what is being planned and build a political leadership to oppose war and the capitalist system that produces it.

The working class must prepare itself politically for the struggles to come. This is the essential significance of the Socialist Equality Party’s election campaign and its candidates, Jerry White for president and Niles Niemuth for vice president. We urge workers and young people to support our campaign and attend the November 5th conference on “Socialism vs. Capitalism and War,” being held in Detroit.

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