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
Is The System Rigged? You Betcha
'Big Media is the power that sustains the
forces of globalism'
By Pat Buchanan
“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a
rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New
Hampshire on Saturday.
The
stunned recoil in this city suggests this
bunker buster went right down the chimney.
As the French put it, “Il n’y a que la
verite qui blesse.” It is only the truth
that hurts.
In
what sense is the system rigged?
Consider Big Media – the elite columnists
and commentators, the dominant national
press, and the national and cable networks,
save Fox. Not in this writer’s lifetime has
there been such blanket hatred and hostility
of a presidential candidate of a major
party.
“So
what?” They reply. “We have a free press!”
But
in this election, Big Media have burst out
of the closet as an adjunct of the regime
and the attack arm of the Clinton campaign,
aiming to bring Trump down.
Half a century ago, Theodore White wrote of
the power and bias of the “adversary press”
that sought to bring down Richard Nixon.
“The power of the press in America,” wrote
Teddy, “is a primordial one. It sets the
agenda of public discussion; and this
sweeping power is unrestrained by any law.
It determines what people will talk about
and think about – an authority that in other
nations is reserved for tyrants, priests,
parties and mandarins.”
On
ABC’s “This Week,” Newt Gingrich volunteered
on Sunday that, “without the unending
one-sided assault of the news media, Trump
would be beating Hillary by 15 points.”
On
this one, Newt is right.
With all due respect, as adversaries, Harry
Reid and Nancy Pelosi are not terribly
formidable. Big Media is the power that
sustains the forces of globalism against
those of Americanism.
Is
the system rigged? Ask yourself.
For
half a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has
systematically de-Christianized and
paganized American society and declared
abortion and homosexual marriage
constitutional rights.
Where did these unelected jurists get the
right to impose their views and values upon
us, and remake America in their own
secularist image? Was that really the
court’s role in the Constitution?
How
did we wind up with an all-powerful judicial
tyranny in a nation the Founding Fathers
created as a democratic republic?
There are more than 11 million illegal
immigrants here, with millions more coming.
Yet the government consistently refuses to
enforce the immigration laws of the United
States.
Why
should those Americans whose ancestors
created, fought, bled and died to preserve
America not believe they and their children
are being dispossessed of a country that was
their patrimony – and without their consent?
When did the country vote to convert the
America we grew up in into the Third World
country our descendants will inherit in
2042?
In
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a
congressional majority voted to end
discrimination against black folks.
When did we vote to institute pervasive
discrimination against white folks,
especially white males, with affirmative
action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even
in blue states like California, affirmative
action is routinely rejected in statewide
ballots.
Yet
it remains regime policy, embedded in the
bureaucracy.
In
2015, in the Democratic primaries, the big
enthusiastic crowds were all for 75-year-old
socialist senator Bernie Sanders.
We
now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not
only the superdelegates and the Obama White
House but a collaborationist press and the
DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any
chance at the nomination.
The
fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the
system is rigged.
If
there is an issue upon which Americans
agree, it is that they want secure borders
and an end to trade policies that have
shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the
wages, of working Americans.
Yet
in a private speech that netted her $225,000
from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton
confided that she dreams of a “common
market, with open trade and open borders”
from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.
That would mean the end of the USA as a
unique, sovereign and independent nation.
But the American press, whose survival
depends upon the big ad dollars of
transnational corporations, is more
interested in old tapes of the Donald on
“The Howard Stern Show.”
As
present, it appears that in 2017, we may get
a government headed by Hillary Clinton, and
an opposition headed by Paul Ryan and Mitch
McConnell.
Is
that what the people were hoping for,
working for, voting for in the primaries of
2016? Or is this what they were voting
against?
Big
money and the media power of the
establishment elites and the transnationals
may well prevail.
And
if they do, Middle America – those who cling
to their Bibles, bigotries and guns in
Barack Obama’s depiction, those
“deplorables” who are “racist, sexist,
xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not
America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary
Clinton’s depiction – will have to accept
the new regime.
But
that does not mean they must love it, like
it or respect it.
Because, in the last analysis, yes,
Virginia, the system is rigged.
Pat Buchanan has
been a senior adviser to three presidents,
twice a candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination and the presidential
nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.
Creators Syndicate, Inc. © 2016 |
