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
Writing on the Wall for Saudi Arabia
By
Irfan Husain
THE UK
has recently announced an extra 37 million
pounds in aid to Yemen, taking the total to
100 million pounds for the year. I wonder if
Britain’s international aid secretary, Priti
Patel, saw the irony in her announcement:
last year, the British government approved
sales of 3 billion pounds worth of arms to
Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has been using
weapons bought from the United States and
Britain to pound Yemen, the poorest Arab
state in the Middle East, to rubble.
As a
result of this relentless, if poorly
directed, air campaign, over 10,000 people,
mostly civilians, have been killed, with
hundreds of thousands wounded and millions
displaced. The infrastructure, already
woefully inadequate, has been largely
destroyed. Incompetent Saudi pilots have
blown up schools, hospitals and markets with
sickening regularity. One study shows that
one out of three bombs dropped has hit
civilian targets. Around 330,000 homes have
been destroyed, along with some 684 mosques,
630 schools and other educational institutes
and 250 health facilities. According to the
UN World Food Programme, the population in
nearly half of the country’s 22 provinces
faces starvation.
It
would seem that after more than a year of
slaughter and wanton destruction, some
people in the West have discovered their
conscience, and have begun asking questions
about their governments’ complicity in the
Saudi-led carnage in which the UAE has been
a junior partner. This bombing campaign has
been actively supported by the UK and the
US, with both supplying intelligence and
targeting data. American mid-air refuelling
tankers have extended the range and flight
time over victims of the coalition air
fleet.
A
recent move in the US Senate to halt arms
supplies to Saudi Arabia was defeated 71 to
27. While the outcome was predictable, the
fact that 27 senators voted for the proposal
is significant, given the millions the
kingdom spends on lobbying and public
relations in Washington. Five of the US
capitol’s top lobbying and PR firms are on
lucrative Saudi contracts. The objective of
all this spin is to change the focus of the
American perspective from the kingdom’s
appalling human rights record to its
usefulness as an ally in a troubled Middle
East.
But
despite all the money spent on buying
influence in Washington, Congress voted
overwhelmingly to approve a bill that would
make it possible for the families of 9/11
victims to sue the Saudi government.
Although President Obama has vetoed the
bill, both houses of Congress have vowed to
send it back. This requires a two-thirds
majority in the Senate, and those pushing
the legislation might struggle to find the
number of senators needed in the face of
fierce resistance from the White House.
Nevertheless, the vote is a sign of serious
slippage in Saudi support in Washington. In
a bid to stave off the vote, the kingdom has
made it known that if the bill is made law,
it will sell off $750 billion in US bonds it
currently holds. Saudi Arabia used a similar
threat recently when it was placed on a UN
blacklist of countries responsible for child
casualties in conflicts around the world.
The kingdom and several Arab camp followers
threatened to withdraw funding for various
UN humanitarian programmes if Saudi Arabia’s
name was not removed from the list. It was
duly removed after what one diplomat called
a campaign that was “bullying, threatening,
pressurising … real blackmail”.
Money
is Riyadh’s weapon of choice when it engages
with the outside world on controversial
issues. When Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, the
Saudi foreign minister, was in London
recently, he urged the UK to continue
supporting his country in Yemen to prevent
if ‘from becoming a terrorist state under
Iran-backed Houthis’. As a carrot, he told
the British government that the Saudi Vision
2030 plan contained projects worth two
trillion dollars, and that cooperation
between the two countries would take their
relationship ‘to another level’. Bribes are
seldom promised as openly as this.
The
Saudis were made aware of their declining
influence in Washington when President Obama
ignored their protests and signed the
nuclear deal with Iran. According to
Wikileaks, a senior Saudi prince had earlier
urged America to ‘cut the head off the
snake’ when there was loud talk of bombing
Iranian nuclear facilities. But as Riyadh’s
bellicose advice was ignored and the US went
ahead with negotiations, its new royal
hierarchy decided to effectively ally itself
with Israel, knowing that Tel Aviv loathed
the ayatollahs of Iran as much as the House
of Saud did. Also, no other country has as
effective a lobby in the US as Israel does.
Nevertheless, the current oil glut and the
emerging fracking industry, combined with
the rapid growth of alternative energy
sources, have all converged to reduce Saudi
Arabia’s clout in Washington and elsewhere.
Increasingly, people are seeing the country
for what it really is: the epicentre of the
Wahabi/Salafi ideology that is driving the
jihadist agenda, and destabilising many
Muslim states. In a long and controversial
interview published in The Atlantic magazine
a few months ago, President Obama
characterised the Saudis as ‘free riders’, a
comment that raised hackles in Riyadh.
This
rising crescendo of comments and criticism
against a country that had long been
considered a sacred cow should be a cause
for concern in the House of Saud. After all,
their policies are ultimately designed to
keep themselves in power, and in this
strategy, the US has a major role. Earlier,
the country’s importance in meeting the
global energy demand placed it beyond
serious scrutiny. This is now changing, and
the Saudis are scrambling around to find
ways of dealing with new realities.
irfan.husain@gmail.com
Published in Dawn September 26th, 2016 |
