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: Israeli War Criminal
By Ben White
September 29, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "MEM"
- Shimon Peres, who passed away
Wednesday aged 93 after suffering a stroke
on 13 September, epitomised the disparity
between Israel’s image in the West and the
reality of its bloody, colonial policies in
Palestine and the wider region.
Peres was born in modern day Belarus in
1923, and his family moved to Palestine in
the 1930s. As a young man, Peres joined the
Haganah, the militia primarily responsible
for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian
villages in 1947-49, during the Nakba.
Despite the violent displacement of the
Palestinians being a matter of historical
record, Peres has always insisted that
Zionist forces “upheld the
purity of arms” during the establishment
of the State of Israel. Indeed, he even
claimed that before Israel existed, “there
was nothing here”.
Over seven decades, Peres served as prime
minister (twice) and president, though he
never actually won a national election
outright. He was a member of 12 cabinets and
had stints as defence, foreign and finance
minister.
He
is perhaps best known in the West for his
role in the negotiations that led to the
1993 Oslo Accords which won him, along with
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Yet
for Palestinians and their neighbours in the
Middle East, Peres’ track record is very
different from his reputation in the West as
a tireless “dove”. The following is by no
means a comprehensive summary of Peres’
record in the service of colonialism and
apartheid.
Nuclear
weapons
Between 1953 and 1965, Peres served first as
director general of Israel’s defence
ministry and then as deputy defence
minister. On account of his responsibilities
at the time, Peres has been described as “an
architect of Israel’s nuclear weapons
programme” which, to this day, “remains
outside the scrutiny of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”
In
1975, as secret minutes have since
revealed, Peres met with South African
Defence Minister PW Botha and “offered to
sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid
regime.” In 1986, Peres
authorised the Mossad operation that saw
nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu
kidnapped in Rome.
Targeting
Palestinian citizens
Peres had a key role in the military regime
imposed on Palestinian citizens until 1966,
under which authorities carried out mass
land theft and displacement.
One
such tool was
Article 125 which allowed Palestinian
land to be declared a closed military zone.
Its owners denied access, the land would
then be confiscated as “uncultivated”. Peres
praised Article 125 as a means to “directly
continue the struggle for Jewish settlement
and Jewish immigration.”
Another one of Peres’ responsibilities in
his capacity as director general of the
defence ministry was to “Judaise”
the Galilee; that is to say, to pursue
policies aimed at reducing the region’s
proportion of Palestinian citizens compared
to Jewish ones.
In
2005, as Vice Premier in the cabinet of
Ariel Sharon, Peres
renewed his attack on Palestinian
citizens with plans to encourage Jewish
Israelis to move to the Galilee. His
“development” plan covered 104 communities –
100 of them Jewish.
In
secret conversations with US officials
that same year, Peres claimed Israel had
“lost one million dunams [1,000 square
kilometres] of Negev land to the Bedouin”,
adding that the “development” of the Negev
and Galilee could “relieve what [he] termed
a demographic threat.”
Supporting
illegal settlements in the West Bank
While Israel’s settlement project in the
West Bank has come to be associated
primarily with Likud and other right-wing
nationalist parties, it was in fact Labor
which kick-started the colonisation of the
newly-conquered Palestinian territory – and
Peres was an enthusiastic participant.
During Peres’ tenure as defence minister,
from 1974 to 1977, the Rabin government
established a number of key West Bank
settlements, including
Ofra, large sections of which were built
on confiscated
privately-owned Palestinian land.
Having played a key role in the early days
of the settlement enterprise, in more recent
years, Peres has
intervened to undermine any sort of
measures, no matter how modest, at
sanctioning the illegal colonies – always,
of course, in the name of protecting “peace
negotiations”.
The Qana
massacre
As
prime minister in 1996, Peres ordered and
oversaw “Operation
Grapes of Wrath” when Israeli armed
forces killed some 154 civilians in Lebanon
and injured another 351. The operation,
widely believed to have been a
pre-election show of strength, saw
Lebanese civilians intentionally targeted.
According to the official Israeli Air Force
website (in Hebrew, not English), the
operation involved “massive bombing of the
Shia villages in South Lebanon in order to
cause a flow of civilians north, toward
Beirut, thus applying pressure on Syria and
Lebanon to restrain Hezbollah.”
The
campaign’s most notorious incident was the
Qana massacre, when Israel shelled a United
Nations compound and killed 106 sheltering
civilians. A UN report
stated that, contrary to Israeli
denials, it was “unlikely” that the shelling
“was the result of technical and/or
procedural errors.”
Later, Israeli gunners told Israeli
television that they had
no regrets over the massacre, as the
dead were “just a bunch of Arabs”. As for
Peres, his conscience was also clean:
“Everything was done according to clear
logic and in a responsible way,” he said. “I
am at peace.”
Gaza –
defending blockade and brutality
Peres came into his own as one of Israel’s
most important global ambassadors in the
last ten years, as the Gaza Strip was
subjected to a devastating blockade and
three major offensives. Despite global
outrage at such policies, Peres has
consistently backed collective punishment
and military brutality.
In
January 2009, for example, despite calls by
“Israeli human rights organisations…for
‘Operation Cast Lead’ to be halted”, Peres
described “national solidarity behind
the military operation” as “Israel’s finest
hour.” According to Peres, the aim of the
assault “was to provide a strong blow to the
people of Gaza so that they would lose their
appetite for shooting at Israel.”
During “Operation Pillar of Defence” in
November 2012, Peres “took on the job of
helping the Israeli public relations effort,
communicating the Israeli narrative to world
leaders,” in the words of
Ynetnews. On the eve of Israel’s
offensive, “Peres
warned Hamas that if it wants normal
life for the people of Gaza, then it must
stop firing rockets into Israel.”
In
2014, during an unprecedented bombardment of
Gaza, Peres stepped up once again to
whitewash war crimes. After Israeli forces
killed four small children playing on a
beach, Peres knew who to
blame – the Palestinians: “It was an
area that we warned would be bombed,” he
said. “And unfortunately they didn’t take
out the children.”
The
choking blockade, condemned internationally
as a form of prohibited collective
punishment, has also been defended by Peres
– precisely on the grounds that it is a form
of collective punishment. As Peres
put it in 2014: “If Gaza ceases fire,
there will be no need for a blockade.”
Peres’ support for collective punishment
also extended to Iran. Commenting in 2012 on
reports that six million Iranians suffering
from cancer were unable to get treatment due
to sanctions, Peres
said: “If they want to return to a
normal life, let them become normal.”
Unapologetic to the end
Peres was always clear about the goal of a
peace deal with the Palestinians. As he
said in 2014: “The first priority is
preserving Israel as a Jewish state. That is
our central goal, that is what we are
fighting for.” Last year he
reiterated these sentiments in an
interview with AP, saying: “Israel should
implement the two-state solution for her own
sake,” so as not to “lose our [Jewish]
majority.”
This, recall, was what shaped Labor’s
support for the Oslo Accords. Rabin,
speaking to the Knesset not long before
his assassination in 1995, was clear that
what Israel sought from the Oslo Accords was
a Palestinian “entity” that would be “less
than a state”. Jerusalem would be Israel’s
undivided capital, key settlements would be
annexed and Israel would remain in the
Jordan Valley.
A
few years ago, Peres described the
Palestinians as “self-victimising.”
He went on: “They victimise themselves. They
are a victim of their own mistakes
unnecessarily.” Such cruel condescension was
characteristic of a man for whom “peace”
always meant colonial pacification.
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