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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