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
We
Live in a Democracy for Dummies
By
Robert C. Koehler
October 08, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- “This politics of fear has actually
delivered everything we were afraid of.”
Well, OK, let’s think about these words of
Jill Stein for a moment, as the 2016
presidential race enters, oh Lord, its final
month — and the possibility still looms that
this country could elect a hybrid of Benito
Mussolini and Jim Crow its next, uh,
commander in chief.
Politics of fear, indeed! Most of the people
I know are going to vote for Hillary
Clinton, and I get it. The other guy is the
most unapologetic “greater evil” the
Democrats have ever been blessed with.
Everybody’s scared.
Bernie Sanders, my guy, the force behind
the Bernie Revolution that almost
transformed, or reclaimed, the Democratic
Party this year, said: “I know more about
third-party politics than anyone. (But) this
is not the time for a protest vote.”
And
Michelle Obama, speaking at a Clinton
rally a few days ago, equated not voting at
all with voting for a third-party candidate.
She told the crowd, according to
Bloomberg.com, that they could “help swing
an entire precinct for Hillary’s opponent
with a protest vote or by staying home out
of frustration.” (And the headline on the
Bloomberg story neatly summed up the media
consensus on how democracy works: “Which
States Can Gary Johnson and Jill Stein
Spoil?”)
A
month to go and I find myself skewered with
something bigger than frustration. It begins
with the false, dead enthusiasm I hear in
Hillary’s attempts to rally her base, the
tepid “USA! USA!” she invokes as she praises
America’s generals and its wars and its
moral righteousness. She and Trump are
running for president of the same illusion,
and there’s something seriously wrong with
this.
It’s no accident that most of the focus this
election season is on how bad the other
candidate is. The rallying cry from both
sides is: We have no choice. And I agree
with those words, but attach a different
meaning to them. We have no choice because
we’re given no choice. We live in a
permanent state of Democracy for Dummies: a
complexity-free democracy, reduced to a game
of winning and losing. The voters are
spectators, not co-creators of the national
future. No, the future is already
predetermined, and it’s one of unquestioned
military budgets and endless war.
Andrew Bacevich,
reflecting on the lameness of the first
presidential debate last week, pondered a
different scenario: a debate in which real
questions are addressed. “Consider it,” he
wrote, “the question that Washington has
declared off-limits: What lessons should be
drawn from America’s costly and
disappointing post-9/11 wars and how should
those lessons apply to future policy?”
Can
you imagine an actual, serious discussion of
such a question? Can you imagine that the
point of this discussion wasn’t to clobber
and humiliate the other guy but rather to
address a deep, unacknowledged national (and
global) wound and begin the work of healing
it?
Such questions have been missing from the
U.S. presidential elections since 1972, when
George McGovern ran on a platform of ending
the Vietnam War. In the 44 years since,
we’ve gotten grotesquely used to campaigns
about far, far less than that — with the
mainstream media acting as the bouncers,
keeping impertinent questions, and
candidates, out of the pseudo-news. This
year, with two extremely unpopular
major-party candidates vying for the job of
president, the media have been more
cynically dismissive than ever of
third-party intruders, a.k.a., spoilers. And
of course, any third-party vision of the
future is idealistic treacle, not something
to actually talk about.
So
it is in this context that I bring Jill
Stein and the Greens back into the
discussion: “All the reasons you were told
you had to vote for the lesser evil,” she
said last June, in a
Democracy Now interview “— because you
didn’t want the massive Wall Street
bailouts, the offshoring of our jobs, the
meltdown of the climate, the endless
expanding wars, the attack on immigrants —
all that, we’ve gotten by the droves,
because we allowed ourselves to be silenced.
You know, silence is not what democracy
needs. . . .
“It’s time,” she said, “to forget the lesser
evil, stand up and fight for the greater
good like our lives depend on it, because
they do.”
If
you’re not a Trump supporter, you may well
be someone caught between the fear of Trump
and the longing for a political process
truly engaged in the creation of a
compassionate, sustainable future. Is voting
Green the way to go? I don’t know, but I
definitely do not believe shutting the Green
Party’s presidential candidate and platform
out of the discussion is the way to go.
The
Green platform, as outlined recently by
David Cobb, Stein’s campaign manager and
2004 Green Party presidential candidate,
includes such items as: transitioning to 100
percent renewable energy (and creating
millions of jobs in the process); ending
mass incarceration; creating a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission “to understand and
eliminate the legacy of slavery”; ending our
current wars and drone attacks, closing our
700-plus foreign military bases and slashing
military spending by at least 50 percent;
taking the lead on a global treaty to halt
climate change.
There’s plenty more, but this cuts to the
heart of it. The media consensus on such a
platform begins and ends, no doubt, with
rolled eyeballs. The unspoken message is:
This stuff’s for later. We’ll start
addressing it in 2020.
http://commonwonders.com
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