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
Trump Escalates Conflict With Congressional
Republicans
By Patrick Martin
October 12, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"WSWS"
-
Tensions within the Republican Party
exploded into public recriminations Tuesday,
with presidential candidate Donald Trump
issuing a series of strident statements
denouncing House Speaker Paul Ryan and
Senator John McCain, two leading
congressional Republicans, for their refusal
to support his campaign.
In
a particularly revealing Twitter comment,
Trump gloated over his open break with the
Republican congressional leadership,
declaring, “It is so nice that the shackles
have been taken off me and I can now fight
for America the way I want to.”
By
“shackles” Trump is referring to the
political norms of the US constitutional
system, which he has defied with his
threats, should he win the presidency, to
prosecute and jail his Democratic opponent,
Hillary Clinton, as well as his
encouragement of violence and his
denunciation of the electoral process as
“rigged.”
At
two campaign rallies Monday, Trump suggested
that a Democratic victory in the
presidential election would be illegitimate,
the result of ballot-box fraud in key states
such as Pennsylvania. He told his supporters
to send poll watchers to “certain
communities”—alluding to African-American
neighborhoods in Philadelphia—to “make sure
that this election is not stolen from us and
is not taken away from us.”
Trump’s strident attacks on his own party as
well as the Democrats make clear that his
perspective is no longer to win the
presidential election on November 8. His
orientation is rather toward the building of
an extra-parliamentary far-right movement
for the period of social and political
upheaval that will follow the elections.
Maine Governor Paul LePage, a fervent Trump
supporter, said in a radio interview Tuesday
that the United States needed someone like
Trump to wield “authoritarian power” because
“we’re slipping into anarchy.” LePage was
only articulating in the crudest form the
strongman politics that are the essence of
the Trump campaign.
Trump has said that a collapse of the world
financial system on an even greater scale
than in 2008 is likely, and he is
positioning himself to offer an ultra-right
alternative to a Democratic administration
that will become deeply unpopular as it
imposes policies of economic austerity and
imperialist war. Whether this approach costs
the Republicans legislative seats on
November 8 is irrelevant to Trump, because
he anticipates that in the next period in
American history, political issues are going
to be decided in the streets, not in the
halls of Congress.
This divergence underlies the conflict
between the Republican presidential
candidate and House Speaker Ryan, the top
Republican in Congress, who announced Monday
he would no longer defend Trump or campaign
for him. Ryan informed the House Republican
Caucus of his decision in a Monday
conference call, during which all members of
the House leadership declared their
agreement while a minority of pro-Trump
representatives loudly objected.
Effectively declaring the presidential race
lost for the Republicans, Ryan said that
while he would not withdraw his endorsement
of Trump, his number one task was to defend
the Republican majorities in the House and
Senate, “making sure that Hillary Clinton
does not get a blank check” when she becomes
president next January.
The
House Republican leaders were reacting to
polling data showing that Clinton has opened
up a double-digit lead over Trump
nationally. Of particular concern to the
Republicans were indications that Trump’s
unpopularity was having an effect on
congressional races. While loss of the
Republican majority in the Senate had been
widely considered possible, the 60-seat
Republican majority in the House of
Representatives was seen as impregnable
until last week.
Trump unloaded on Ryan in a series of tweets
on Tuesday, calling him “weak” and
suggesting that the congressional Republican
leadership would be responsible if he lost
the election to Clinton. He also denounced
the 2008 Republican presidential candidate
John McCain, one of ten Republican senators
who announced Saturday they could no longer
support his presidential campaign.
Clinton’s response to these events has been
a further shift to the right, redoubling her
efforts to win support from leading figures
in the Republican Party. Her campaign
launched advertisements in at least four
states that include testimonials from
Republican voters who are supporting Clinton
this year. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon
said, “She is reaching out to voters that
may well have supported Mitt Romney in 2012
and in a normal year might also be inclined
to support the Republican nominee, but are
so troubled by Donald Trump they are open to
supporting Hillary Clinton.”
As
part of this “outreach” effort, Clinton
followed up a campaign rally at Wayne State
University in Detroit Monday with a private
meeting with Republican billionaire Dan
Gilbert, the Quicken Loans mogul who has
bought up most of downtown Detroit in order
to make a killing from the city’s
bankruptcy.
For
the Democratic Party and its supporters in
the media, Trump’s slide in the polls and
the very public crisis of the Republican
Party are cause for celebration and
complacent sighs of relief. Typical is the
column by Roger Cohen in the New York
Times, which begins with a lengthy
verbal lashing of Trump:
“It’s fortunate that we are less than a
month from the election because we are
running out of words to describe him: this
phony, this
liar, this blowhard, this
cheat, this
bully, this
misogynist, this demagogue, this
predator, this bigot, this bore, this
egomaniac, this racist, this sexist, this
sociopath. I will not go on. It’s pointless.
Everyone knows,
not least his supporters .”
Cohen and his like are hostile to
acknowledging the widespread economic
desperation that is driving millions of
working people to vote for and support the
billionaire demagogue. But as Times
columnist David Leonhardt pointed out on the
same page Tuesday, tens of millions of
Americans confront economic stagnation and
generally deteriorating conditions of life.
He wrote:
“The typical household, amazingly, has a net
worth 14 percent lower than the typical one
did in 1984, according to a forthcoming
Russell Sage Foundation publication. The
life-expectancy gap between the affluent and
everyone else is
growing. The number of children living
with only one parent or none has
doubled since the 1970s (to 30 percent).
The obesity rate has
nearly tripled (to 38 percent). About
eight million people have spent time behind
bars at some point in their life,
up from 1.5 million 40 years ago. While
college enrollment has grown, the norm for
middle-class and poor students is to leave
without a four-year degree.”
Cohen dismisses this social layer as “the
losers to turbo-capitalism,” but they
comprise, as Leonhardt suggests, the vast
majority of the working class and large
sections of the middle class, for whom
living standards have declined or, at best,
stagnated.
Hillary Clinton, the handmaiden of the stock
exchange and the Pentagon, has no
credibility as a defender of working-class
jobs and living standards. It is the
complacent, right-wing defense of capitalism
and imperialism by the Democratic
Party—given a “progressive” coloration by
its pseudo-left apologists, who share its
obsession with the politics of race, gender
and sexual orientation—that provides an
opening for fascistic demagogues, whether
Trump himself or a more politically skilled
successor.
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