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
US Presidential Elections – the Meaning of a
Farce
“We got the meaning, we lost the
experience”, T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
Human kind is facing the most formidable
threats in all its history
–
The planet is going rapidly towards an
irreversible climatic disaster, facing
simultaneously all sort of threats to its
ecosystem
–
We are facing again the specter of a
possible major nuclear conflict
–
The vast majority of the human population
lives now in conditions which are,
sometimes, even worse than those prevailing
500 years ago
Huge banks, state and “private” secret
services are developing like cancer in our
societies.
For
the first time in human History the
development of productive forces has
attained the level required to satisfy all
“reasonable” human needs and permit a life
in dignity to all inhabitans of the planet,
but, in the same time, inequality has beaten
all historical records.
–
Also for the first time in History, the
extremely limited minorities, already
controlling most of power, money and
knowledge, are also in the process of
acquiring the technological capacity to
impose a totalitarian order which will make
Hitler seem a poor boy, an alchemist
compared to modern chemists.
But
maybe more worrisome than all those, already
very worrisome “objective” facts, is the
level of discourse emitted by the two
persons competing to become Presidents of
the most powerful country of the world. They
want to rule the superpower and the world.
But you will hardly find in the insults they
exchange any meaningful idea on what they
will do with the formidable challenges in
front of their country and the planet.
Words and ideas do matter, even if they are
false or ridiculous. Karl Marx used to say
that Ideas are in delay compared to the
Being and this is quite true. But the
opposite is also true. Ideas – or their
absence – is also a clear indication where a
society is heading, what it chooses to know
and what to ignore, what truths it needs and
what illusions it prefers.
Our
century was announced as a “century of
catastrophes” – traditional wars in the
Middle East, less traditional in Europe,
like the one that destroyed already Greece
and it goes on pushing it into the abyss,
nuclear disasters like in Fukushima (a clear
result by the way of the submission of
nuclear industry to the prerogatives of a
sick society in general and of the Finance
in particular, the consequences of which
remain hidden to a great extent). We are
living in an era of “end of hope”, of huge
crisis or collapse of nearly all the modern
projects promising to make Humans subjects
of their History (Enlightment and Democracy,
Socialism, Welfare Capitalism, blind belief
into the automatic social benefits of
Science, Psychanalysis etc.).
But
humans cannot survive without hope and
without meaning (project). The destruction
of meaning in the political discourse of the
most powerful states of the world, like the
USA, is a more than clear sign for the
accelerating decomposition of modern
capitalism (if capitalism is still the right
word for a system which is going into a kind
of post-modern feudalism, opening the way to
the end of Humans, the destruction of the
Planet and a dictatorship of the Machines).
The destruction of meaning may announce our
own destruction.
It
is only normal that people, feeling by
instinct the terrible prospects ahead, go
back to past identities, like nation or
religion, or try to find new hopes (for. ex.
the social movement crystallized around
Sanders during the US election campaign).
Still the “dark” forces seem, for the time
being, to dominate the scene.
Coming back to the US elections what we see?
One of the candidates seems to represent the
end of Rationality, the other the end of
Emotion, both the end of any kind of Ethics.
But we know from the Ancient times that
those three properties, when and only when
they coexist, are the ones differentiating
Humans from human-like monsters. (The
situation in Europe, in particular in
France, which is the “mother” of modern
Europe, as far as politics and ideas is
concerned, is not better. Probably it is
even worse than in the American center of
the world system).
The
characters dominating the political class
reflect the illness of the “system”. Maybe
this process is old enough. But after the
“end” of the Cold War (not ended by the way)
and the collapse of the USSR, it has come to
the fore nearly everywhere in “Western
Democracies”, the United States of America
included.
Read the following commentaries on the
second Trump-Clinton debate published in the
The Nation and the Counterpunch respectively
[1
,
2].
(Or, if you prefer, you may also skip the
news and just look again to the films of
Stanley Kubrick, especially the last one.
His genius will help you discern the nature
of forces governing, to a large extent, our
world and also their – unannounced –
project).
As
the great French genetician Albert Jacquard
has put it, “the main obstacle to grasp
reality consists of the limits of our
imagination”.
Dimitri Konstantakopoulos
is a journalist and writer. He served as
special advisor to the Office of Greek PM
Andreas Papandreou (1985-88), working on
Arms Control and East-West relations. He has
been chief correspondent of the Athens News
Agency in Moscow (1989-1999). He has been
the Secretary of the Movement of Independent
Citizens (2011-12) and a member of the
Secretariat and the Central Committee of
SYRIZA (2012-13). He left this party in July
2015. A member of the editorial board of the
international review of self-management
“Utopie Critique”, he is actively involved
in the Delphi international Initiative for
Democracy. He is the author of three books
on relations between CPSU and Greek CP, the
Cyprus conflict and US policy in Eastern
Mediterranean and on relations between
Nation and the Left.
Notes
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-strangest-debate-of-the-weirdest-election-ever/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/10/ |
