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
Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for
Fascism
By Chris Hedges
October 17, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"Truth
Dig"-
Americans are not offered major-party
candidates who have opposing political
ideologies or ideas. We are presented only
with manufactured political personalities.
We vote for the candidate who makes us
“feel” good about him or her. Campaigns are
entertainment and commercial vehicles to
raise billions in advertising revenue for
corporations. The candidate who can provide
the best show gets the most coverage. The
personal brand is paramount. It takes
precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and
the common good. This cult of the self,
which defines our politics and our culture,
contains the classic traits of psychopaths:
superficial charm, grandiosity,
self-importance, a need for constant
stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception
and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse
or guilt. Donald Trump has these
characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our
system of
inverted totalitarianism has within it
the seeds of an overt or classical fascism.
The more that political discourse becomes
exclusively bombastic and a form of
spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria
is substituted for political thought and the
more that violence is the primary form of
social control, the more we move toward a
Christianized fascism.
Last week’s presidential debate in St. Louis
was only a few degrees removed from the
Jerry Springer TV show—the angry row of
women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill
Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage
with a threatening posture, the sheeplike
and carefully selected audience that
provided the thin veneer of a democratic
debate while four multimillionaires—Martha
Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and
Trump—squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The
Clinton campaign, aware that the policy
differences between her and a candidate such
as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during
the primaries to
elevate the fringe Republican candidates—especially
Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a
match between Clinton and Trump seemed made
in heaven. Trump, with his “brain trust” of
Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, would make
Clinton look like a savior.
A
memo addressed to the Democratic National
Committee under the heading “Our Goals &
Strategy” was part of the trove of
John Podesta emails released this month
by WikiLeaks.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential
HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] campaign and
the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make
whomever the Republicans nominate
unpalatable to the majority of the
electorate. We have outlined three
strategies to obtain our goal …,” it reads.
The
memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben
Carson as candidates, or what the memo calls
“Pied Piper” candidates who could push
mainstream candidates closer to the
positions embraced by the lunatic right. “We
need to be elevating the Pied Piper
candidates so that they are leaders of the
pack and tell the press to [take] them
seriously
The
elites of the two ruling parties, who have
united behind Clinton, are playing a very
dangerous game. The intellectual and
political vacuum caused by the United
States’ species of anti-politics, or what
the writer
Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,”
leaves candidates, all of whom serve the
interests of the corporate state, seeking to
exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed “the
narcissism of small differences.”
However, this battle between small
differences, largely defined by the culture
wars, no longer works with large segments of
the population. The insurgencies of Trump
and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a
breakdown of these forms of social control.
There is a vague realization among Americans
that we have undergone a corporate coup.
People are angry about being lied to and
fleeced by the elites. They are tired of
being impotent. Trump, to many of his most
fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger
to a corporate establishment that has ruined
their lives and the lives of their children.
And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot,
is the only vehicle they have to defy the
system, they will use him.
The
elites, including many in the corporate
press, must increasingly give political
legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a
desperate battle to salvage their own
legitimacy. But the more these elites
pillage and loot, and the more they cast
citizens aside as human refuse, the more the
goons and imbeciles become actual
alternatives. The corporate capitalists
would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary
Clinton. But they also know that police
states and fascist states will not impede
their profits; indeed in such a state the
capitalists will be more robust in breaking
the attempts of the working class to
organize for decent wages and working
conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman
Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very
well without democracy.
In
the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally
democratic liberal elite in the former
Yugoslavia fail to understand and act
against the population’s profound economic
distress. The fringe demagogues whom the
political and educated elites dismissed as
buffoons—Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan
Milosevic and Franjo Tudman—rode an
anti-liberal tide to power.
The
political elites in Yugoslavia at first
thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics,
who amassed enough support to be given
secondary positions of power, could be
contained. This mistake was as misguided as
Franz von Papen’s assurances that when the
uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed
the German chancellor in January 1933 the
Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any
system of prolonged political paralysis and
failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And
the longer we remain in a state of political
paralysis—especially as we stumble toward
another financial collapse—the more certain
it becomes that these monsters will take
power.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America,
the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He
has reported from more than 50 countries and
has worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas
Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15
years.
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