The gift that keeps on giving
Please sir, we want much more: PM Netanyahu takes Obama to see one of America’s gifts, the Iron Dome defence system, with assorted military in 2013. Photo by Israel Project/Flickr Creative Commons
Why Obama’s military aid to Israel is breaking all records
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada
February 15, 2016
The Obama administration is offering Israel “the largest single pledge of military assistance to any country in US history,” an American official has confirmed.
This is a remarkable fact when set against the persistent claims of an ongoing “rift” between the US president and his Israeli counterpart Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The assurance was given to Defense News, in a report on Saturday outlining details of the package.
While the US hasn’t publicly confirmed specifics – which are still being negotiated – an Israeli cabinet minister told Defense News that the Obama package would see US military aid jump to more than $40 billion over the 10-year period beginning in 2018, from the $30 billion in the program that began in 2008.
Israel is the largest recipient of US military aid, according to Defense News, taking about 55 percent of the total. Aid from the US accounts for a quarter of Israel’s military budget.
Israel will also retain sweeteners that are denied other countries: the self-declared Jewish state receives its billions as a lump-sum payment at the beginning of each fiscal year, while other countries get installments.
While other countries are required to spend their US aid on American weapons and services, Israel is free to spend about a billion dollars each year subsidizing its own arms makers and research, developing technologies that may eventually compete against US companies.
But an unnamed, recently retired senior Israeli official told Defense News that there is a catch: under the Obama weapons deal, Israel won’t be able to ask for annual “plus-ups” – extra gifts from the US Congress that have amounted to as much as an extra $1.9 billion per year on average – except in “extreme emergency cases.”
That is hardly a catch, however. There’s nothing that the Obama administration can agree to with Israel that can effectively bind any future Congress.
What can stop Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill from continuing their practice of giving Israel annual top-ups that exceed even the requests put in for Israel by the Pentagon?
“Realistic offer”
As the Palestine Liberation Organization ought to have learned from decades of the so-called “peace process,” Israel’s negotiating strategy is to pocket any concessions from the other side, then start negotiating anew for more as if it had received nothing.
There is every indication that this is Israel’s approach. Despite Obama’s unprecedented largesse, Israel is publicly complaining that the US president is not being generous enough.
Last week, Israeli cabinet minister Zeev Elkin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that Israel was still waiting for a “realistic offer” from the Obama administration.
Elkin was only taking a lead from his boss.
“Iran’s going to get about $100 billion now,” Netanyahu claimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, referring to the country’s own money that is being unfrozen due to the lifting of sanctions.
“The American assistance to Israel is about $3.1 billion and we’re talking about a bigger package. But remember that even over a 10-year period, it pales in comparison to the enormous funds Iran gets,” the Israeli leader added.
Netanyahu last week told his ministers that if Israel didn’t extract what it wanted from Obama, “perhaps we will not manage to come to an agreement with this administration and will need to come to an agreement with the next administration.”
The White House responded – no doubt sincerely – that Israel could wait if it preferred, but that it “will certainly not find a president more committed to Israel’s security than is President Obama.”
Israel and its lobby
Israel is conducting itself as if it is an equal to the US, and as if it is engaged in a “negotiation” in which two sides have something substantial to offer and substantial to receive from each other.
That’s what Israel and its lobby want people to believe. The lobby boasts of the benefits Israel supposedly brings to its US bankroller – particularly in technology.
But these benefits are marginal compared with the vast military, industrial and scientific complex of the US, whose $600-billion-a-year global military machine would barely notice if Israel disappeared.
A glance at the Israeli arsenal makes clear that it is Israel that is completely dependent on US technology, not the other way around.
American-made Caterpillar D9 bulldozer with Israeli armour for 2014 operation in Gaza.
The fact is that Israel is a very small and barely significant US client state. Its importance is inflated by several factors, including its outsize domestic lobby and the ideological commitments of US leaders like Obama who openly embrace the “shared values” between America’s settler-colonial history and Zionism.
But Israel lobby power is not and has never been absolute. Rather, as Joseph Massad has argued, its influence is proportional to how closely aligned Israel is with US imperial and hegemonic interests.
When these clash – as in the case of the ongoing US rapprochement with Iran – the US establishment, even Obama, has no problem defying the lobby.
But where US leaders have no substantial disagreements with Israel’s actions – such as Israel’s killing of Palestinians and stealing of their land – there is no benefit, but there is a high cost to confronting the lobby.
Indeed, Palestinian rights and lives have been the currency Obama has used to “compensate” Israel over the Iran deal.
The new, bigger-than-ever Obama arms package will not be used by Israel to attack Iran, and therefore does not interfere with any US hegemonic interest.
The weapons Obama is giving Israel will be used to maintain and fuel Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism in Palestine, not to mention its regular massacres in Gaza.
That is why Obama is so determined to conclude this record-breaking weapons giveaway before his term ends.
The US-made Apache attack helicopter, much used to patrol and fire at Gaza.
Stop America’s Military Aid to Israel From Subsidizing the Settlements
The administration’s new security package should require Israel to stop funding settlements, which are destroying the two-state solution. Democratic primary voters might want to weigh in too.
By Peter Beinart, Haaretz
February 24, 2016
Should the United States give Israel $4 billion a year without asking it to do anything to keep the two state solution alive?
It’s a timely question. America’s current agreement with Israel, which expires in 2018, grants the Jewish state $3 billion per year in military aid.
(The real figure is hundreds of millions of dollars higher because in recent years Congress has given Israel additional aid for anti-missile defense systems like Iron Dome.) According to press reports, the Obama and Netanyahu governments are weeks away from replacing the current aid deal with a new, substantially larger, one. The United States has reportedly offered $3.7 billion per year. Israel has reportedly requested as much as $5 billion. Whatever the final figure, Israel will continue receiving more than half of America’s overall military aid.
I support military assistance to Israel. Although last year’s Iran deal retards Tehran’s nuclear program, and thus benefits Israeli security overall, it does lift many Western sanctions, thus giving Iran more money with which to bolster its conventional military arsenal. ISIS, Hezbollah and Hamas pose even more direct threats to Israeli lives. I was in Tel Aviv with my six-year-old daughter in the summer of 2014 when Hamas hit the city with rockets. I’m glad the United States helped pay for the missile defence system that knocked them down.
But if Hamas and Hezbollah threaten Israeli security, so does the death of the two state solution. Don’t take my word for it. In 2013, Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, warned that if Benjamin Netanyahu continued his current policies, “we will face an immediate existential threat of the erasing of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” In 2015, former head of the Mossad, Israel’s external security service, Meir Dagan, declared that, “On the Palestinian matter, his [Netanyahu’s] policies are leading to either a binational state or an apartheid state,” and thus “could lead to the end of the Zionist dream.” Just this week, the head of Israeli military intelligence warned that without movement toward a Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorism will grow.
Enjoying the lazy, hazy days of summer and an abundant water supply in the Jews-only illegal settlement of Ariel.
Giving the Israeli government $4 billion per year in security assistance while it continues policies that its own security officials say endangers Israel’s survival is not true friendship, no matter what AIPAC says.
So here’s a modest proposal: Condition the aid package on an end to settlement subsidies.
Right now, Israel doesn’t merely allow its Jewish citizens to move into the West Bank settlements that undermine a viable Palestinian state. It pays them to. A 2012 study by the newspaper Yediot Ahronot found that the average settler receives 70 percent more government money than does the average Israeli inside the green line. (That’s only civilian spending. It doesn’t even count the extra security costs required to guard settlements.) Israel’s five most heavily subsidized municipalities are all settlements in the West Bank, several of them outside the “settlement blocs” that Israel would try to retain in a two state deal.
Other investigations have noted the same thing. A 2015 report by Tel Aviv’s Macro Centre for Political Economics found that the Israeli government spends twice as much on students in settler schools as on those in Israel proper. A 2013 Peace Now Report concluded that settlers “receive a budget of four times more than their share of the population” from Israel’s housing ministry. Israeli officials boast about this. In 2012, Netanyahu’s then-finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, bragged that his government had “double[d] the economic and financial support and government transfers to the settlements.”
The illegal West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin. Photo by Gershon Elinson/
Asking Israel to end these subsidies in return for a $4 billion annual aid package that would constitute roughly 20 percent of Israel’s defence budget is a pretty modest request. After all, the United States wouldn’t be demanding that Israel sign a two state agreement right away. It wouldn’t even be demanding that Israel stop settlement growth, as George H.W. famously did a quarter-century ago. It would simply be asking Israel not to offer a financial incentive for it.
Merely by posing the question, the Obama administration would make establishment American Jewish groups squirm. They could not support such a condition because they can’t support any pressure on Israel without rupturing their own relationship with Netanyahu’s government. But opposing such a modest requirement would help expose the fraudulence of their supposed support for the two state solution.
The ‘Doher’ howitzer, the US M109 upgraded by Israel. Extensively used in OPE.
It would make Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders squirm too. Clinton has signalled that she’ll put even less pressure on Netanyahu than Obama did, and Sanders has tried to avoid talking about Israel altogether. Yet I suspect most Democratic primary voters think that if the U.S. is going to give Netanyahu $4 billion a year, it should at least ask him to avoid destroying the possibility of a Palestinian state. Merely by posing the question, in other words, the Obama administration would provoke a debate the Democratic Party badly needs to have.
Notes and links
What does the IDF buy with US money?
Overall, the United States covers nearly one quarter of Israel’s defence budget — from tear gas canisters to F-16 fighter jets. In their 2008-2009 assault on Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces made use of M-92 and M-84 “dumb bombs,” Paveway II and JDAM guided “smart bombs,” AH-64 Apache attack helicopters equipped with AGM-114 Hellfire guided missiles, M141 “bunker defeat” munitions, and special weapons like M825A1 155mm white phosphorous munitions — all supplied as American foreign aid. (Uniquely among Washington’s aid recipients, Israel is also permitted to spend 25% of the military funding from Washington on weapons made by its own weapons industry.)