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2009-01-09 05:52:56 UTC
The Cost of Israel to the American People
by Richard Curtiss
http://www.alhewar.com/Curtiss.html
By now many Americans are aware that Israel, with a population of only
5.8 million people, is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, and
that Israels aid plus U.S. aid to Egypts 65 million people for
keeping the peace with Israel has, for many years, consumed more than
half of the U.S. bi-lateral foreign aid budget world-wide.
What few Americans understand however, is the steep price they pay in
many other fields for the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which in turn is
a product of the influence of Israels powerful U.S. lobby on American
domestic politics and has nothing to do with U.S. strategic interests,
U.S. national interests, or even with traditional American support for
self-determination, human rights, and fair play overseas.
Besides its financial cost, unwavering U.S. support for Israel,
whether its right or wrong, exacts a huge price in American prestige
and credibility overseas. Further, Israels powerful U.S. lobby has
been a major factor in delaying campaign finance reform, and also in
the removal from American political life of some of our most
distinguished public servants, members of Congress and even
presidents.
Finally, the Israel-U.S. relationship has cost a significant number of
American lives. The incidents in which hundreds of U.S. service
personnel, diplomats, and civilians have been killed in the Middle
East have been reported in the media. But the media seldom revisits
these events, and scrupulously avoids analyzing why they occurred or
compiling the cumulative toll of American deaths resulting from our
Israel-centered Middle East policies.
Each of these four categories of the costs of Israel to the American
people merits a talk of its own. What follows, therefore, is just an
overview of such losses.
First is the financial cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers. Between 1949
and 1998, the U.S. gave to Israel, with a self-declared population of
5.8 million people, more foreign aid than it gave to all of the
countries of sub-Saharan Africa, all of the countries of Latin
America, and all of the countries of the Caribbean combined with a
total population of 1,054,000,000 people.
In the 1997 fiscal year, for example, Israel received $3 billion from
the foreign aid budget, at least $525 million from other U.S. budgets,
and $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the 1997 total of U.S.
grants and loan guarantees to Israel was $5.5 billion. Thats
$15,068,493 per day, 365 days a year.
If you add its foreign aid grants and loans, plus the approximate
totals of grants to Israel from other parts of the U.S. federal
budget, Israel has received since 1949 a grand total of $84.8 billion,
excluding the $10 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees it has
drawn to date.
And if you calculate what the U.S. has had to pay in interest to
borrow this money to give to Israel, the cost of Israel to U.S.
taxpayers rises to $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation.
Put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis
had received from the U.S. government by October 31, 1997, cost
American taxpayers $23,241 per Israeli. Thats $116,205 for every
Israeli family of five.
None of these figures include the private donations by Americans to
Israeli charities, which initially constituted about one quarter of
Israels budget, and today approach $1 billion annually. In addition
to the negative effect of these donations on the U.S. balance of
payments, the donors also deduct them from their U.S. income taxes,
creating another large drain on the U.S. treasury.
Nor do the figures above include any of the indirect financial costs
of Israel to the United States, which cannot be tallied. One example
is the cost to U.S. manufacturers of the Arab boycott, surely in the
billions of dollars by now. Another example is the cost to U.S.
consumers of the price of petroleum, which surged to such heights that
it set off a world-wide recession during the Arab oil boycott imposed
in reaction to U.S. support of Israel in the 1973 war.
Other examples are a portion of the costs of maintaining large U.S.
Sixth Fleet naval forces in the Mediterranean, primarily to protect
Israel, and military air units at the Aviano base in Italy, not to
mention the staggering costs of frequent deployments to the Arabian
Peninsula and Gulf area of land and air forces from the United States
and naval units from the Seventh Fleet, which normally operates in the
Pacific Ocean.
Many years ago the late Undersecretary of State George Ball estimated
the true financial cost of Israel to the United States at $11 billion
a year. Since then direct U.S. foreign aid to Israel has nearly
doubled, and simply adjusting that original figure into 1998 dollars
would send it considerably higher today.
Next comes the cost of Israel to the international prestige and
credibility of the United States. Americans seem constantly astounded
at our foreign policy failures in the Middle East. This stems from a
profound ignorance of the background of the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute, which in turn results from a reluctance by the mainstream
U.S. media to present these facts objectively.
Toward the end of the 19th century when political Zionism was created
in Europe, Jews were a tiny fraction of the population of the Holy
Land, much of which was heavily cultivated and thickly populated, and
certainly not a desert waiting to be reclaimed by outsiders.
Even in 1947, after half a century of Zionist immigration and an
influx of Jewish refugees from Hitler, Jews still constituted only one
third of the population of the British Mandate of Palestine. Only
seven percent of the land was Jewish-owned. Yet when the United
Nations partitioned Palestine in that year, the Jewish state-to-be
received 53 percent and the Arab state-to-be received only 47 percent
of the land. Jerusalem was to remain separate under international
supervision, a "corpus seperatum" in the words of the United Nations.
One of the myths that many Americans still believe is that the initial
war between the Arabs and Israelis broke out on May 15, 1948 when the
British withdrew and military units from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria
entered Palestine, allegedly because the Arabs had rejected a
partition plan that the Israelis accepted.
In fact, the fighting began almost six months earlier, immediately
after the partition plan was announced. By the time the Arab armies
intervened in May, some 400,000 Palestinians already had fled or been
driven from their homes. To the Arab nations the military forces they
sent to Palestine were on a rescue mission to halt the dispossession
of Palestinians from the areas the U.N. had awarded to both the Jewish
and the Palestinian Arab state. In fact history has revealed that the
Jordanian forces had orders not to venture into areas the U.N. had
awarded to Israel.
Although the newly created Israeli government didnt formally reject
the partition plan, in practice it never accepted the plan. To this
day, half a century later, Israel still refuses to define its borders.
In fact, when the fighting of 1947 and 1948 ended, the State of Israel
occupied half of Jerusalem and 78 percent of the former mandate of
Palestine. About 750,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians had been
driven from towns, villages and homes to which the Israeli forces
never allowed them to return.
The four wars that followed, three of them started by Israel in 1956,
1967, and 1982, and one of them started by Egypt and Syria to recover
their occupied lands in 1973, have been over the portions of Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan and Egypt which the Israelis occupied militarily in
those wars, the other half of Jerusalem, and the 22 percent of
Palestine comprising the West Bank and Gaza which is all that
remains for the Palestinians.
It is the unwillingness of successive U.S. governments to acknowledge
these historical facts, and adjust U.S. Middle East policies to right
these wrongs, that has resulted in such a devastating loss of
international credibility. Americans, who once were identified with
the modern schools, universities and hospitals they had established
throughout the Middle East starting more than 150 years ago, now are
identified with U.S. misuse of its veto in the United Nations to
condone Israeli violations of the human rights of the Palestinians
living in the lands Israel has seized by force. The Israeli occupation
violates the preface to the United Nations Charter banning the
acquisition of territory by war. What the Israeli government has been
doing in the occupied territories also violates the Fourth Geneva
convention, which forbids the transfer of populations to or from such
areas.
Governments of Middle Eastern countries which once looked to the
United States as their protectors from European colonialism, now find
it very difficult to justify maintaining cordial relations with the
United States at all. Friendly Arab governments are jeopardized by
their U.S. alliances, and the fall of one, the Hashemite Kingdom of
Iraq, was directly attributable to its premature withdrawal of its
armed forces from Palestine during the 1948 fighting, and its
subsequent membership in a military alliance with the U.S. and
Britain.
Even our European and Asian allies have joined in deploring the
perpetual American tilt toward Israel. In a recent vote on a U.N.
General Assembly resolution calling upon Israel to curb further
encroachments on Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers, only the United
States and Micronesia voted with Israel. Of the 185 U.N. member
nations, all of the others, without exception, voted against Israel or
abstained.
Yet Americans seem oblivious to such examples of how their
Israel-centered Middle East policies are isolating the United States
in the world.
Next is the cost of Israel to the American domestic political system.
In December 1997, Fortune magazine asked professional lobbyists to
select the most powerful special interest group in the United States.
They chose the American Association of Retired Persons, which lobbies
on behalf of all Americans over 60.
In second place, however, was the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, Israels official Washington, D.C. lobby, with a $15
million budget the sources of which AIPAC refuses to disclose and
150 employees. AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a
roof group set up to coordinate the efforts on behalf of Israel of
some 52 national Jewish organizations.
Among those organizations are groups such as Bnai Brith's
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with a $45 million budget, and Hadassah,
the Zionist womens group, which spends more than AIPAC and sends
thousands of Americans every year to Israel on Israeli
government-supervised visits.
Both AIPAC and the ADL maintain secret "opposition research"
departments which compile files on politicians, journalists, academics
and organizations, and circulate this information through local Jewish
community councils to pro-Israel groups and activists in order to
damage the reputations of those who dare to speak out and thus have
been blackballed as "enemies of Israel." In the case of ADL, police
raids on the organizations Los Angeles and San Francisco offices
established that much of the information they had compiled was
erroneous, and thus slanderous, and some also was illegally obtained.
In the case of AIPAC, this is not the organizations most
controversial activity. In the 1970s members of AIPACs national board
of directors set out to form deceptively named local political action
committees (PACs) which could coordinate their efforts in supporting
candidates in federal elections. To date, at least 126 pro-Israel PACs
have been registered, and no fewer than 50 PACs, like AIPAC, can give
a candidate who is facing a tough opponent and who has voted according
to AIPAC recommendations up to half a million dollars. Thats enough
money to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most
parts of the country.
What is totally unique about AIPACs network of political action
committees is that they all have deceptive names. Who could possibly
know that the Delaware Valley PAC in Philadelphia, San Franciscans for
Good Government in California, Cactus PAC in Arizona, Chili PAC in New
Mexico, Beaver PAC in Wisconsin and even Ice PAC in New York are
really pro-Israel PACs. So just as no other special interest can put
so much hard money into any candidates election campaign as can the
Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate
lengths to hide its tracks.
Some of Americas wisest and most distinguished public servants have
been kept from higher office by the blackballing of the Israel lobby.
One such leader was George Ball, who served the Kennedy administration
as Under Secretary of State and the Johnson administration as U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations. Given his unmatched brilliance in
forecasting international developments, there is no doubt that he
would have become secretary of state had he not publicly expressed the
skepticism about the U.S. relationship with Israel which most
Americans involved in foreign affairs privately feel.
In membership meetings which journalists are not allowed to attend,
AIPAC presidents have boasted that the organization was responsible
for the defeats of two of historys most distinguished chairmen of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat J. William Fulbright of
Arkansas and Republican Charles Percy of Illinois. The list of other
senators and House members for whose election defeats AIPAC takes
credit is too long to recount.
There is good evidence also that had it not been for complex maneuvers
by the Israel lobby, including encouragement of third party candidates
and unrelenting partisanship by pro-Israeli syndicated columnists and
other media figures, Democratic President Jimmy Carter probably would
have been reelected in 1980, and Republican President George Bush
almost certainly would have been reelected in 1992.
The cost to our political system of losing national figures who
refused to allow U.S. domestic political interests to dictate U.S.
foreign policy has been enormous. So long as AIPAC and other powerful
lobbies continue to thwart meaningful efforts on behalf of campaign
finance reform, Americans will continue unknowingly paying such costs.
Finally, there is the cost of Israel in American lives. References to
the attack by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty in
which 34 Americans were killed and 171 wounded on the fourth day of
the Six-Day War of June 1967 often are met by disbelief. Very few
Americans seem to have heard of the attack on the ship operated by the
U.S. Navy for the National Security Agency to monitor Israel and Arab
military communications during the fighting.
The Israeli government claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. The
members of the crew and other naval officers who were stationed in the
Mediterranean and in Washington at the time state that it was a
deliberate attempt to sink the ship and blame Egyptian forces for the
disaster. It is the only such event in U.S. Naval history the cause of
which has never been formally investigated either by Congress or by
the Navy itself.
Major losses of American lives at the hands of Arab forces opposing
Israel are better known. These include the loss of 141 U.S. service
personnel in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in
1984. They also include the loss of xx U.S. diplomats and xxx local
employees of the U.S. government in two bombings of the American
Embassy in Beirut. Other such events include the bombing of the U.S.
Embassy in Kuwait, the taking of U.S. hostages in Beirut of whom three
were killed, the deaths of Americans in a series of Middle East
related skyjackings, the deaths of 19 U.S. service personnel in the
bombing of the Al Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1997
assassination of four U.S. accountants working for an American company
in Karachi.
All of these incidents, and many more in which Americans have died,
resulted directly from one-sided U.S. support for Israel in its
refusal to participate in the land-for-peace settlement with the
Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors envisioned in U.N. Security
Council Resolution 242. The U.S. has given lip service to that
resolution since November, 1967. But in practice the U.S. has done
nothing to force Israel to comply, even though the resolution has been
accepted by the members of the League of Arab States. That U.S.
hypocrisy fuels rage and frustration throughout the Middle East and
South Asia which will continue to take a toll of American lives until
Israel finally gives back the lands it occupied in 1967, or the U.S.
stops subsidizing Israeli intransigence.
Claims that there are positive aspects of the U.S.-Israeli
relationship seldom stand up to scrutiny. During the Reagan
administration it was labeled for the first time a "strategic
relationship" conferring benefits on the U.S. as well as on Israel.
The idea that Israel smaller in both area and population than Hong
Kong can offer the United States benefits sufficient to offset the
hostility that relationship arouses among 250 million Arabs living in
a 4,000-mile strategic swath of territory stretching from Morocco to
Oman is ludicrous. It becomes even more ludicrous when one realizes
that the relationship also has alienated another 750 million Muslims
who, together with the Arabs, control more than 60 percent of the
worlds proven oil and gas reserves.
Apologists for Israel also describe the U.S.-Israeli cooperation in
weapons development. The fact is that the one or two successful joint
weapons programs have been largely U.S. financed, while for their part
the Israelis have repeatedly sold to rogue nations U.S. weapons turned
over at no cost to Israel.
It is a sad but proven fact that the Israeli government also has
obtained secret U.S. military technology which Israel has sold to
other countries. For example, after the U.S. sent Patriot missile
defense batteries on an emergency basis to help defend Israel during
the Gulf War, the Israelis seem to have sold the Patriot missile
technology to China, according to the U.S. State Departments
inspector general. As a result, the U.S. has been forced to develop a
whole new generation of missile technology able to penetrate the
defenses China has developed as a result of the Israeli treachery.
Perhaps the most hypocritical rationalization offered by friends of
Israel is that U.S. special treatment is justified because Israel is
"the Middle Easts only working democracy" and that Israel and the
U.S. have many basic institutions in common. In fact, Israeli
democracy does not work for non-Jews. In contrast to the United
States, where by law all citizens have equal rights regardless of
religion or ethnic origin, Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel do
not have equal rights with regards to military service, the extensive
social benefits available to veterans of Israeli military service, or
even in terms of Israeli tax rates imposed on Arab citizens and
Israeli government expenditures in Arab communities within Israel.
Further, Israeli citizenship is not available to the Muslim and
Christian Palestinians driven from their homes in Israel in 1948, nor
to their descendants. But a Jew, born anywhere in the world, can have
Israeli citizenship for the asking.
Perhaps most shocking is the little-known fact that by now 90 percent
of the land in Israel proper is held under restrictive covenants
barring non-Jews, even those with Israeli citizenship, from owning the
land or from earning a living on it. Unfortunately, the land held
under such covenants is increasing, not decreasing. It would be
difficult, therefore, to find two countries more profoundly different
in their approaches to basic questions of citizenship and civil and
human rights as are the United States and Israel.
by Richard Curtiss
http://www.alhewar.com/Curtiss.html
By now many Americans are aware that Israel, with a population of only
5.8 million people, is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, and
that Israels aid plus U.S. aid to Egypts 65 million people for
keeping the peace with Israel has, for many years, consumed more than
half of the U.S. bi-lateral foreign aid budget world-wide.
What few Americans understand however, is the steep price they pay in
many other fields for the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which in turn is
a product of the influence of Israels powerful U.S. lobby on American
domestic politics and has nothing to do with U.S. strategic interests,
U.S. national interests, or even with traditional American support for
self-determination, human rights, and fair play overseas.
Besides its financial cost, unwavering U.S. support for Israel,
whether its right or wrong, exacts a huge price in American prestige
and credibility overseas. Further, Israels powerful U.S. lobby has
been a major factor in delaying campaign finance reform, and also in
the removal from American political life of some of our most
distinguished public servants, members of Congress and even
presidents.
Finally, the Israel-U.S. relationship has cost a significant number of
American lives. The incidents in which hundreds of U.S. service
personnel, diplomats, and civilians have been killed in the Middle
East have been reported in the media. But the media seldom revisits
these events, and scrupulously avoids analyzing why they occurred or
compiling the cumulative toll of American deaths resulting from our
Israel-centered Middle East policies.
Each of these four categories of the costs of Israel to the American
people merits a talk of its own. What follows, therefore, is just an
overview of such losses.
First is the financial cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers. Between 1949
and 1998, the U.S. gave to Israel, with a self-declared population of
5.8 million people, more foreign aid than it gave to all of the
countries of sub-Saharan Africa, all of the countries of Latin
America, and all of the countries of the Caribbean combined with a
total population of 1,054,000,000 people.
In the 1997 fiscal year, for example, Israel received $3 billion from
the foreign aid budget, at least $525 million from other U.S. budgets,
and $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the 1997 total of U.S.
grants and loan guarantees to Israel was $5.5 billion. Thats
$15,068,493 per day, 365 days a year.
If you add its foreign aid grants and loans, plus the approximate
totals of grants to Israel from other parts of the U.S. federal
budget, Israel has received since 1949 a grand total of $84.8 billion,
excluding the $10 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees it has
drawn to date.
And if you calculate what the U.S. has had to pay in interest to
borrow this money to give to Israel, the cost of Israel to U.S.
taxpayers rises to $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation.
Put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis
had received from the U.S. government by October 31, 1997, cost
American taxpayers $23,241 per Israeli. Thats $116,205 for every
Israeli family of five.
None of these figures include the private donations by Americans to
Israeli charities, which initially constituted about one quarter of
Israels budget, and today approach $1 billion annually. In addition
to the negative effect of these donations on the U.S. balance of
payments, the donors also deduct them from their U.S. income taxes,
creating another large drain on the U.S. treasury.
Nor do the figures above include any of the indirect financial costs
of Israel to the United States, which cannot be tallied. One example
is the cost to U.S. manufacturers of the Arab boycott, surely in the
billions of dollars by now. Another example is the cost to U.S.
consumers of the price of petroleum, which surged to such heights that
it set off a world-wide recession during the Arab oil boycott imposed
in reaction to U.S. support of Israel in the 1973 war.
Other examples are a portion of the costs of maintaining large U.S.
Sixth Fleet naval forces in the Mediterranean, primarily to protect
Israel, and military air units at the Aviano base in Italy, not to
mention the staggering costs of frequent deployments to the Arabian
Peninsula and Gulf area of land and air forces from the United States
and naval units from the Seventh Fleet, which normally operates in the
Pacific Ocean.
Many years ago the late Undersecretary of State George Ball estimated
the true financial cost of Israel to the United States at $11 billion
a year. Since then direct U.S. foreign aid to Israel has nearly
doubled, and simply adjusting that original figure into 1998 dollars
would send it considerably higher today.
Next comes the cost of Israel to the international prestige and
credibility of the United States. Americans seem constantly astounded
at our foreign policy failures in the Middle East. This stems from a
profound ignorance of the background of the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute, which in turn results from a reluctance by the mainstream
U.S. media to present these facts objectively.
Toward the end of the 19th century when political Zionism was created
in Europe, Jews were a tiny fraction of the population of the Holy
Land, much of which was heavily cultivated and thickly populated, and
certainly not a desert waiting to be reclaimed by outsiders.
Even in 1947, after half a century of Zionist immigration and an
influx of Jewish refugees from Hitler, Jews still constituted only one
third of the population of the British Mandate of Palestine. Only
seven percent of the land was Jewish-owned. Yet when the United
Nations partitioned Palestine in that year, the Jewish state-to-be
received 53 percent and the Arab state-to-be received only 47 percent
of the land. Jerusalem was to remain separate under international
supervision, a "corpus seperatum" in the words of the United Nations.
One of the myths that many Americans still believe is that the initial
war between the Arabs and Israelis broke out on May 15, 1948 when the
British withdrew and military units from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria
entered Palestine, allegedly because the Arabs had rejected a
partition plan that the Israelis accepted.
In fact, the fighting began almost six months earlier, immediately
after the partition plan was announced. By the time the Arab armies
intervened in May, some 400,000 Palestinians already had fled or been
driven from their homes. To the Arab nations the military forces they
sent to Palestine were on a rescue mission to halt the dispossession
of Palestinians from the areas the U.N. had awarded to both the Jewish
and the Palestinian Arab state. In fact history has revealed that the
Jordanian forces had orders not to venture into areas the U.N. had
awarded to Israel.
Although the newly created Israeli government didnt formally reject
the partition plan, in practice it never accepted the plan. To this
day, half a century later, Israel still refuses to define its borders.
In fact, when the fighting of 1947 and 1948 ended, the State of Israel
occupied half of Jerusalem and 78 percent of the former mandate of
Palestine. About 750,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians had been
driven from towns, villages and homes to which the Israeli forces
never allowed them to return.
The four wars that followed, three of them started by Israel in 1956,
1967, and 1982, and one of them started by Egypt and Syria to recover
their occupied lands in 1973, have been over the portions of Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan and Egypt which the Israelis occupied militarily in
those wars, the other half of Jerusalem, and the 22 percent of
Palestine comprising the West Bank and Gaza which is all that
remains for the Palestinians.
It is the unwillingness of successive U.S. governments to acknowledge
these historical facts, and adjust U.S. Middle East policies to right
these wrongs, that has resulted in such a devastating loss of
international credibility. Americans, who once were identified with
the modern schools, universities and hospitals they had established
throughout the Middle East starting more than 150 years ago, now are
identified with U.S. misuse of its veto in the United Nations to
condone Israeli violations of the human rights of the Palestinians
living in the lands Israel has seized by force. The Israeli occupation
violates the preface to the United Nations Charter banning the
acquisition of territory by war. What the Israeli government has been
doing in the occupied territories also violates the Fourth Geneva
convention, which forbids the transfer of populations to or from such
areas.
Governments of Middle Eastern countries which once looked to the
United States as their protectors from European colonialism, now find
it very difficult to justify maintaining cordial relations with the
United States at all. Friendly Arab governments are jeopardized by
their U.S. alliances, and the fall of one, the Hashemite Kingdom of
Iraq, was directly attributable to its premature withdrawal of its
armed forces from Palestine during the 1948 fighting, and its
subsequent membership in a military alliance with the U.S. and
Britain.
Even our European and Asian allies have joined in deploring the
perpetual American tilt toward Israel. In a recent vote on a U.N.
General Assembly resolution calling upon Israel to curb further
encroachments on Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers, only the United
States and Micronesia voted with Israel. Of the 185 U.N. member
nations, all of the others, without exception, voted against Israel or
abstained.
Yet Americans seem oblivious to such examples of how their
Israel-centered Middle East policies are isolating the United States
in the world.
Next is the cost of Israel to the American domestic political system.
In December 1997, Fortune magazine asked professional lobbyists to
select the most powerful special interest group in the United States.
They chose the American Association of Retired Persons, which lobbies
on behalf of all Americans over 60.
In second place, however, was the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, Israels official Washington, D.C. lobby, with a $15
million budget the sources of which AIPAC refuses to disclose and
150 employees. AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a
roof group set up to coordinate the efforts on behalf of Israel of
some 52 national Jewish organizations.
Among those organizations are groups such as Bnai Brith's
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with a $45 million budget, and Hadassah,
the Zionist womens group, which spends more than AIPAC and sends
thousands of Americans every year to Israel on Israeli
government-supervised visits.
Both AIPAC and the ADL maintain secret "opposition research"
departments which compile files on politicians, journalists, academics
and organizations, and circulate this information through local Jewish
community councils to pro-Israel groups and activists in order to
damage the reputations of those who dare to speak out and thus have
been blackballed as "enemies of Israel." In the case of ADL, police
raids on the organizations Los Angeles and San Francisco offices
established that much of the information they had compiled was
erroneous, and thus slanderous, and some also was illegally obtained.
In the case of AIPAC, this is not the organizations most
controversial activity. In the 1970s members of AIPACs national board
of directors set out to form deceptively named local political action
committees (PACs) which could coordinate their efforts in supporting
candidates in federal elections. To date, at least 126 pro-Israel PACs
have been registered, and no fewer than 50 PACs, like AIPAC, can give
a candidate who is facing a tough opponent and who has voted according
to AIPAC recommendations up to half a million dollars. Thats enough
money to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most
parts of the country.
What is totally unique about AIPACs network of political action
committees is that they all have deceptive names. Who could possibly
know that the Delaware Valley PAC in Philadelphia, San Franciscans for
Good Government in California, Cactus PAC in Arizona, Chili PAC in New
Mexico, Beaver PAC in Wisconsin and even Ice PAC in New York are
really pro-Israel PACs. So just as no other special interest can put
so much hard money into any candidates election campaign as can the
Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate
lengths to hide its tracks.
Some of Americas wisest and most distinguished public servants have
been kept from higher office by the blackballing of the Israel lobby.
One such leader was George Ball, who served the Kennedy administration
as Under Secretary of State and the Johnson administration as U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations. Given his unmatched brilliance in
forecasting international developments, there is no doubt that he
would have become secretary of state had he not publicly expressed the
skepticism about the U.S. relationship with Israel which most
Americans involved in foreign affairs privately feel.
In membership meetings which journalists are not allowed to attend,
AIPAC presidents have boasted that the organization was responsible
for the defeats of two of historys most distinguished chairmen of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat J. William Fulbright of
Arkansas and Republican Charles Percy of Illinois. The list of other
senators and House members for whose election defeats AIPAC takes
credit is too long to recount.
There is good evidence also that had it not been for complex maneuvers
by the Israel lobby, including encouragement of third party candidates
and unrelenting partisanship by pro-Israeli syndicated columnists and
other media figures, Democratic President Jimmy Carter probably would
have been reelected in 1980, and Republican President George Bush
almost certainly would have been reelected in 1992.
The cost to our political system of losing national figures who
refused to allow U.S. domestic political interests to dictate U.S.
foreign policy has been enormous. So long as AIPAC and other powerful
lobbies continue to thwart meaningful efforts on behalf of campaign
finance reform, Americans will continue unknowingly paying such costs.
Finally, there is the cost of Israel in American lives. References to
the attack by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats on the USS Liberty in
which 34 Americans were killed and 171 wounded on the fourth day of
the Six-Day War of June 1967 often are met by disbelief. Very few
Americans seem to have heard of the attack on the ship operated by the
U.S. Navy for the National Security Agency to monitor Israel and Arab
military communications during the fighting.
The Israeli government claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. The
members of the crew and other naval officers who were stationed in the
Mediterranean and in Washington at the time state that it was a
deliberate attempt to sink the ship and blame Egyptian forces for the
disaster. It is the only such event in U.S. Naval history the cause of
which has never been formally investigated either by Congress or by
the Navy itself.
Major losses of American lives at the hands of Arab forces opposing
Israel are better known. These include the loss of 141 U.S. service
personnel in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in
1984. They also include the loss of xx U.S. diplomats and xxx local
employees of the U.S. government in two bombings of the American
Embassy in Beirut. Other such events include the bombing of the U.S.
Embassy in Kuwait, the taking of U.S. hostages in Beirut of whom three
were killed, the deaths of Americans in a series of Middle East
related skyjackings, the deaths of 19 U.S. service personnel in the
bombing of the Al Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1997
assassination of four U.S. accountants working for an American company
in Karachi.
All of these incidents, and many more in which Americans have died,
resulted directly from one-sided U.S. support for Israel in its
refusal to participate in the land-for-peace settlement with the
Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors envisioned in U.N. Security
Council Resolution 242. The U.S. has given lip service to that
resolution since November, 1967. But in practice the U.S. has done
nothing to force Israel to comply, even though the resolution has been
accepted by the members of the League of Arab States. That U.S.
hypocrisy fuels rage and frustration throughout the Middle East and
South Asia which will continue to take a toll of American lives until
Israel finally gives back the lands it occupied in 1967, or the U.S.
stops subsidizing Israeli intransigence.
Claims that there are positive aspects of the U.S.-Israeli
relationship seldom stand up to scrutiny. During the Reagan
administration it was labeled for the first time a "strategic
relationship" conferring benefits on the U.S. as well as on Israel.
The idea that Israel smaller in both area and population than Hong
Kong can offer the United States benefits sufficient to offset the
hostility that relationship arouses among 250 million Arabs living in
a 4,000-mile strategic swath of territory stretching from Morocco to
Oman is ludicrous. It becomes even more ludicrous when one realizes
that the relationship also has alienated another 750 million Muslims
who, together with the Arabs, control more than 60 percent of the
worlds proven oil and gas reserves.
Apologists for Israel also describe the U.S.-Israeli cooperation in
weapons development. The fact is that the one or two successful joint
weapons programs have been largely U.S. financed, while for their part
the Israelis have repeatedly sold to rogue nations U.S. weapons turned
over at no cost to Israel.
It is a sad but proven fact that the Israeli government also has
obtained secret U.S. military technology which Israel has sold to
other countries. For example, after the U.S. sent Patriot missile
defense batteries on an emergency basis to help defend Israel during
the Gulf War, the Israelis seem to have sold the Patriot missile
technology to China, according to the U.S. State Departments
inspector general. As a result, the U.S. has been forced to develop a
whole new generation of missile technology able to penetrate the
defenses China has developed as a result of the Israeli treachery.
Perhaps the most hypocritical rationalization offered by friends of
Israel is that U.S. special treatment is justified because Israel is
"the Middle Easts only working democracy" and that Israel and the
U.S. have many basic institutions in common. In fact, Israeli
democracy does not work for non-Jews. In contrast to the United
States, where by law all citizens have equal rights regardless of
religion or ethnic origin, Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel do
not have equal rights with regards to military service, the extensive
social benefits available to veterans of Israeli military service, or
even in terms of Israeli tax rates imposed on Arab citizens and
Israeli government expenditures in Arab communities within Israel.
Further, Israeli citizenship is not available to the Muslim and
Christian Palestinians driven from their homes in Israel in 1948, nor
to their descendants. But a Jew, born anywhere in the world, can have
Israeli citizenship for the asking.
Perhaps most shocking is the little-known fact that by now 90 percent
of the land in Israel proper is held under restrictive covenants
barring non-Jews, even those with Israeli citizenship, from owning the
land or from earning a living on it. Unfortunately, the land held
under such covenants is increasing, not decreasing. It would be
difficult, therefore, to find two countries more profoundly different
in their approaches to basic questions of citizenship and civil and
human rights as are the United States and Israel.