Actually, “villain of the piece” is too mild a term for what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people for the last sixty years, ever since the Zionist state was created in 1948 pursuant to a UN resolution of 1946. A more accurate description would be the monster of the piece. The irony is that Israel’s biggest supporter and military and financial backer over the years has been the United States of America – a country that prides itself on its democratic traditions and calls itself “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.
What ‘bravery’ does it take for a mighty nuclear superpower like the US to support Israel in its barbaric actions against the defenceless Palestinian people? Israel itself is the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, with some 400 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It is also the world’s fourth strongest conventional military power in terms of firepower (after the US, Russia and China).
As if all this were not enough, Israel has long been under the US’s protective nuclear umbrella. Every US administration since the Truman administration has been committed to ensuring Israel’s security. This is reflected in the fact that Israel is the world’s biggest recipient of US military and economic aid, which is currently running at about $ 4 billion a year – most of it in the form of outright grants which do not have to be repaid. Since 1980, Israel has received a total of more than $ 100 billion in US aid.
Additionally, the US has never hesitated to us its veto power in the UN Security Council to block resolutions critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. Since 1979, the US has used its veto no fewer than 39 times to block such resolutions.
President George W. Bush’s repeated refusal to join other world leaders in condemning Israel’s barbaric actions against the Palestinian people comes as no surprise, given the enormous clout the Jewish lobby wields in Washington.
So influential is this lobby that no US administration is willing to risk doing anything that could be construed by the American Jewish community as going against Israel’s interests.
When the revered elderly Palestinian Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Yasin was assassinated by Israel in March 2004, Bush’s first public comment on the assignation was that “Israel has the right to defend herself from terror.”
The question is: who will defend the Palestinian people from the barbaric acts of violence carried out against them by the Israeli army?
Any US president who takes even a mildly tough line against Israel does so at his peril, as George Bush Senior found out to his cost in the 1992 election when American Jews ended up pouring money into Clinton’s campaign because Bush Senior had refused to extend $ 10 billion worth of loan guarantees to Israel unless it agreed to attend the Madrid peace talks.
According to a report published in the London Economist in 1992, 60 per cent of all private contributions to Clinton’s campaign came from America’s Jewish community.
Examples of the Israeli lobby’s clout in Washington abound, as was seen, for instance, in June 2000 when the Clinton administration agreed to exercise a rarely used waiver to US law that enables Israel to spend more of its multibillion-dollar annual American military aid inside Israel, for the purposes of indigenous weapons research, development and procurement.
After months of intense negotiations, an interagency group from the Pentagon, the State Department and the US Treasury acceded to Israeli appeals to waive provisions of the US Arms Control Act limiting the amount of money Israel can spend locally. Although the decision was intended as a one-time exception to be applied solely to Washington’s pledged $ 1.2 billion Wye River assistance package to Israel, the precedent had been set for additional waivers to Israel for future aid packages associated with Middle East peace agreements.
President George W. Bush has continued this waiver policy, allowing Israel to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid on weapons research and development. Such research programmes have, among other things, enabled Israel to develop weapons systems that it is now offering for sale to other countries, including India – with whom Israel has signed more than $ 2 billion worth of arms sales agreements in recent years, including one for the supply of three advanced Phalcon aerial radar systems.
But the Bush administration’s support to Israel goes far beyond such waivers. In September 2002, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government sent bulldozers into then-Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s compound in Rammalah, reducing all the buildings except one to rubble and cutting off the compound’s water and electricity, all Bush had to say on the subject was that Israel’s action was “unhelpful”.
This is the same Bush who once described Sharon (the Butcher of Sabra, Chattila and Jenin) as “a man of peace”. That’s like calling the 19th century London murderer Jack the Ripper as a man of non-violence.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post in September 2002, Sharon said that “a great deal of thought” went into the Ramallah assault – an apparent response to reports that senior Israeli military officials had expressed reservations about the operation to Sharon before the operation was launched.
The so-called Wye River funding was pledged by President Clinton and endorsed by Congress after the US sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in October 1998.
The Wye River precedent was also applied to $ 50 million in military assistance pledged by Washington as a result of Israel’s May 25, 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon. The precedent was also applied to the multibillion-dollar military assistance packages that Israel received from the United States in 2001, 2002 and 2003.
Guidelines associated with US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) assistance require Israel to spend 73.7 per cent of its annual FMF money in the United States on US products and services. The remaining 26.3 per cent – known as offshore procurement – is converted into Israeli shekels and used to fund weapons programmes and related efforts deemed as high priority by Israel’s ministry of defence.
US FMF grants to Israel for the year 2000 stood at $ 1.92 billion, with $ 505 million allowed in offshore procurement. Like previous grants, this whole amount of $ 1.92 billion was in the form of outright grants that did not have to be repaid.
As for the $ 1.2 billion Wye River funding, US guidelines called for $ 315 million to be spent in Israel, with the remaining $ 885 million to be spent in the United States. But the June 2000 waiver allowed Israel to use $ 260 million of FMF funds to pay the US Army Corps of Engineers to manage major Israeli construction projects in Israel, thus, in effect, raising Israel’s portion of offshore procurement to nearly 50 per cent.
The Israelis were jubilant. “This was a very creative solution and quite unprecedented,” crowed Brigadier Motty Bresser, the then-director of the Israeli defence ministry’s and chief financial adviser to Israel’s chief of general staff. He said in June 2000 that he did not yet know how the $ 50 million promised by Washington as a result of the Lebanon “redeployment” would be spent (“redeployment is Tel Aviv’s euphemism for withdrawing from its totally illegal occupation of southern Lebanon).
Although most of the military construction projects were relevant to the Wye River agreement and Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territories, some were not, including the construction of a new high-rise military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Thus, Israel was, in effect, able to alter even the terms of the Wye River funding package to its own advantage.
Besser said that every year since 1991, Israel has received its FMF money in a one-time disbursement at the beginning of the fiscal year, an arrangement that has resulted in a windfall to Israel of about $ 500 million in interest during the 1991-2000 period. In 2000, Israel received $ 450 million of its $ 1.9 billion FMF assistance package in advance.
Intriguingly, the waivers given to Israel by the Clinton administration came at a time when the US Congress was considering legislation to strip President Clinton of the authority to offer arms exemptions to US allies. The legislation took the form of arcane language attached to Senate Bill S2382, the “Technical Assistance, Trade Promotion and Anti-Corruption Act of 2000”.
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted the new legislation. But the legislation did not strip the US president of his power to grant arms exemptions to Israel – the most ‘allied’ of America’s allies. – The News, Karachi

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