topic by
Balder
12/6/2001 (19:17)

Did mossad have a hand in the sept.11 events? I believe they did. Either way ,lets consider what cost israel is to the U.S.

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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
Israel's aid plus U.S. aid to Egypt's 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 Israel's 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
it's right or wrong, exacts a huge price in American prestige and
credibility overseas. Further, Israel's 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. That's $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. That's $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
Israel's 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 didn't 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.