Ron Paul on Israel
On January 9, Ron Paul addressed Congress to voice his opposition to a House resolution expressing strong support for Israel in its invasion of Gaza, and branding Hamas as a terrorist organization. Ron Paul called for American neutrality in conflicts that have nothing to do with the United States.
Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives
Statement on H Res 34, “Recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza, Reaffirming the United States strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process”
January 9, 2008
Madame Speaker, I strongly oppose H. Res. 34, which was rushed to the floor with almost no prior notice and without consideration by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The resolution clearly takes one side in a conflict that has nothing to do with the United States or US interests. I am concerned that the weapons currently being used by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza are made in America and paid for by American taxpayers. What will adopting this resolution do to the perception of the United States in the Muslim and Arab world? What kind of blowback might we see from this? What moral responsibility do we have for the violence in Israel and Gaza after having provided so much military support to one side?
As an opponent of all violence, I am appalled by the practice of lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza. I am only grateful that, because of the primitive nature of these weapons, there have been so few casualties among innocent Israelis. But I am also appalled by the longstanding Israeli blockade of Gaza — a cruel act of war — and the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the latest Israeli attack that started last month.
There are now an estimated 700 dead Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale. Such collective punishment is immoral. At the very least, the US Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.
Madame Speaker, this resolution will do nothing to reduce the fighting and bloodshed in the Middle East. The resolution in fact will lead the US to become further involved in this conflict, promising “vigorous support and unwavering commitment to the welfare, security, and survival of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Is it really in the interest of the United States to guarantee the survival of any foreign country? I believe it would be better to focus on the security and survival of the United States, the Constitution of which my colleagues and I swore to defend just this week at the beginning of the 111th Congress. I urge my colleagues to reject this resolution.
Later, Ron Paul was interviewed by Press TV about the ongoing tragedy in Gaza:
Congressman Ron Paul condemns the violence in the Gaza Strip, saying the “collective punishment” against Palestinians is immoral.“Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale,” said the outspoken Republican. More…
Ron Paul was also interviewed by Russia Today on the same subject. He expressed his belief that Israel’s critics and enemies will see the United States as the side to be blamed for the ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip, and called for the US to review its unconditional support of the Jewish state.
Excerpt:
Interviewer: [...]“Why do you think that so many US officials, Congress, Senate, show overwhelming support to involving the US over there?”
Ron Paul: [...] “It’s been going on for more than 50 years, because there has been a pretty strong case made for the Jewish people being treated quite badly, and emotionally there was an argument for having a place they can call their homeland, and people bought into this. But even then there was no justification for us to be using our money for doing that.
There’s one thing being friends, getting along with people and trading with people versus subsidizing them. So it’s been going on a long time, and even from the origination of the state of Israel, the American people generally have supported all of this, and it’s what they’ve read about and heard about and the way they’ve been taught, yet today there’s a growing number of Americans who are questioning it.
They don’t have anything against Jewish people, they don’t have anything against Israel per se, but there’s a lot of questioning whether or not it should be our money and our weapons, and a blank check, so to speak.
So if Israel would get into trouble, there’s not very many people in this country that don’t assume that we would come to their rescue.”
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Believe it or not- there are a lot of israelis that support Ron Paul!!!
http://israelfinancialexpert.blogspot.com/search/label/Ron%20Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MprAMPnI6w&feature=related
Very important statement by Ron Paul.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mALpnSTGAQs&feature=related
“Der Aayed Durust Aayed,” Obama showing Israel its place
There is a saying in Farsi, “Der Aayed Durust Aayed,” which means, “Late coming is good coming.” Obama is showing Israel a rouge nation governed by racist criminals doing human genocide for the last 61 years; its right place. Israel is responsible to a major extent for world unrest because of their continued occupation of Palestine with brutal force; arms and ammunition financed by Americans. Obama is directly challenging the thesis of Israel and its lobby AIPAC that U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same, that we are partners. Obama is saying honestly the truth that further Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are an impediment and an independent Palestinian state indispensable to world peace.
I admire Obama’s courage for confronting the Zionist Lobby controlling US Foreign & Domestic policies besides control on US Banking, Congress, Media, Hollywood, Real Estate & local politics. I refuse to call any one American who can vote in the election of a foreign country, holding citizenship of a foreign country and can serve in the Defense forces of a foreign country. American Jews with a philosophy of Israel first as prisoners of their Zionist Leadership fall in this category. It’s about time that the welfare of the USA be put first – and the greed of the Zionist spies and defense technology thieves in America stealing for Israel be put to an end.
My advise to such racist fanatics with American citizenship and putting America second after their country of origin; move out of America. No offense, but if your loyalties are for some other country than America; feel free to move there especially Zionist and their loyalist in America go to Israel and enlist in the IDF. I wish them all the best, but they are not our responsibility.
Hindu fanatics behaving like Zionist living in America and doing demonstrations against US Government that India’s security is America’s responsibility is another joke. While living in 82% Christian country dreaming of their Bharat “India” without Muslims and Christians by writing filthy blogs is contrary to American values. Then some are holding racist events on the pattern of AIPAC in the name of a Indian state Gujarat in America by excluding Gujarati Muslims, Gujarati Christians as well as non-Gujarati speaking Hindus is an insult to American Democratic values. These Hindus are also free to move back to India. My request to such brain paralyzed idiots is please show me in the US Constitution where it says Israel or any other country is our responsibility? Where in our Constitution it is written that as US citizen you can do politics of a foreign country?
Probably Obama is the first US President since JFK to publicly confront bloody Zionist & their BS organizations like AIPAC etc controlling America. However we all know what happened to JFK. After him Israel HAS enjoyed this special partnership with the successive US government with Israel-centric Middle East and foreign policy. Bill Clinton even out sourced the domestic policy also to Zionist and Israel and Bush helped them to literally call every shot. This will not die an easy death. I expect some turbulent waters ahead for our President, as he performs this sea change” with a formidable power group. Expect “bad press” for President Obama from the elements of the Zionist controlled US media with the support of Zionist controlled Congress and big corporations here. I pray to God long live our President, God Bless America and every human on this planet earth.
Dave Makkar
American Hindu
This will be difficult for me to change, because I and others have said this for years, Israel is a Jewish state. It is not a Jewish state. Israel IS a Zionist state.
Even Jimmy Carter is now speaking out against Israel. Check out this link.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/ObamaFlyer.pdf
The only comment I will make is that the whole of the Americas were invaded and taken. We Americans live on land that was conquered and colonized a few hundred years ago. Do the native or ancient people’s of the America’s any longer have any right to these lands?
The USS Liberty
Some of the USS Liberty Dead
On June 8, 1967, 34 American servicemen were killed and 174 were wounded during an Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. According to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer, “Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government.” The survivors are still awaiting justice.
Articles About the USS Liberty
The USS Liberty Timeline
Americans for Middle East Understanding – June 8, 1967, Israeli forces attack the USS Liberty. They kill 34 American servicemen, wounding 171 others. It will be the highest casualty rate ever inflicted on a U.S. naval vessel, with 7 out of every 10 crew members killed or injured. It will also be the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval vessel that, to this day, the Congress of the United States of America formally refuses to investigate. The facts, as known, are as follow: more
Key Figure in USS Liberty Inquiry Dies
Bryant Jordan, Military.com read article
Obituary: Ward Boston Jr.; helped investigate ‘67 Liberty attack
Blanca Gonzalez, San Diego Union-Tribune read article
Obituary: Ward Boston; Investigated Attack on USS Liberty
Chelsea J. Carter, Washington Post read article
Congressional inquiries got nowhere
John Crewdson in the Chicago Tribune – In the 40 years since the U.S. Court of Inquiry closed its books on the Liberty investigation, members of Congress have asked for information about the attack and have received stock replies, like the one provided to the late Sen. Alan Cranston. more
New revelations in attack on American spy ship
John Crewdson in the Chicago Tribune – Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn’t tell full story of deadly ‘67 incident. more
Letter to Secretary of the Army Regarding Report of War Crimes
Rear Admiral Merlin Staring and Rear Admiral Clarence Hill, Jr. – On 8 June 2005 the U.S.S. Liberty Veterans Association, Inc., submitted to you a documented Report of War Crimes Committed Against U.S. Military Personnel on June 8, 1967. That report was submitted to you in your capacity as Executive Agent for the Secretary of Defense under Department of Defense Directive No. 5810.01B of 29 March 2004. It was based upon, and contained a detailed description of, the sudden, savage, unjustified, and prolonged attack made on 8 June 1967, by air and naval forces of the state of Israel, upon the USS LIBERTY (AGTR-5), a U.S. Navy technical research ship then operating peacefully in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. The LIBERTY was at that time the most sophisticated and best-equipped intelligence ship in the world. Of a crew of 294 officers and men, including three American civilian government employees, she suffered 34 Americans killed in action and 173 wounded in action. The ship itself was so badly damaged that it never again sailed on an operational mission. more
Four Decades of Twisting Facts About Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty
James Ennes in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – Since June 8, 1967, when Israeli air and naval forces deliberately attacked the American intelligence ship USS Liberty, Israel and its American supporters have lied about what happened. more
American Media Miss the Boat: For USA Today, Freedom of the Press Means the Right to Report It Wrong
Alison Weir in CounterPunch – Capitol Hill, October 2003. It is a historic occasion. An independent, blue-ribbon commission is to release its findings from an investigation into an internationally significant 36-year-old attack on a US Navy ship that left more than 200 American sailors killed or wounded. more
Cristol Claim of 13 Investigations Into Israel’s Attack on USS Liberty a Travesty
Terence O’Keefe in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – When A. Jay Cristol’s The Liberty Incident was released a year ago, it was uncritically hailed as the last word in the 36-year controversy surrounding Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that took 34 American lives and wounded 172. The book was packed with tedious minutiae arguing the case. Indeed, if its author is to be believed, Liberty survivors have engaged in a 36-year slander against the state of Israel—which was guilty, at worst, of a grievous mistake in the heat of war. more
‘In Awesome Peril’
Richard K. Kolb in VFW Magazine – On June 8, 1967, the spy ship USS Liberty withstood an unparalleled assault by Israeli torpedo boats and planes off the coast of Egypt. Despite official and public abandonment, the courageous crew deserves recognition on this 40th anniversary of the costliest hostile U.S. ship action since World War II. more
Statement of Rear Admiral Merlin H. Staring, JAGC, USN (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Merlin H. Staring – I am honored to be allowed to participate in this tribute to the crew and survivors of the USS Liberty – ruthlessly attacked by Israeli forces on 8 June 1967. As a Navy JAG-Corps Captain, I had only a brief official contact with that event at the time – and not until many years later did I learn the full facts. When I did, I became aware – and I am now of the firmest conviction – the the Liberty honorees have suffered – for 40 years – an unprecedented injustice – and at the hands of our very own Navy and government. more
2007 USS Liberty Memorial Statement of Ambassador Edward Peck
Ambassador Edward Peck – The Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest decoration for bravery that our nation can bestow, was awarded to the Commanding Officer of the USS Liberty, Captain William McGonagle. more
2007 USS Liberty Memorial Speech
Stan White at Arlington National Cemetery – The first thing I would like to talk about, in speaking for the USS Liberty survivors, is the organization “No Greater Love”. These special people have been conducting ceremonies on June 8th annually at this location, for many, many years now, honoring our thirty-four shipmates killed during the attack on our ship June 8, 1967. more
War Crimes Committed Against U.S. Military Personnel, June 8, 1967
USS Liberty Veterans Association – On June 8, 1967 while patrolling in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, USS Liberty was savagely attacked without warning or justification by air and naval forces of the state of Israel. Of a crew of 294 officers and men (including three civilians), the ship suffered thirty four (34) killed in action and one hundred seventy three (173) wounded in action. The ship itself, a Forty Million ($40,000,000) Dollar state of the art signals intelligence (SIGINT) platform, was so badly damaged that it never sailed on an operational mission again and was sold in 1970 for $101,666.66 as scrap. more
The Attack on the USS Liberty and its Cover-up
Ambassador James Akins – In 1963, three World War II Victory hull freighters were refitted as technical research ships. Their function, formally, was “to conduct technical research operations in support of U.S. Navy electronic research projects, which include electromagnetic propagation studies and advanced communications systems.” Jane’s Fighting Ships called these vessels “mobile bases for research in communications and electromagnetic radiation…. [They are] considered electronic intelligence ships.” They were designed to intercept foreign electronic messages, and they were popularly called “spy ships.” One of these ships was re-christened the “USS Liberty.” more
A fair probe would attack Liberty misinformation
Admiral Thomas Moorer in the Stars and Stripes – While state department officials and historians converge on Washington this week to discuss the 1967 war in the Middle East, I am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history’s most shocking cover-ups. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship—the USS Liberty—killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government. more
The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 26 Years
Lieutenant Commander James Ennes in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – Twenty-six years have passed since that clear day on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. more
New Findings Reveal U.S.-Israeli Cover Up of Deliberate Israeli Attack on U.S. Naval Vessel
A new report released today by former officials from the highest level of the military and government reveals that Israel “committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States” when it deliberately attacked the USS Liberty and killed 34 American crewmembers in 1967. more
Read the Findings of the Independent Commission
Media Coverage of the New Findings
Read the Affidavit of the 1967 Chief Attorney Captain Boston
For more than 30 years, I have remained silent on the topic of the USS Liberty. I am a military man and when orders come in from the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States, I follow them. However, recent attempts to rewrite history compel me to share the truth. more
Listen to an interview with Captain Boston
James Lupton (Oct. 29, 1942 – Jun. 8, 1967) was killed aboard the USS Liberty
Letter from a Liberty Widow
I am the wife of James Mahlon Lupton, CT1, who was killed aboard the USS Liberty when it was attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967. He was right where the torpedo hit. more
Documentary Film: The Loss of Liberty
Howard Films – ‘Loss of Liberty’ dramatically proves, beyond any doubt, that the attack by Israel on June 8, 1967 against the US naval intelligence gathering ship USS Liberty was deliberate. This filmed testimony by dozens of USS Liberty survivors demolishes Israel’s ‘tragic accident’ claim. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer are representative of the honored high-ranking Americans supporting the condemnation of deliberate aggression against the United States by ‘ally’ Israel. Watch the Film
USS Liberty dead & survivors no Justice after 42 years against Israeli aggression
On June 8, 1967, Israeli forces attacked the USS Liberty. They killed 34 American servicemen, wounded 171 others. Till to-date it is the highest casualty rate ever inflicted on a U.S. naval vessel, with 7 out of every 10 crew members killed or injured after World War 11. It is the only peacetime attack on a U.S. naval vessel to this day, the Zionist controlled Congress of the United States of America formally refuses to investigate.
Admiral Thomas Moorer in the Stars and Stripes – While state department officials and historians converge on Washington this week to discuss the 1967 war in the Middle East, I am compelled to speak out about one of U.S. history’s most shocking cover-ups. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked our proud naval ship—the USS Liberty—killing 34 American servicemen and wounding 172. Those men were then betrayed and left to die by our own government.
Rear Admiral Merlin H. Staring – I am honored to be allowed to participate in this tribute to the crew and survivors of the USS Liberty – ruthlessly attacked by Israeli forces on 8 June 1967. As a Navy JAG-Corps Captain, I had only a brief official contact with that event at the time – and not until many years later did I learn the full facts. When I did, I became aware – and I am now of the firmest conviction – the Liberty honorees have suffered – for 40 years – an unprecedented injustice – and at the hands of our very own Navy and government.
War Crimes Committed Against U.S. Military Personnel, June 8, 1967 by Israel
USS Liberty Veterans Association – On June 8, 1967 while patrolling in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, USS Liberty was savagely attacked without warning or justification by air and naval forces of the state of Israel. Of a crew of 294 officers and men (including three civilians), the ship suffered thirty four (34) killed in action and one hundred seventy three (173) wounded in action. The ship itself, a Forty Million ($40,000,000) Dollar state of the art signals intelligence (SIGINT) platform, was so badly damaged that it never sailed on an operational mission again and was sold in 1970 for $101,666.66 as scrap.
John Crewdson in the Chicago Tribune – In the 40 years since the U.S. Court of Inquiry closed its books on the Liberty investigation, members of Congress have asked for information about the attack and have received stock replies, like the one provided to the late Sen. Alan Cranston.
Richard K. Kolb in VFW Magazine – On June 8, 1967, the spy ship USS Liberty withstood an unparalleled assault by Israeli torpedo boats and planes off the coast of Egypt. Despite official and public abandonment, the courageous crew deserves recognition on this 40th anniversary of the costliest hostile U.S. ship action since World War II.
Four Decades of Twisting Facts About Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty
James Ennes in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – Since June 8, 1967, when Israeli air and naval forces deliberately attacked the American intelligence ship USS Liberty, Israel and its American supporters have lied about what happened.
Zionist controlled American Media Miss the Boat: For USA Today, Freedom of the Press Means the Right to Report It Wrong: Alison Weir in CounterPunch – Capitol Hill, October 2003. It is a historic occasion. An independent, blue-ribbon commission is to release its findings from an investigation into an internationally significant 36-year-old attack on a US Navy ship that left more than 200 American sailors killed or wounded.
Cristol Claim of 13 Investigations into Israel’s Attack on USS Liberty a Travesty
Terence O’Keefe in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – When Jay Cristol’s The Liberty Incident was released, it was uncritically hailed as the last word in the 36-year controversy surrounding Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that took 34 American lives and wounded 172. The book was packed with tedious minutiae arguing the case. Indeed, if its author is to be believed, Liberty survivors have engaged in a 36-year slander against the state of Israel—which was guilty, at worst, of a grievous mistake in the heat of war.
The Assault on the USS Liberty Still Covered Up After 42 Years
Lieutenant Commander James Ennes in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs – on June 8, 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty with aircraft and torpedo boats, killing 34 young men and wounding 171. The attack in international waters followed over nine hours of close surveillance. Israeli pilots circled the ship at low level 13 times on eight different occasions before attacking. Radio operators in Spain, Lebanon, Germany and aboard the ship itself all heard the pilots reporting to their headquarters that this was an American ship. They attacked anyway. And when the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime.
New Findings Reveal U.S.-Israeli Cover Up of Deliberate Israeli Attack on U.S. Naval Vessel
A new report released by former officials from the highest level of the military and government reveals that Israel “committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States” when it deliberately attacked the USS Liberty and killed 34 American crewmembers in 1967.
Affidavit of the 1967 Chief Attorney Captain Boston: For more than 30 years, I have remained silent on the topic of the USS Liberty. I am a military man and when orders come in from the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States, I follow them. However, recent attempts to rewrite history compel me to share the truth.
Even the Documentary Film “The Loss of Liberty” dramatically proves, beyond any doubt, that the attack by Israel on June 8, 1967 against the US naval intelligence gathering ship USS Liberty was deliberate. This filmed testimony by dozens of USS Liberty survivors that demolishes Israel’s ‘tragic accident’ claim. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer are representative of the honored high-ranking Americans supporting the condemnation of deliberate aggression against the United States by ‘ally’ Israel.
Can the survivors and dead of USS liberty expect Justice from their new Commander in Chief of US Armed Forces President Barack Hussein Obama?
Contents provided by Chrsitine at Ron Paul on Israel
Dave Makkar
Israel deliberately forgets its history
Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East.
Schlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)
Schlomo Sand
Le Monde Diplomatique
September 2008
Translated by Donald Hounam
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah1 in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.
This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.
But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.
Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.
Founding myths shaken
Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.
But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea2.
Proselytising zeal
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud3 authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture4.
Prism of Zionism
Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.
This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.
Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the “chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.
Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.
The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.
And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.
Notes
1. The Torah, from the Hebrew root yara (to teach) is the founding text of Judaism. It consists of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. | BACK
2. See David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past and present, 1918 (in Yiddish), and Jerusalem, 1980 (in Hebrew); Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Our population in the country, Executive Committee of the Union for Youth and the Jewish National Fund, Warsaw, 1929 (in Hebrew). | BACK
3. The Mishnah, regarded as the first work of rabbinic literature, was drawn up around 200 AD. The Talmud is a synthesis of rabbinic discussions on the law, customs and history of the Jews. The Palestinian Talmud was written between the 3rd and 5th centuries; the Babylonian Talmud was compiled at the end of the 5th century. | BACK
4. Yiddish, spoken by the Jews of eastern Europe, was a Germano-Slavic language incorporating Hebrew words. |
Refugees and Ethnic Cleansing
“Everyone has the right to leave any country,
including his own, and to return to his country.”
— Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“On October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population…There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion [the first Prime Minister of Israel]”
— Israeli Historian Benny Morris, in Ha’aretz
Sderot Built on Ashes of Ethnically Cleansed and Defaced Najd
Um Khalil Blog – We often hear about Palestinian rockets hitting the Israeli town of Sderot. What is often left out of these reports is that these rockets almost never kill or injure anyone, and only rarely cause damage. In addition, as this article describes, Sderot was built on the remains of a Palestinian town that had been ethnically cleansed by Israel’s founders in 1948. more
Forgotten Christians
Anders Strindberg, The American Conservative – At the time of the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, it is estimated that the Christians of Palestine numbered some 350,000. Almost 20 percent of the total population at the time, they constituted a vibrant and ancient community; their forbears had listened to St. Peter in Jerusalem as he preached at the first Pentecost. Yet Zionist doctrine held that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of the 750,000 Palestinians that were forced from their homes in 1948, some 50,000 were Christians—7 percent of the total number of refugees and 35 percent of the total number of Christians living in Palestine at the time. more
Ethnic Cleansing: How Palestine Became Israel
If Americans Knew – In the late 1800s a small, fanatic movement called “political Zionism” began in Europe. Its goal was to create a Jewish state somewhere in the world. Its leaders settled on the ancient and long-inhabited land of Palestine for the location of this state. more
Commentary: Embarrassing history
Arnaud de Borchgrave in UPI – The Palestinians call Israel’s 1948 war of independence their nakba, or catastrophic ethnic cleansing, or forced exile. The Israelis, for their part, have steadfastly rejected any suggestion of ethnic cleansing as calumny in all its anti-Semitic horror. Historic revisionism is now under way. Without fanfare, just below the media radar screen, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that concedes the war that gave birth to Israel was a “nakba” for the Palestinians. The textbook refers to the “expulsion” of some of the Palestinians and the “confiscation of many Arab-owned lands.” more
An Iraqi Jewish family arrives in Israel in 1949.
Hitching a ride on the magic carpet
Yehouda Shenhav in Haaretz – Any analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands is folly in historical and political terms.
An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries – depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign’s proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a “right of return” on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of “lost” assets. more
The Legacy of Ariel Sharon
Robert Fisk in the UK Independent – This is a place of filth and blood which will forever be associated with Ariel Sharon. In Israel today, he may well be elected prime minister. Then he will be master of the most powerful nation in the Middle East; he will travel to America, he will visit the White House and shake hands with President George W Bush. But for everyone who stood in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut on 18 September 1982, his name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder… more
Fortress Israel
Ilan Pappe in the London Review of Books – The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in accordance with notions of universal justice. More surprisingly perhaps, it also makes sense in terms of realpolitik: unless Israel agrees to repatriate the refugees, all attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict are bound to fail. more
Why a ‘right of return’ is necessary
Sari Hanafi in The Daily Star – The right of return of Palestinian refugees to their place of origin is enshrined in four separate bodies of international law: humanitarian law, human rights law, the law of nationality as applied to state succession, and refugee law. more
Response to Benny Morris’ “Politics by other means” in the New Republic
Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé in the Electronic Intifada – In a 17 March 2004 article, “Politics by Other Means”, Benny Morris offered a “review” of Ilan Pappé’s new book, “A History of Modern Palestine; one land, two peoples” (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which tells the history of Palestine from the point of view of its workers, peasants, children, women and all the subaltern groups that make the society and not its political elite. Morris’ “review” consisted of a series of ad hominem attacks and outright factual distortions. Ilan Pappé sent the following reply to the New Republic, who refused to publish it. more
Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ’48 Eviction of Arabs
David K. Shipler in the New York Times – A censorship board composed of five Cabinet members prohibited former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first-person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In it, Mr. Rabin attributes the final decision on expulsion to David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel’s founders and its first Prime Minister, who died in 1973. Mr. Rabin says that some Israeli soldiers refused to participate in driving out the Arabs and that afterward, propaganda sessions were required to soothe the consciences of embittered troops. more
“Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler”
Gabriel Ash in the Yellow Times – Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the “moral” justification for a future genocide against Palestinians. Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every “ethnically cleansed” village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers. more
Right of Return: Two-State Solution Again Sells Palestinians Short
Professor George Bisharat in the Los Angeles Times – It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another — and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft. more
Photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing in 1948.
Palestinian Refugees Return and Repatriation
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD in Sharing the Land of Canaan – Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is the most persistent military occupation on earth. But this 35-year-old occupation is only the second stage in the colonization of the land of Canaan. The first stage, between 1947-1949, generated the largest population of refugees still unsettled since World War Two, with the longest displacement in modern history. Until recently, two competing accounts of this catastrophic event existed. Recently, Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, Zeev Sternhall, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and Tom Segev, have validated the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and debunked the established Israeli myths of Israel’s creation. Using Israeli archives and declassified material, they were able to discover much of the hidden history of Zionism and they reveal a factual account of the establishment of Israel. more
Photo of Naeim Giladi.
The Jews of Iraq
Naeim Giladi in The Link – I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called “cruel Zionism.” I write about it because I was part of it. more
Photo of a Gaza Refugee Camp. Shacks surrounded by rubble are constructed from sheets of metal.
Life in a Palestinian Refugee Camp
Grace Halsell in Journey to Jerusalem – Entering the refugee camp, I feel I am entering some medieval ghetto. I walk along a narrow alleyway, skirting an open sewage ditch. I pass tens of dozens of one- and two-room houses, each leaning on the other for support. I am in a ghetto without streets, sidewalks, gardens, patios, trees, flowers, plazas, or shops—among an uprooted, stateless, scattered people who, like the Jews before them, are in a tragic diaspora. I pass scores of small children, the third generation of Palestinians born in the ghetto that has almost as long a history as the state of Israel itself. Someone has said that for every Jew who was brought in to create a new state, a Palestinian Arab was uprooted and left homeless.
A Synopsis of the
Israel/Palestine Conflict
The following is a very short synopsis of the history of this conflict. We recommend that you also read the much more detailed account, “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict.”
For centuries there was no such conflict. In the 19th century the land of Palestine was inhabited by a multicultural population – approximately 86 percent Muslim, 10 percent Christian, and 4 percent Jewish – living in peace.
Zionism
In the late 1800s a group in Europe decided to colonize this land. Known as Zionists, they represented an extremist minority of the Jewish population. Their goal was to create a Jewish homeland, and they considered locations in Africa and the Americas, before settling on Palestine.
Map of historic Palestine. Click here for larger map.
Historic Palestine
more maps
At first, this immigration created no problems. However, as more and more Zionists immigrated to Palestine – many with the express wish of taking over the land for a Jewish state – the indigenous population became increasingly alarmed. Eventually, fighting broke out, with escalating waves of violence. Hitler’s rise to power, combined with Zionist activities to sabotage efforts to place Jewish refugees in western countries, led to increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, and conflict grew.
UN Partition Plan
Finally, in 1947 the United Nations decided to intervene. However, rather than adhering to the principle of “self-determination of peoples,” in which the people themselves create their own state and system of government, the UN chose to revert to the medieval strategy whereby an outside power divides up other people’s land.
Map of UN-proposed partition of Palestine. Click here for larger map.
UN Plan of Partition
more maps
Under considerable Zionist pressure, the UN recommended giving away 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state – despite the fact that this group represented only about 30% of the total population, and owned under 7% of the land.
1947-1949 War
While it is widely reported that the resulting war eventually included five Arab armies, less well known is the fact that throughout this war Zionist forces outnumbered all Arab and Palestinian combatants combined – often by a factor of two to three. Moreover, Arab armies did not invade Israel – virtually all battles were fought on land that was to have been the Palestinian state.
Finally, it is significant to note that Arab armies entered the conflict only after Zionist forces had committed 16 massacres, including the grisly massacre of over 100 men, women, and children at Deir Yassin. Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, head of one of the Jewish terrorist groups, described this as “splendid,” and stated: “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” Zionist forces committed 33 massacres altogether.
By the end of the war, Israel had conquered 78 percent of Palestine; three-quarters of a million Palestinians had been made refugees; over 500 towns and villages had been obliterated; and a new map was drawn up, in which every city, river and hillock received a new, Hebrew name, as all vestiges of the Palestinian culture were to be erased. For decades Israel denied the existence of this population, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once saying: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”
Map of Palestinian, Egyptian, and Syrian lands occupied by Israel in 1967. The Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Syrian Golan Heights are all still under occupation. Click here for larger map.
1967 Occupation
more maps
1967 War & USS Liberty
In 1967, Israel conquered still more land. Following the Six Day War, in which Israeli forces launched a highly successful surprise attack on Egypt, Israel occupied the final 22% of Palestine that had eluded it in 1948 – the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since, according to international law it is inadmissible to acquire territory by war, these are occupied territories and do not belong to Israel. It also occupied parts of Egypt (since returned) and Syria (which remain under occupation).
Also during the Six Day War, Israel attacked a US Navy ship, the USS Liberty, killing and injuring over 200 American servicemen. President Lyndon Johnson recalled rescue flights, saying that he did not want to “embarrass an ally.” (In 2004 a high-level commission chaired by Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, found this attack to be “an act of war against the United States,” a fact few news media have reported.)
Current Conflict
There are two primary issues at the core of this continuing conflict. First, there is the inevitably destabilizing effect of trying to maintain an ethnically preferential state, particularly when it is largely of foreign origin. The original population of what is now Israel was 96 percent Muslim and Christian, yet, these refugees are prohibited from returning to their homes in the self-described Jewish state (and those within Israel are subjected to systematic discrimination).
Second, Israel’s continued military occupation and confiscation of privately owned land in the West Bank, and control over Gaza, are extremely oppressive, with Palestinians having minimal control over their lives. Over 10,000 Palestinian men, women, and children are held in Israeli prisons. Few of them have had a legitimate trial; Physical abuse and torture are frequent. Palestinian borders (even internal ones) are controlled by Israeli forces. Periodically men, women, and children are strip searched; people are beaten; women in labor are prevented from reaching hospitals (at times resulting in death); food and medicine are blocked from entering Gaza, producing an escalating humanitarian crisis. Israeli forces invade almost daily, injuring, kidnapping, and sometimes killing inhabitants.
According to the Oslo peace accords of 1993, these territories were supposed to finally become a Palestinian state. However, after years of Israel continuing to confiscate land and conditions steadily worsening, the Palestinian population rebelled. (The Barak offer, widely reputed to be generous, was anything but.) This uprising, called the “Intifada” (Arabic for “shaking off”) began at the end of September 2000.
U.S. Involvement
Largely due to special-interest lobbying, U.S. taxpayers give Israel an average of $7 million per day, and since its creation have given more U.S. funds to Israel than to any other nation. As Americans learn about how Israel is using our tax dollars, many are calling for an end to this expenditure.
Notes
Recommended Reading: “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict.”
Al-Hewar Center Panel Explores How to Address
the Issues of Jerusalem and Palestine
to the American Public
During the month of May, 1998, the Al-Hewar Center in Vienna, Virginia, hosted several discussions and events related to the 50th anniversary of the nakba or catastrophe which befell the Palestinians in 1948 upon the creation of Israel and the ensuing loss and occupation of their land. One of the featured events was a panel discussion on May 20, 1998, about how talk to Americans about the issues of Jerusalem and Palestine so that they can better understand the reasons for the struggle over this land. The panelists featured at this event were: Mr. Richard Curtiss, the Executive Editor of the respected magazine, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and a retired Foreign Service Officer; Mr. Ra’afat Dajani, the Executive Director of the American Committee on Jerusalem, a coalition of Arab-American organizations dedicated to educating the American public and policy makers about the issue of Jerusalem; and Dr. Murhaf Jouejati, an expert on Middle East affairs. The event was moderated by Dr. Ayman Al-Ouri.
The Cost of Israel to the American People
Richard Curtiss
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.
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, Israel’s 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 B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with a $45 million budget, and Hadassah, the Zionist women’s 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 organization’s 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 organization’s most controversial activity. In the 1970s members of AIPAC’s 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. That’s enough money to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most parts of the country.
What is totally unique about AIPAC’s 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 candidate’s election campaign as can the Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate lengths to hide its tracks.
Some of America’s 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 history’s 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 several U.S. diplomats and 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 world’s 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 Department’s 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 East’s 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. Ì
Palestine, Jerusalem and the American Public by Mr. Ra’afat Dajani
Making Israel Blink by Dr. Murhaf Jouejati
By Richard H. Curtiss
Former U.S. Foreign Service Officer
Speech at the Al Hewar Center for Arab Culture and Dialogue
May 20, 1998
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.
Richard H. Curtiss enlisted in the U.S. Army in World War II, and served as a military correspondent in Berlin, Germany after the war. After earning a B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California and working on newspapers and for the United Press, he served as a career Foreign Service officer with the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency throughout the world and in Washington D.C. During his U.S. government career he received the U.S. Information Agency’s Superior Honor Award and the Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in Public Diplomacy, U.S.I.A.’s highest professional recognition.
Curtiss is currently the Executive Editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Read his full bio.
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.
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, Israel’s 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 B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with a $45 million budget, and Hadassah, the Zionist women’s 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 organization’s 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 organization’s most controversial activity. In the 1970s members of AIPAC’s 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. That’s enough money to buy all the television time needed to get elected in most parts of the country.
What is totally unique about AIPAC’s 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 candidate’s election campaign as can the Israel lobby, no other special interest has gone to such elaborate lengths to hide its tracks.
Some of America’s 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 history’s 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 several U.S. diplomats and 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 world’s 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 Department’s 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 East’s 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.
Shirl McArthur
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
November 2008, pages 10-11
TABLE 1: Direct U.S. Aid to Israel (millions of dollars)
Year Total Military
Grant Economic
Grant Immigrant ASHA All Other
1949-1996 68,030.9 29,014.9 23,122.4 868.9 121.4 14,903.3
1997 3,132.1 1,800.0 1,200.0 80.0 2.1 50.0
1998 3,080.0 1,800.0 1,200.0 80.0 ? ?
1999 3,010.0 1,860.0 1,080.0 70.0 ? ?
2000 4,131.85 3,120.0 949.1 60.0 2.75 ?
2001 2,876.05 1,975.6 838.2 60.0 2.25 ?
2002 2,850.65 2,040.0 720.0 60.0 2.65 28.0
2003 3,745.15 3,086.4 596.1 59.6 3.05 ?
2004 2,687.25 2,147.3 477.2 49.7 3.15 9.9
2005 2,612.15 2,202.2 357.0 50.0 2.95 ?
2006 2,534.53 2,257.0 237.0 40.0 ? .53
2007 2,500.24 2,340.0 120.0 40.0 ? .24
2008 2,423.8 2,380.6 0.0 39.7 3.0 .5
Total 103,614.67 56,024.0 30,897.0 1,557.9 143.3 14,992.47
Notes: FY 2000 military grants include $1.2 billion for the Wye agreement and $1.92 billion in annual military aid. FY 2003 military aid included $1 billion from the supplemental appropriations bill. The economic grant was earmarked for $960 million for FY 2000 but was reduced to meet the 0.38% rescission. Final amounts for FY 2003 are reduced by 0.65% mandated rescission, the amounts for FY 2004 are reduced by 0.59%, and the amounts for FY 2008 are reduced by .81%.
Sources: CRS Report RL33222: U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, updated Jan. 2, 2008, plus the FY ’08 omnibus appropriations bill, H.R. 2764.
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This estimate of total U.S. direct aid to Israel updates the estimate given in the July 2006 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is an estimate because arriving at an exact figure is not possible, since parts of U.S. aid to Israel are a) buried in the budgets of various U.S. agencies, mostly that of the Defense Department (DOD), or b) in a form not easily quantifiable, such as the early disbursement of aid, giving Israel a direct benefit in interest income and the U.S. Treasury a corresponding loss. Given these caveats, our current estimate of cumulative total direct aid to Israel is $113.8554 billion.
It must be emphasized that this analysis is a conservative, defensible accounting of U.S. direct aid to Israel, NOT of Israel’s cost to the U.S. or the American taxpayer, nor of the benefits to Israel of U.S. aid. The distinction is important, because the indirect or consequential costs suffered by the U.S. as a result of its blind support for Israel exceed by many times the substantial amount of direct aid to Israel. (See, for example, the late Thomas R. Stauffer’s article in the June 2003 Washington Report, “The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion.”)
Shirl McArthur, a retired U.S. foreign service officer, is a consultant based in the Washington, DC area.
Especially, this computation does not include the costs resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq—hundreds of billions of dollars, 4,000-plus U.S. and allied fatalities, untold tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and many thousands of other U.S., allied, and Iraqi casualties—which is almost universally believed in the Arab world to have been undertaken for the benefit of Israel. Among other “indirect or consequential” costs would be the costs of U.S. unilateral economic sanctions on Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the costs to U.S. manufacturers of the Arab boycott, and the costs to U.S. companies and consumers of the 1973 Arab oil embargo and consequent and subsequent soaring oil prices partially as a result of U.S. support for Israel.
Among the real benefits to Israel that are not direct costs to the U.S. taxpayer are the early cash transfer of economic and military aid, in-country spending of a portion of military aid, and loan guarantees. The U.S. gives Israel all of its economic and military aid directly in cash during the first month of the fiscal year, with no accounting required of how the funds are used. Also, in contrast with other countries receiving military aid, who must purchase through the DOD, Israel deals directly with the U.S. companies, with no DOD review. Furthermore, Israel is allowed to spend 26.3 percent of each year’s military aid in Israel (no other recipient of U.S. military aid gets this benefit), which has resulted in an increasingly sophisticated Israeli defense industry. As a result, Israel has become a major world arms exporter; the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that in 2006 Israel was the world’s ninth leading supplier of arms worldwide, earning $4.4 billion from defense sales.
Another benefit to Israel are U.S. government loan guarantees. The major loan guarantees have been $600 million for housing between 1972 and 1990; $9.2 billion for Soviet Jewish resettlement between 1992 and 1997; about $5 billion for refinancing military loans commercially; and $9 billion in loan guarantees authorized in FY ’03 and extended to FY ’10. Of that $9 billion, CRS reports that Israel has drawn $4.1 billion through FY ’07. These loans have not—yet—cost the U.S. any money; they are listed on the Treasury Department’s books as “contingent liabilities,” which would be liabilities to the U.S. should Israel default. However, they have been of substantial, tangible benefit to Israel, because they enable Israel to borrow commercially at special terms and favorable interest rates.
Components of Israel Aid
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. aid since World War II (not counting the huge sums being spent in Iraq). The $3 billion or so per year that Israel receives from the U.S. amounts to about $500 per Israeli. Most of this money is earmarked in the annual Foreign Operations (foreign aid) appropriations bills, with the three major items being military grants (Foreign Military Financing, or FMF), economic grants (Economic Support Funds, or ESF), and “migration and refugee assistance.” (Refugee assistance originally was intended to help Israel absorb Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, but this was expanded in 1985 to include all refugees resettling in Israel. In fact, Israel doesn’t differentiate between refugees and other immigrants, so this money is used for all immigrants to Israel.)
Not earmarked but also included in congresssional appropriations bills is Israel’s portion of grants for American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) and monies buried in the appropriations for other departments or agencies. These are mostly for so-called “U.S.-Israeli cooperative programs” in defense, agriculture, science, and hi-tech industries.
Before 1998, Israel received annually $1.8 billion in military grants and $1.2 billion in economic grants. Then, beginning in FY ‘99, the two countries agreed to reduce economic grants to Israel by $120 million and increase military grants by $60 million annually over 10 years. FY ’08 is the last year of that agreement, with military grants reaching $2.4 billion (reduced by an across-the-board rescission), and zero economic grants. Then, in August 2007, U.S. and Israeli officials signed a memorandum of understanding for a new 10-year, $30 billion aid package whereby FMF will gradually increase, beginning with $2.55 billion in FY ’09, and average $3 billion per year over the 10-year period.
Methodology
TABLE 2: Foreign Aid and DOD Appropriations
Legislation Since FY 2004
Basic Documents Conference Report Public Law
FY ‘04 Defense H.R. 2658 H.Rept. 108-283 P.L. 108-87
Omnibus H.R. 2673 H.Rept. 108-401 P.L. 108-199
FY ‘05 Defense H.R. 4613 H.Rept. 108-662 P.L. 108-287
Omnibus H.R. 4818 H.Rept. 108-792 P.L. 108-447
FY ‘06 Defense H.R. 2863 H.Rept. 109-359 P.L. 109-148
Foreign Aid H.R. 3057 H.Rept. 109-265 P.L. 109-102
FY ‘07 Defense H.R. 5631 H.Rept. 109-676 P.L. 109-289
Foreign Aid H.J.Res. 20 P.L. 110-5
FY ‘08 Defense H.R. 3222 H.Rept. 110-434 P.L. 110-116
Omnibus H.R. 2764 H.Rept. 110-497 P.L. 110-161
Notes: H.R.=House Resolution; S.=Senate Resolution; H.Rept.=House Report; the “public law” is the final, binding version, as signed by the president. In FY ’04, ’05, and ’08 defense was passed separately and foreign aid was included in the consolidated or “omnibus” bill. In FY ’07 defense was passed separately and foreign aid was included in the continuing resolution, H.J. Res. 20, which continued ’07 appropriations at the ’06 level with some exceptions—including, of course, for Israel.
As with previous Washington Report estimates of U.S. aid to Israel, this analysis is based on the annual CRS report, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, which uses available and verifiable numbers, primarily from the foreign operations appropriations bills. Although the CRS report does include such things as the old food for peace program, the $1.2 billion from the Wye agreement, the $1 billion in FMF included in the FY ’03 Emergency Supplemental appropriations bill, the subsidy for “refugee resettlement,” and money from the ASHA account, it does not include money from the DOD and other agencies. Nor does it include estimated interest on the early disbursement of aid.
The January 2008 CRS report on aid to Israel shows a total of $101.1908 billion through FY ’07. Table 1, on the previous page, is drawn from the summary table of that report, plus $2.4238 billion from the FY ’08 omnibus appropriations bill and estimates for ASHA and “other” amounts in FY ’08, for a total of $103.6147 billion through FY ’08.
To that has been added $10.2407 billion, as detailed below, for a grand total of $113.8554 billion.
Estimated Amounts Not Included in Table 1:
$10.2407 Billion
Defense Department Funds: $7.694 Billion. For previous estimates, a search going back several years was able to identify $6.794 billion from the DOD to Israel through FY ‘06. Adding $450 million from the FY ’07 DOD appropriations and $450 million from the ’08 appropriations gives a total of $7.694 billion. (The FY ’08 appropriations bill earmarks $155.6 million for Israel. However, AIPAC’s Web site reported that the total for earmarked and non-earmarked programs was $450 million—and who would know better than the Israel lobby itself?)
The military aid from the DOD budget is mostly for specific projects. The largest items have been the canceled Lavi attack fighter project, the completed Merkava tank, the ongoing Arrow anti-missile missile project, and several other anti-missile systems, most recently the “David’s Sling” short-range missile defense system. Haaretz reported in June that a senior U.S. defense official has said the U.S. will support and help Israel’s development of the advanced Arrow 3 designed to intercept advanced ballistic missiles. The fact that the U.S. military was not interested in the Lavi or the Merkava for its own use and has said the same thing about the Arrow and the other anti-missile projects would seem to jettison the argument that these are “joint defense projects.” The FY ‘01 appropriations bill also gave Israel a grant of $700 million worth of military equipment, to be drawn down from stocks in Western Europe, and the FY ’05 defense appropriations bill includes a provision authorizing the DOD to transfer an unspecified amount of “surplus” military items from inventory to Israel. In addition, since 1988 Israel has been designated a “major non-NATO ally,” giving it access to U.S. weapons systems at lower prices, and preferential treatment in bidding for U.S. defense contracts.
Interest: $2.089 Billion. Israel receives its U.S. economic and military aid in a lump sum within one month of the new fiscal year or the passage of the appropriations act. Applying one-half of the prevailing interest rate to the aid for each year (on the assumption that the aid monies are drawn down over the course of the year), the July 2006 estimate arrived at a total of $1.991 billion through FY ’06. To that, using an interest rate of 4 percent, is added $50 million for FY ’07 and $48 million for FY ’08, for a cumulative total of $2.089 billion through FY ’08.
Other Grants and Endowments: $457.7 Million. The July 2006 report included $456.7 million in U.S. grants and endowments to U.S.-Israeli scientific and business cooperation organizations. The two largest are the BIRD (Israel-U.S. Binational Research & Development) Foundation and the BARD (Binational Agriculture and Research and Development) Fund. While these are mostly self-sustaining, the BARD Fund gets about $500,000 a year from the Agriculture Department. Adding $0.5 million for each of FY ’07 and ‘08 to the ’06 total gives a new total of $0.457.7 billion.
For the convenience of those who wish to look up more details, citations for the foreign aid and DOD appropriations bills for the past five years are given in Table 2 above.
First Article in Booklet: The Cost of Israel to the American Public | Final Article in Booklet: The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion
By Thomas R. Stauffer, Ph.D.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
June 2003
Conflicts in the Middle East have been very costly to the U.S., as well as to the rest of the world. An estimate of the total cost to the U.S. alone of instability and conflict in the region – which emanates from the core, Israeli-Palestinian conflict – amounts to close to $3 trillion, measured in 2002 dollars. This is an amount almost four times greater than the cost of the Vietnam war, also reckoned in 2002 dollars.
Even this figure underestimates the costs because certain classes of expenditure remain unquantified. In particular, no reliable figure is available for the costs of “Project Independence,” Washington’s lavishly promoted effort to reduce U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East. That effort, which was subverted early on by diverse local special interests, was designed primarily to insulate Israel from any new “Arab oil weapon” after 1973/74, and may easily have cost $1 trillion. Even though the outlays were rationalized in the interest of “national security,” however, they contributed little or nothing to reducing U.S. strategic dependence upon imported oil from the Middle East. Similarly, aid to Israel – and thus the regional total – also is understated, since much is outside of the foreign aid appropriation process or implicit in other programs. Support for Israel comes to $1.8 trillion, including special trade advantages, preferential contracts, or aid buried in other accounts. In addition to the financial outlay, U.S. aid to Israel costs some 275,000 American jobs each year.
The major components in this minimum estimate of the costs are summarized in Table One; the detailed breakdown is displayed later in Table Two:
TABLE 1: Summary Overview of Cost of Mideast Conflicts to U.S. Since WWII (in 2002 dollars or jobs per year)
Type of Cost Events 2002 Costs
Political or Military Crises Conflicts in 1967, 1973, 1978-87, 1990/1 and construction of Strategic Petroleum Reserve $1,516 bn
Economic and Military Aid Total Regional (budgeted) – Near East, Turkey, Greece, and periphery $867 bn
Ad hoc support for Israel Trade preferences, loan guarantees, privileged contracts and technology access $56 bn +
Lost Trade and Domestic jobs Effects of sanctions and blocked contracts $275,000/yr
Energy autarky “Project Independence” indeterminate
Of which identifiable programs $285 bn
“Defense” of Gulf Oil Supplies Presence and preparedness in the Gulf (since mid-1980s) $40 bn +
Contingent Cost Oil Supply Guarantee for Israel (1975 MOU) $3bn/month
TABLE 2: Detailed Breakdown of Cost of Mideast Conflicts to U.S. Since WWII (in 2002 dollars or jobs per year)
table
Total identifiable costs come to almost $3 trillion. About 60 percent, well over half, of those costs—about $1.7 trillion—arose from the U.S. defense of Israel, where most of that amount has been incurred since 1973 (see later section and Table Three).
Oil Crises
Eminent economist and engineer Dr. Thomas R. Stauffer served twice in the Executive Office of the president: with the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import Control and with the Price Commission during the Nixon administration. He also was a consultant to the anti-trust unit of the Federal Trade Commission.
Dr. Stauffer taught economics and Middle East studies at Harvard (1971-1982), the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna (1982-85) and Georgetown University (1985-1989). He also lectured regularly at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute and at the Army and Navy war colleges.
Dr. Stauffer appeared before numerous tribunals and international bodies in Washington, DC and abroad, testifying as an expert in tax, nationalization and regulatory matters, including proceedings at The Hague.
The largest single element in the costs has been the series of six oil-supply crises since the end of World War II. To date these have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion (again in 2002 dollars), excluding the additional costs incurred since 2001 during the build-up toward the second war with Iraq. Until 1991, each crisis was triggered by a conflict among two or more Middle Eastern states, usually with the active involvement of at least one extra-regional power. The nature and impact of the oil crises changed over time, becoming more serious and implying greater risk to the oil-consuming world.
The several earlier Mideast oil crises, in 1956 and 1967, actually had relatively little effect on the United States. Indeed, the U.S. profited from exporting surplus oil in 1956 when Mideast supplies—especially of “sterling oil”—were interrupted. The second such crisis, in 1967, did have a longer-term impact. Initially, only the cost of shipping was raised when the Israelis interdicted the Suez Canal. The splitting of oil markets between east and west of Suez, however, was the catalyst for an overall price increase which otherwise would have been unlikely, if not impossible. Several OPEC states were successful in exploiting the closure of the Suez Canal to increase oil prices across the board after 1968. Again, the effect on the U.S. was relatively small, because U.S. oil imports were still at a low level. Nonetheless, those increases between 1970 and 1973 did cost the U.S. some $40 billion (in 2002 dollars).
The period before 1973, therefore, had little effect on U.S. oil costs, and the burden of aid to Israel was modest, so the overall cost of Middle East conflicts remained modest. The major cost prior to 1973, in fact, was support for Turkey as part of Cold War operations to contain the Soviet Union.
This changed with 1973, and costs escalated rapidly thereafter. Starting with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the costs to the U.S. of regional crises and aid programs began to increase beyond any original expectations. Since 1973, protection of Israel and subsidies to countries willing to sign peace treaties with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, has been the prime driver of U.S. outlays or the trigger for crisis costs. The 1973 war proved to be dear. At a minimum, it cost the U.S. between $750 billion and $1 trillion. This was the price tag for the rescue of Israel when President Richard Nixon agreed to resupply Israel with U.S. arms as it was losing the war against its neighbors. Washington’s intervention triggered the Arab oil embargo which cost the U.S. doubly: first, due to the oil shortfall, the US lost about $300 billion to $600 billion in GDP; and, second, the U.S. was saddled with another $450 billion in higher oil import costs.
A third factor added to the oil-related cost of the 1973 war (over and above the multi-billion dollar aid package to Israel which began in that year). Deciding to act preventively, as it were, the U.S. created, after some travail, a Strategic Petroleum Reserve (”SPR”) designed to insulate Israel and the U.S. against the wielding of a future Arab “oil weapon.” It was destined to contain one billion barrels of oil which could be released in the event of a supply crisis. To date the SPR, which still exists and is slowly being expanded, has cost $134 billion—since much of the oil was bought at high prices, and because the salvage value is relatively low. Thus, the 1973 oil crisis, all in all, cost the U.S. economy no less than $900 billion, and probably as much as $1,200 billion. Ironically, military costs themselves were negligible. The 1973 war illustrated the new dimension of Middle East conflicts, where the burdens are economic rather than military.
The next regional oil crisis was relatively less dear, although costly nonetheless. The Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war cost the U.S. $335 billion in terms of higher oil import prices. There were two stages. First, 5 million barrels per day (b/d) of Iranian oil exports were suspended when the revolutionaries closed the oil terminals in 1978. The resulting shortfall in oil supply, compounded by speculators, doubled oil prices. Then, just two years later, in 1980, began the Iran-Iraq war, which interrupted oil exports from both warring countries, causing prices to more than double once again. The joint effect of the two crises cost the U.S. consumer $335 billion in terms of higher prices for imported oil. It also caused a rise in prices of domestic energy—oil, gas, and coal. These “knock-on” effects are not included, however, so that the figure of $335 billion is indeed a lower bound for the actual costs of those two, back-to-back crises. The total consumer cost is likely to have been more than double that figure.
The 1990/91 Gulf war, on the other hand, proved to be almost a bargain. It did cost American consumers approximately $80 billion in higher oil prices, including both imported and domestic oil, again excluding the resulting “knock-on” effects. The military costs of conducting the war itself were all but nil, however, because virtually all the other costs were passed on to Washington’s willing or reluctant allies through “burden-sharing.” The Germans, Japanese, and some Gulf states contributed cash and kind to the pursuit of the war, with the result that the net military cost to the U.S. was essentially zero. Officially reported “burden-sharing” contributions amounted to $45 billion, compared to officially reported U.S. military costs of $49 billion. Given the inherent imprecision in the budgeted figures, the net effect was a wash. In fact, the U.S. government actually showed a fiscal profit from the crisis, because it collected at least an additional $10 billion in taxes and royalties from the higher prices of domestically produced oil and gas.
Economic and Military Aid
This category includes only those amounts which flow through the conventional foreign aid appropriations process. Ad hoc and special aid is discussed later. The total for the Middle East is $867 billion, which includes the official “Near East” category, plus Greece and Turkey, which are classified as part of Europe for purposes of U.S. statistics. Greece is included because the Greek lobby has ensured that Greece receives roughly 70 percent as much aid as Turkey as a condition for acquiescing in the appropriations for Turkey. Thus the outlays for Greece are necessary conditions for the outlays for Turkey, given the U.S. domestic political dynamic, and thus are causally linked to the Middle East.
The official reports are incomplete. First, it is necessary to estimate the ad hoc and special aid for Israel, which is reported differently, if at all (see below). Secondly, it is necessary to include such special, but related, transactions as U.S. support for insurgents in the Sudan, or the U.S. share in multilateral aid to Turkey, in order to flesh out the full picture. “Humanitarian aid” to the revolutionaries in the southern Sudan has aggregated to some $2 billion, while the U.S. share of recent multilateral aid to Turkey from the IMF and World Bank can be estimated at $7 billion. It can be argued that this money was made available to Ankara as a result of U.S. pressure, intended to reward Turkey further for its alliance with Israel and as an incentive for further cooperation against Iraq.
TABLE 3: Summary Overview of Costs to U.S. of Support for Israel Since WWII (in 2002 dollars or jobs per year)
Direct $1,845 bn
Official foreign aid 247 bn
Rescue Costs (1973) 1,050 bn
Collateral costs (aid) 451 bn
Special, ad hoc support 106 bn
Trade & Job losses 275,000 jobs/yr
Linked $324 bn min
Aid to periphery (NIS, etc) 49 bn+
Energy autarky 235 bn min
“Defense” of the Gulf 40 bn
Contingent
Oil Supply Guarantee
(not yet implemented) $3 bn/month
Increasingly, aid to the periphery is part of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea are viewed as integral to geopolitical planning for the Middle East, and, more recently, aid to the Central Asian “emergent democracies” is linked in part to Middle East politics, related to efforts to encircle and isolate Iran. That increasing flow of aid is also part of the larger picture of aid to the Middle East.
Another element is ad hoc support for Israel, which is not part of the formal foreign aid programs. No comprehensive compilation of U.S. support for Israel has been publicly released. Additional known items include loan guarantees—which the U.S. most probably will be forced to cover—special contracts for Israeli firms, legal and illegal transfers of marketable U.S. military technology, de facto exemption from U.S. trade protection provisions, and discounted sales or free transfers of “surplus” U.S. military equipment. An unquantifiable element is the trade and other aid given to Romania and Russia to facilitate Jewish migration to Israel; this has accumulated to many billions of dollars. Lastly, unofficial aid, in the form of transfers from the Diaspora resident in the U.S. and net purchases by U.S. parties of Israel Bonds, adds at least $40 billion to the total. A rough estimate, again a minimum, for such additional elements is more than $100 billion since 1973.
U.S. jobs and exports also have been affected, adding to costs and losses. “Trade followed the flag” in the area—but in the reverse direction. As U.S. relations with Mideast countries deteriorated, trade was lost. Worsening political relations resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs. Some disappeared as a consequence of trade sanctions, some because large contracts were forefeited, thanks to the Israel lobby—as in the case of foregone sales of fighters to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s—and still others due to a dangerously growing trade-aid imbalance vis-à-vis Israel.
Sanctions alone have caused U.S. jobs to disappear. The trickle of U.S. trade with Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria—compared to what would have been expected had relations been “normal,” let alone “good”—currently costs the U.S. some 80,000 to 100,000 jobs each year. The figure is probably higher, in fact, because it does not reflect the lost opportunities for U.S. farmers to export their products into the growing markets of the sanctioned countries.
“Good” relations, however, do not necessarily mean employment gains for Americans. In the case of Israel, the striking trade-aid imbalance vis-à-vis Israel costs the U.S. almost as many jobs as the sanction regimes. Israel exports to the U.S. much more than it imports, while it pays for only a fraction of what it does import from the U.S. Specifically, Israel buys little from the U.S. in relation to U.S. aid levels, and the trade-aid imbalance of $6 billion to $10 billion each year costs about 125,000 jobs. One aspect of U.S. government policy in the region, however, does create American jobs: the states of the southern Gulf incrementally buy large quantities of U.S. arms and related services. That relationship, primarily with Saudi Arabia, has translated into an extra 60,000 jobs in recent years. This gain, due to the special status of Saudi Arabia, partly offsets the jobs lost through Israeli pressures or contracting policies.
Another large element in cost has been the push for energy autarky—specifically, “Project Independence.” This clutch of programs has been extraordinarily costly since it was initiated as a policy objective in the 1970s. Oil imports are higher today than before, in spite of the imposing array of subsidies or forced technologies designed to increase U.S. energy production and cut consumption. No overview of these costs has been compiled. Identifiable costs come to $285 billion, but the grand total is certainly very much higher. A reasonable estimate is at least one trillion dollars, but only part of that can be documented. While the subsidies were inevitably justified in the interests of national security, the projects and programs were in most cases captured and co-opted by domestic lobbies. Since the national objective was reducing dependence upon Mideast oil, however, the costs should be subsumed within the costs of coping with regional conflicts, even if the programs were largely ineffectual.
“Defense” of the Gulf—often cited as a major cost factor—in fact has been but a minor element of cost. Excluding the buildup for war against Iraq in late 2002, the official figure for operations and presence in the Gulf is about $30 billion to $40 billion per year. That figure is misleading, however. Most of the equipment and troops and the operations of the carrier task force at Diego Garcia would be maintained in support of other geopolitical objectives, so those outlays, which represent the largest component in the reported “cost,” are not substantively tied to U.S. policies in the Gulf itself. The U.S. presence itself has entailed relatively modest incremental costs—on the order of $2 billion (net) per year, exclusive of any new costs tied to the new mobilization against Iraq.
Lastly, a large part of the costs have been inextricably tied to U.S. protection of or support for Israel. It is therefore useful to pull together the various elements linked to that policy:
Direct costs, excluding crisis costs, have amounted to about $800 billion. This figure includes budgeted U.S. aid for Egypt and Jordan, since that flow of aid is so closely correlated with their postures toward Israel—i.e., that aid is part of the cost of buying peace for Israel on two of its borders. It also includes the flow of dollars from private Jews or Jewish organizations in the U.S. to Israel, which are drains on the U.S. balance of payments, analogous to official aid transfers. The rescue of Israel in 1973 cost another $1 trillion, so total direct costs, including the costs of the results of support for Israel, are some $1.8 trillion.
There have been further costs where the causal linkage is less clear—aid to the states of the periphery (Ethiopia, Central Asia, etc.), the “defense” of the Gulf, and the costs of Energy Independence. Although some part of those costs of $300-plus billion are attributable to U.S. support for Israel at the core, any allocation is beyond the scope of this discussion.
A last element is a contingent cost: the cost to the U.S. of the Oil Supply Guarantee which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proffered the Israelis in 1975. If Israel’s oil supply is affected, Israel in effect gets a first call on any oil available to the U.S. The opportunity cost of that oil depends upon the crisis scenario—a plausible scenario would entail costs to the U.S. of $3 billion per month in terms of lost GDP if the U.S. were embargoed at the same time.
Expensive Unrest
Unrest in the Middle East has proven to be very expensive for the U.S. It is known that most of American foreign aid goes to Egypt and Israel, but it is clear that the total costs to the U.S. of conflict in the region are very much higher than the aid bill itself. The total costs of supporting Israel are some six times the official aid, for example. Oil price crises have been particularly expensive—a sobering lesson from the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years. Future “burden-sharing” is unlikely—while successful in eliminating much of the cost of the 1990/91 Gulf war, it will become much more difficult. Mercenary allies, such as Turkey, moreover, are likely to demand compensation “up front,” since, they argue, they never received the aid promised to them during the prior Gulf war. Ankara is especially likely to demand considerable rewards, since it protests that it received little to offset the $30 billion it claimed it lost in the last affair.
Israel, too, is demanding more aid—$4 billion in extra military support and a further $10 bn in loan guarantees, over and above the current level of appropriated aid. Conflicts in the Middle East have become expensive indeed for the American taxpayer.
It is worth noting, however, that the burden shared by the other oil-consuming states has, in fact, been much higher. Even though they do not share in policy formation, they do indeed share in the costs of the consequences. While not greatly drained by foreign aid to the region—unlike the $800 billion borne by the U.S.—they bear much more of the costs of oil crises because, collectively, they import much more oil than the U.S. Thus the total bill—the total burden shared by default—is two to four times higher than that for the U.S. alone. All states—not just the U.S.—have borne the burden of conflicts in the Middle East.
First Article in Booklet: The Cost of Israel to the American Public | Previous Article in Booklet: A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: Almost $114 Billion
I would like to add to the comments above. If you noticed the numbers, it was not just Germany killing the Jews. (Although, this is what the Jewish propaganda wants us to believe.) They had a major part in starting World War II. But, in the beginning it was not about the Jewish people. The people of all these countries felt threatened by the Jewish human rights in there own area. If you look at Israel and the way they are being very inhumane, any one can easily see the correlations.
For years there have been rallys against Israel, all over the world. In the last few months there have been protests. As these things progress, things will get worse. What Israel is doing, is putting Jewish people all over the world at risk.
These protests have been all over the world. Here in the United States there have been very large turnouts. In Israel there have been protests against the Israel government and military, the last couple of months. If there is a group of people in there own country that do not approve of what is happening, how can others approve. I can easily see Israel implode on it’s self. The region is a hot bed.
Dear Christine, I agree with you 100% this Holocaust business has become a nuisance. I do not want to dispute their figures and even how the people were killed. My problem is this community does not want to bury their dead and every year wants to make money on these dead bodies. The worst is they want every one to feel guilty for some thing which Hitler did rather practically every European country did to Jews.
The Jewish leadership does not want to tell the world what wrong Jew leaders did to other Europeans that the entire Europe turned against them?
As a Hindu I believe in our Holy scriptures which stipulate time period for both birth and death. You can celebrate a birth for few days only because you don’t know what kind of good or bad deed the new born is going to perform when grows up. Similarly on a death you can stay in the state of mourning and sorrow for 17 days only. After that immediate family only can remember or pray for them during certain days for 1 day once a year only. Where as Jew Leaders are keeping the entire world in the state of mourning for more than 60 years. Most pathetic is no one is questioning them.
Here we have organized Jew Leaders who practically control word Media and Banking wants the whole world to talk 24/7 about the holocaust in which 3.5-5 million Jews were killed by Hitler and other Europeans rather than their illegal colonization of Palestine Land for last 41 years. They want the whole world to feel guilty for this. This Leadership does not wish to address current failed socio, economics & political policies of Israel and illegal colonization of Palestine Land with 3.5 million Arab Muslim Slaves.
Where as it is an irony no one including the Indians themselves have ever talked about that 40-50 million Indians who were starved to death from 1876-1943 during 25 major famines by the British colonizers of India . 1876-1879 famine 20 million Indians died of starvation. The 20 million Indians who were starved to death between 1876-1879 under British colonial rule at that time a Jew Benjamin Disraeli was the British Prime Minister.
In the last famine in 1943 alone more than 4 million Indian Bengali victims including new born children perished alive under inhuman, atrocious and cruel British Rule. British Rulers inhuman attitude towards human disaster & sufferings of Indians became more visible in 1943 when in a response to an urgent request by the secretary of State for India, Leo Amery and Wavell to release food stocks for India, Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, “If food was so scare, “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.”
It was very unfortunate even the Democrat President Roosevelt of America refused to help the dying Indians by denying help with food stock. By doing so President Roosevelt not only showed least concern for the lives of Bengali Indians but he showed utter disrespect to the American philosophy, “ Liberty and Justice to all.”
Then how come Indians can forget the 200 years of British slavery which was started by a trading company “East India Company” comprising mainly Jewish Traders. Still Indians have not made a Holocaust of human tragedy from the death of over 40 million Indians neither they have been blaming 24/7 Britishers or Jews. The reason is life has to move on. On the other hand Jew Leaders who are stealing from the entire world because of their control on world Banking & Media and have been doing human genocide by killing Arabs and Muslims for more than 60 years wants to talk 24/7 about holocaust just to divert world attention from their inhuman behavior.
I wish more and more Americans realize this what Jew Leaders have done to America. Our country has been ruined. We have been reduced to the status of being a another Israeli colony after Palestine. All US Congress & Senate Members must be approved by Israel & racist AIPAC and must work in the best interest of Israel/Jews only. I am sure this would be treason in the UK, country’s lawmaker putting the interest of another country ahead of their own country.
I refuse to call all those Jews; Americans even with American citizenship because their loyalty is to Israel only. When they can serve in Israeli army, can vote in Israeli elections and are stealing military secrets for Israel, for all practical purposes they are Israelis for me. Americans must join together to throw such traitors out of America.
The reason why the Jews kill other nationalities is because they are not pro-life. The British empire not only called for genocide in India, but early in the U.S. history the Native Americans suffered the same fate. The British Empire has done this in Africa as well.
The question is: Why must the British and Israel Jews kill millions of people?
The Answer: They are not pro-life. They abort their young. They promote homosexuality. etc….
With this they can not go forth and multiply. In order for both, the British Empire and Israel Jews, to remain a force they must create a genocide on other people. This will give them an equal footing.
The genocide that has repeatedly happened throughout history around the world by these two groups of people is to keep control of worldly goods.
Wait long enough, and both the British Empire and Israel will not exist on their own. Patients is what is needed.
The British Empire had to give up India, because there just weren’t enough British to control the continued population growth of the people that were the natural inhabitants. With Israel preventing food, medical supplies, etc… into the Gaza Strip, they were trying to control the population growth of the Palestinians. People are survivors. A way will be found. And for the Palestinian people a way was found, the tunnels. Israel failed to control the growing Palestinian population. Israel attacking Gaza was to reduce the population. Destroying the tunnels Israel hopes to control the population growth of the Palestinian people.
Muslim and Islam are the most pro-life religions in the world. Jewish is the most anti-life religion in the world.
I can not understand why U.S. Christians that call them self pro-life side with the most anti-life group of people on this planet.
(I am Catholic.)
Plain and simple. Religious wars… Hatred passes down from generation to generation through word of mouth as if it happened yesterday. You can’t try to comprehend the thoughts and actions of civilizations you don’t understand.. In Egypt around 1300 BC, jews were enslaved. That is a hatred that will never go away because there was no dr. king, malcom x, or any civil rights movement that would begin to fix their hatred..
and the Holocaust happened because Jewish people were taking over Germany’s wealth. Hitler first tried to send them off to other countries but nobody wanted them there.
It is funny that whomever writes the history only tells there side of the story. I wonder if the Egyptians were alive today, if they would be writing a different history book than what the Jewish history books have shown. Some scholars claim that they believe the Jews were slaves to the life style and forgot to live by Gods words.
As the pyramids are being explored they are finding a different Egypt than what the Jewish history tells. As artifacts are found they see that even the lowest of the people were receiving proper medical care and were being well fed. I think I will believe what the scientist are finding rather than a history that is being told down through the generations. This Jewish history is glorified for Jewish purpose. There is no concrete evidence that the Jewish population was ever mistreated in Egypt. (Perhaps Egypt was going through exactly what the Palestinians are going through today.) Again seek the facts and not propaganda, however old it might be. Review and learn from the archeologist that are doing the digs in Egypt.
Killing of the first born in Egypt. Could this have been a form of population control?
ya thats crazy.
I feel we do need to talk about the holocaust. The lies have abounded by the Jewish propaganda for centuries. We can learn from the past. The example: the increase in number of Jews killed. (I was worried about the new math, now I am concerned about the Jew new math.) This increase in numbers is suppose to put us in a sympathetic view, so that we will agree with what ever Israel says.
This is a very high estimate of those killed: (You must remember that they were not just Jews killed. The gypsies, traders, or anyone else that they felt threatened by was also killed.)
Germany 130,000
Austria 65,000
Belgium & Luxemberg 29,000
Bulgaria 7,000
Czechoslvakia 277,000
France 83,000
Greece 65,000
Hungary/Ukraine 402,000
Italy 8,000
Netherlands 106,000
Norway 760
Poland/USSR 4,565,000
Romania 220,000
Yugoslavia 60,000
So with these facts, why are you accusing Germany of a holocaust of 11,000,000 Jews dieing in concentration camps by Germans. There were not millions of Jews killed in gas chambers in Germany!!!!!
In the area of Palestine and the illegal state of Israel, over 750,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel soldiers. Only Poland/USSR has more deaths.
Israel is creating a holocaust on the Palestinian people that they claim is to protect themselves.
I believe history will again repeat itself. (Again, because World War II was not the first time this has happened.) Countries from all over the middle east,and perhaps other countries, will began to put Israel in it’s place, just as the Europeans did during World War II and on other historical dates.
Dr. Paul’s whole point is proven by the fact that you and others cannot get off the topic of the holocaust. IT ISN’T THE POINT.
I’m going to stop responding. You obviously have made up your mind. Your bias and or hatred toward the Jews and Israel as the only Jewish state has skewed your version of reality. You are taking an act that is the worst case of genocide in all recorded history. Independent scholars and researchers calculated that the number of Jews world wide before WWII was around 17 million. After the holocaust the number of Jews recorded was around 11 million. You can deny what you wish but the reality is the truth. The truth is not what you make it. You should educate your self on the facts about Israel. They have 1.5 million Arab Israelis. Muslims are allowed to practice how ever they wish. They blast there prayers over the loud speaker every day. They protect the Christians that are being killed in Bethlehem from the radical Muslims. They are by no means perfect. They have made many mistakes. But before you go classifying them as in humane at least stick to reality. When the radical Muslims took over Lebanon, the only Christian Arab country in the Middle East, they were slaughtering them by the thousands. The whole world looked on as an Arab conflict. Just like now in Darfur, the Arabs are slaughtering the Africans. The fact that you want to put them in a moral equivalence is in your own mind. The fact is from the time Israel has become a nation the Palestinian population has more then tripled. So my recommendation to you is that you boycott all products that Jews and or Israel has invented or owns. Unfortunately you would not live very long, even the fruits and vegetables that you eat most likely were irrigated using Israeli technology. Look at what a culture does to improve society before you judge them.
Just visited this site tonight. Thank you for your support of the Jews and understanding. God has blinded some…so no matter what…they will never understand.You have done your job well. Wipe your feet. I agree ww/some things here, but the Jewish situation is not one of them.
Gabriel,
Muslims are allowed to practice how ever they wish? Ever heard of mosques being closed and muslims not being allowed to go into the dom of the rock to pray?? Oh well that is news to you obviously. They blast prayers over loud speakers?? Yes muslims do that to annoy Israel right lol. That is called the call for prayer and that has been practice for over 1400 years fyi. I have palastinne christen friends and no they don’t support Israel. Radical muslims?? Dude you have zero knowledge of the Arabic or the muslim culture. That is really sad. Lebanon was a christain country?? Radical muslims took over Lebanon?? FYI PER labenese constiton and law. The president has to be Christain, VP has to be muslim. What a take over lol. Muslims slaughtered Labenese christens?? You need to freshen up on labenese history. Darfur, arabs slaughtering the Africans??? Man you remind me of that miss teen America girl with her idiotic answer lol. Those that are fighting are both African, and there is a lot more to it than arabs killing Africans.
I feel like I am talking to a bunch of kids here. How could people debate middleeastern history and politics and they don’t even understand the basics. I don’t have jews and I don’t hate israelies. I hate Zionism. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. LOOK IT UP.
PS DON’T USE WIKKIPEDIA. LOL.
We give Israel, the fourth wealthiest nation, approx. 6.8 million dollars every day (plus other bonuses). I guarantee, whatever nation we gave that much money would be our ally. I do not call Israel an ally. Just like I would not call someone a friend, if I have to pay them everyday to be my friend. We need to stop giving Israel it’s meal ticket. Then see if they remain our ally.
I have been to the one in Los Angeles and Jerusalem. Both are very powerful…they have many artifacts not just pictures but yes plenty of pictures and videos. One of the most powerful that still sticks in my head, is a video of a small girl maybe 6 years old, a SS officer takes his gun to her forehead and pulls the trigger. The body falls and you see the legs twitching, then it stops. There are plenty of these pictures of mass graves. The Nazi’s did a good job of destroying the evidence but we still have many people alive today. They have the tattoos still on there skin. I’m sorry to say that people make themselves believe what they wish to believe.
Just for your knowledge Israel is not even in the top 10 of whom we give money to.
http://www.globalissues.org/i/aid/aid-2005-2006-us.gif
Again you are not speaking of the masses that death that they say have occurred. A mass grave does not hold a million let alone 6 million people.
I have talked to many Germans that also talked to many Germans who have lived in Germany before, during and after World War II. They speak of the horrific things that the Jews did to them. The Germans were provoked by the inhumane injustices that were heaped upon them prior to World War II. It still does not make it right. But, you must consider that what Israel is doing AGAIN, may cause another tragedy just like many times in past history. If Israel does not stop treating their neighbors inhmanely, history will repeat itself in a very negative manner towards them. Israel must seek to be more humane or justice will be served. Unfortunately, the innocent of Israel will be the greater suffers.
I just listened to Bishop Richard Williamson’s most recent interview about the Nazi gas chambers. He speaks of what I believe is factual truth. I do not believe that 6 million Jews were killed in gas chambers. After listening to the evidence he spoke of, it is clear that perhaps no Jews were killed in gas chambers. These so called “gas chambers” were crematories.
I also went to Jewish sights to see what evidence they had. I was looking for facts. Not fancy drawings. Not opinions. It does not seem that the Jewish community has any actual facts for Nazi “gas chambers”.
What do you think?
I would visit the many different Museum of Tolerances. http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.juLVJ8MRKtH/b.1580483/
Here you will find artifacts and a huge amount of documentation, photos what have you that can not be falsified. Eyewitness testimony. The fact that a Bishop who is suppose to be credible is letting there twisted anti-Jew views twist reality is very sad. I am not Jewish but my Grandfather who served in WWII told me what he saw. He was not a Jew, in fact comes from German heritage. So those who doubt are simply projecting there hate.
I don’t want to get into the controversary how many Jews were killed and how they were killed. They were killed by Hitler and his cronies. The problem is every year Jew Leaders are increasing the number of those killed in that human tragedy. Now this figure stand at over 6 million and every year Jew Leaders put a gun on every body’s head around the world and force them too feel guilty for those who were killed by Hitler.
Jew Leaders have commercialized the so called Holocaust and turn into a money making Industry capitalizing on the sacrifice and sufferings of warriors and less fortunate who were not in a position to defend them selves. Every where this Organized Jewish Leadership wants the whole world to talk 24/7 about the holocaust in which conflicting number of Jews were killed by Hitler rather than their illegal colonization of Palestine Land. They want the whole world to have sympathy for Jews. But this Leadership does not wish to address current failed socio, economics & political policies of Israel and its illegal colonization of Palestine Land with 3.5 million Arab Muslim Slaves.
Can these Jew Leaders learn some thing from Indians who have not commercialized the sacrifice of 50 million Indians who were brutally killed by British colonial rulers of India mainly Jew Traders who entered India in the name of East India Company. It was a Jew Benjamin Disreali who was twice British Prime Minister during 1862 to 1880. Under this murderer Prime Minister millions of Indians were killed.
Every Jew in the world must understand that the life has to move on and stop asking for sypathies in the name of your dead especially when your leadership of criminals and racist is doing human genocide for last 60 years in Palestine.
I went to that web sight. Really does not give any information. I also went to an exhibit here in Denver a few years back. It was mostly a show and tell exhibit. It really does not give facts. A few photos. Some testimony, but only a paragraph or two. Eyewitness accounts on a very small scale. Not the large scale that we are made to believe. Mostly about fantasy. What they could have doing. What may have happened. etc….
Where is the truth, the concrete facts. Show me numbers.
The fact of whether the Jews were killed or not is irrelevant in this discussion.
If you wanted to get technical, the better argument is that we have been their greatest ally since the establishment of Israel and we have gotten little to show for it other than empty promises and more war. Even more reason to leave them to themselves.
Thank you David. Well put.
Ron Paul is right on! The pea brain politicians that run this great country should get out of the way & out of our everyday lives. No good ever came from the Govt. meddling in the private sector. Between the Govt. & Wall St. they pretty much dashed the hopes & dreams of all americans. I, along with every american,has seen a lot of their retirement money (401K)just disappear. The plan there is to make sure that we have nothing to fall back on when we retire so that we will have to depend on BIG GOVT. They want to be able to run our lives the way they see fit. The way this american sees it, if they get what they want we are all doomed to slave our lives away for the Govt.& the Elite so they can have it all and we end up with nothing. Lets not let that happen! GOD BLESS AMERICA!
You said it very well. The Government and the Elite have been against us, the American people, all along. And they’ll stop at nothing to take away our freedoms and our property. Ron Paul is one of the few, if not the ONLY member of Congress who does NOT support US Government’s increasingly socialist state.
ISRAEL A FAILED STATE THREAT TO WORLD PEACE
Current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is not the first Israeli prime minister suspected or being investigated for bribery, influence paddling and criminal activities. 4 other Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Areil Sharon who preceded him were also accused of corruption, influence paddling and criminal activities.
Israel ’s economy is under the control of a handful of families who, like medieval robber barons, rob public assets, utilities and national resources, all with the help of corrupt officials, Politicians and ministers like Olmert. Israel is an example of Culture of Moral and Ethical Corruption, under the guise of Democracy. Major criminal investigations and corruption cases against the Elite Club of Wealthy, Bureaucrats & Politicians are frozen by a lack of will by those who are governing Israel for being part of this Elite Club.
Jewish’s Leadership around the world is an exclusive Organized Club with hardly any feelings for any other & their own community. The proof is 34% Israeli children live in poverty and 20% of its population live below poverty line; an individual making less than $400/month and a family of 4 making less than $1,000.00/month. The accumulated wealth of 500 richest people is around $65 billion in contrast to Israel ’s GDP of $130 Billion and National Budget of $65 Billion. Israel is in the top ten nations with the widest socio-economic gap. It is an economically, socially and politically failed state who can not solve its socio-economic, political problems including its Land dispute with Palestine since 1967. This Land Israel has colonized for last 40 years; 3.5 million Arab Muslims lives there with no voting Rights. Still Jews around the world call Israel a Democracy!
If one looks back there was no conflict in Palestine for centuries; till 1850 there were aprx. 400,000 Muslims (80%), 75,000 Christians (15%) and 25,000 Jews (5%) who lived in harmony. Then in late 1800s a Zionist group from Europe decided to colonize this Land to create a “Jewish Homeland” after rejecting locations in Africa and South America . At first this immigration created no problem; however when more and more Jews immigrated with the sole stated desire to take land for an exclusive Jewish state fighting with escalating waves of violence erupted between the 2 groups.
Finally in 1947 United Nations (UNO) under the pressure of American Jews intervened and dishonestly arbitrarily decided to give 55% of Palestine to Jewish state despite the fact this group represented only 30% of the total population and owned less than 7% of the Land. A war broke out between Jewish Forces with American & European money consisting 90,000 European trained soldiers with most modern weaponry including fighter & bomber planes and 30,000 ill-equipped, improvised, poorly trained men representing Arab Forces. Entire civilized world watch this one sided no contest war with a known outcome. By the end of 1948 war Jewish state “ Israel ” was created on 78% Palestine conquered Land. This was far more than that proposed generous UN conspiracy. A new map was drawn up in which every city; river and hillock received a New Hebrew name to erase all vestiges of the Palestine culture.
In 1967 Israel launched a surprise war lasting 6 days and occupied remaining 22% of Palestine that had eluded it in 1948; the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also occupied parts of Egypt (which has been returned) and Syria which is still under their occupation. Israel has inevitably created destabilizing effects in their pursuit to maintain an ethnically preferential Jewish State, particularly when majority land it is on was forcibly colonized that primarily belongs to Arab Muslims. This has destabilized the peace in the entire Middle East . The original state which was 80% Muslim & 15% Christians have become refugees and are not being allowed to return home in the current Jewish state Israel; which is in violation to UN guaranteed Refugee Rights to return to their Homeland.
Israel’s defiance to Bill Clinton brokered 1993 Oslo Peace accord of giving back West Bank & Gaza strip for the creation of Palestine state has made the Palestine Muslims to rebel in more violent manner. Israel by moving its citizens to take more land has put fuel to this violent uprising which the Arabs call “Intifada” (Arabic for shacking off) Intifada began in 2000 and continued to this day and turning more violent each day.
Israel ’s continued illegal confiscation of Palestine Land since 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is being resisted by the Palestine inhabitants with violence, terrorism and guerilla war tactics. Israeli government in retaliation feels it is ethical to Bomb Palestine civilians including children. This gave status of a Leader to terrorist like Yaser Arafat who can be named as inventor of human Bomb. Despite his numerous wives and more than 100 children he never made any of his own family members a human bomb. This type of terrorism, guerilla war and Islamic Jihad invented & practiced in Israel/Palestine has spread to the whole world and has destabilized the world peace.
Every where Organized Jewish Leadership wants the whole world to talk 24/7 about the holocaust in which 3.5-5 million Jews were killed by Hitler rather than their illegal colonization of Palestine Land. They want the whole world to feel guilty for this. This Leadership does not wish to address current failed socio, economics & political policies of Israel and illegal colonization of Palestine Land with 3.5 million Arab Muslim Slaves.
Where as it is an irony no one including the Indians themselves have ever talked about that 30-40 million Indians were starved to death from 1876-1943 during 25 major famines by the British colonizers of India . 1876-1879 famine 20 million Indians died of starvation. In the last famine in 1943 alone more than 4 million Indian Bengali victims including new born children perished alive under inhuman, atrocious and cruel British Rule. British Rulers inhuman attitude towards human disaster & sufferings of Indians became more visible in 1943 when in a response to an urgent request by the secretary of State for India, Leo Amery and Wavell to release food stocks for India, Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, “If food was so scare, “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.”
It was very unfortunate even the Democrat President Roosevelt of America refused to help the dying Indians by denying help with food stock. By doing so President Roosevelt not only showed least concern for the lives of Bengali Indians but he showed utter disrespect to the American philosophy, “ Liberty and Justice to all.”
The British Colonizers have yet to tender a formal apology or regret or any help to those families whose members died in various famines in India , neither the Indian government or Indian public has ever demanded for the same.
This Culture of Moral and Ethical Corruption by Jewish organized Leadership have penetrated America in a big way with their control of Wall Street, Main Stream Media, Real Estate, Hollywood and Politics. 2% Jewish Population of America has organized 14% representation in US Senate and 8% in Congress(14 Senators & 32 Congress Rep) spanning over 18 states of America with assets in trillions of dollars. It looks like this Organized Leadership wants to repeat the history of colonization of Palestine by their ancestors in America . In majority Christian nation America which ever Town Jewish Leadership control; corruption & racism has become hallmark of their administration. Saying “Merry Christmas” is an insult for Leadership and shutting down Towns on Jewish religious days are the norms.
Just for an example under this Organized Leadership representing 4% Jewish population, New Jersey is probably the world’s most corrupt & racist state. This state in 8,000 sq miles has more than 1 Elected Politician & 50 Employees per Square Miles (over 9,000 Elected Scoundrels & 400,000 Employees with little or no work) for 8.5 Million residents under 588 Gangs (governments) in 566 Racially segregated Princely Estates (towns) with a budget of $74 billion and deficit of $140 billion including unfunded liabilities like state pension, healthcare and transport fund. New Jersey is legally corrupt & legally racially segregated under the Jewish/Israeli Rulers & their cronies. This state with highest Property Taxes $7,500.00 & highest cost $19,000.00 to educate a student in the nation also takes pride in its 250,000 students who can not comprehend in basic education. In Racism this state has set new record under Jewish Rulers. The Police Union under a Jew President called the entire Indian community, “cockroaches, animals, illiterates and illegal go home in the presence of print & TV Media in Aug 2006. It is an irony no Indian Leader in America or India or any part of the world; worth the name protested to these worst ever called Racial Slurs for a minority community in the history of America
Beside few other nationalities; Jews are also allowed dual citizenship in America . In Israel more than 100,000 American Jews are living there. Israel has permitted them to serve in their Army and to vote in their elections. It is a debatable issue how one can trust such a privileged class Jews First with loyalties towards racist, corrupt & criminal Leadership of Israel only; in any country? Especially when this Organized Leadership is governing Israel promoting a Culture of Moral & Ethical Corruption with guns & bombs to glorify their illegal confiscation of Palestine Land . To hide all of this they want the entire world to live in the past and feel guilty for the massacre of Jews by Hitler.
Can the preachers of Peace, Liberty and Democracy pay attention to this 41 year old blood soaked ongoing territorial dispute between Israel & Palestine; which is threatening world Peace and Liberty of other humans around the world? How can we forget that this conflict has given birth to Human Bombs, status of Leaders to Terrorist & Separatist and Islamic Jihad around the world?
God Bless United States of America and every human on earth.
Dave Makkar
Where do I begin with your blatant dishonesty. You do not understand the history of Israel. Your obvious hatred for the Jews clouds your eyes from the truth. Everyone should disregard all that you state it is full of lies and miss truths. If you are interested you should check out the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isreal
Let me make clear to you I never criticize communities. I criticize the Leadership. Like Jews have fanatic leaders same way Hindus have fanatic Leaders with hate for Muslims. I don’t have to read any thing cooked up by racist, inhuman & corrupt Jewish leadership. Like state of Pakistan created out of Indian land was an Independence gift to India by the Colonial British Rulers, same way creation of state of Israel was a gift to Palestine again by the British Rulers supported by American Leadership not the public. Even in the recent Israeli attack on Palestine civilians 71% of the Americans wanted their government to stay neutral but unfortunately America being under seize of 7800 corrupt & racist Jew Leaders they forced the American gov to support the criminals and fanatics running Israel.
Once again I refused to call all those Israelis American who are living in America and vote in the election of Israel and can serve in the Army of Israel. They are Jew First with blind loyalty towards criminal & inhuman leadership of Israel. Why don’t they live in Israel?
Jew Leaders have made Holocaust an Industry capitalizing on the sacrifice and sufferings of warriors. Learn some thing from Indians who have not commercialized the sacrifice of 50 million Indians who were brutally killed by British colonial rulers of India mainly Jew Traders who entered India in the name of East India Company. It was a Jew Benjamin Disreali who was twice British Prime Minister during 1862 to 1880. Under this murderer Prime Minister millions of Indians were killed.
Then I am living in the Israeli ruled state New Jersey of America. A womanizer Jew Leader started the trend of Buying US Senate seat and then bought a bed in Governor House. Another Jew Leader has blown up a Hill to make Dream Luxury condos right next to a Christian Church by destroying the environment; vegetation & wild life 100%.
Then here is a wonderful quote from that Jew Leader a Nobel Peace Prize winner Menachem Begin:
“Our race is the Master Race. We are divine Gods on this planet. We are different from the inferior races as they are insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our kingdom will be ruled by our Leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve as our slaves.”
What more proof you need about the corrupt,inhuman & racist Jew Leadership?
You better start doing something about your corrupt, criminal, inhuman and racist leaders.
Dave Makkar
what a crap to say that Israel is on right. its very existence is unjustified. it was christians who crushed Jews in germany and now they are shedding crocodile tears for them. why are they so much worried to have a different country for Jews ? … why they did not allow them to keep being in Europe? … why a separate land ???
Ok, we do not have any problems even if you want to show sympathy and want to create a separate homeland for Jews. Do it. but why on muslim land of palestine. If you want to do something for Jews, do it on your own lands. Give one of the 50 states of USA to Jews. If Jews are so much helpful for the technological development of US, take these bastards inside the USA and get them settled inside USA. Make an Israel inside USA. Its a serious violation of international law that one country occupy the lands of another. The UK did the same in early 20th century and then they made the illegal state of terrorist Israel who brutally killed palestinian men women & children to clear the lands for Jewish occupiers. They showed more terrorism towards innocent palestinians than the Nazis showed towards Jews.
Hamas is a elected government in palestine and are the freedom fighters struggling to free up their land from the bloody & barbaric clutches of the so called state of illegal & terrorist Israel. Terroristic policies of USA to invade muslim lands and its blind support to the so called state of illegal & terrorist Israel are the prime cause for the rise of various militant movements like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and has made USA & Bush the most hated nation & leader across the globe.
The palestinians are on right on the grounds of all logic, reasoning, justice & truth. Their only crime is that they do not have the military power to counter the terrorism of Israel supported by USA.
However, no power is bigger than the truth and the truth shall prevail. Palestinians will win one day and the illegal state of Israel will be wiped off from the face of earth and all the zionists, evangelists, neocons and freemasonic terrorists, who have disturbed the peace in the world for their sinister motives, will be killed. The peace will again prevail on the land of GOD.
What does it really matter who is right and who is wrong in this war and who decides who is wrong/right. Does the US always have to be the judge on this decision. Can’t we just let them handle their own argument/war? Although the US is consistent; they invade Irak and Afghanistan so why not support Israel occupying and invading a foreign country
America is an Israeli Colony & Ron Paul is the lone voice in US Congress
7,800 Jews/Israeli Leaders control America representing the 2% Jew population of USA . They control Judiciary, big law firms besides Media, Hollywood , Banking, Real Estate, Universities, Schools and Politics of America.
46 Jew Leaders in US Congress with their racist organization AIPAC made up of Jew Bankers, Media & Big Businesses controlling US Congress have made America another Israeli colony after Palestine .
With only exception of Ron Paul every American politicians including President Obama can drop their pants and skirts when they see an Israeli/Jew before any one can blink their eyes. When they open up their mouth they talk about Jews and Israel only. The proof is irresponsible statement by Obama on June 5, 2008 at AIPAC, “Undivided Jerusalem for Israel”. Which means Obama does not want peace in that region.
For more than 2 decades American Domestic, Trade & Foreign Polices is dictated by Israeli’s & Pro Israeli Americans to please Israel . Take example of recent unjustified bombing by Israeli’s of Gaza to kill unarmed civilians ; 71% American favor that their Government should stay neutral but Israel/Jew loyal American Politicians are siding with Israeli’s.
I refused to call Jews or any one American when they can serve in the Army of a foreign country and can vote in elections of a foreign Country. In the case of Jews while holding American Citizenship they can serve in Israeli Army like President Obama’s Chief of White House Staff Rahm Emanuel and can vote in Israeli elections. It is a debatable issue how one can trust such a privileged class of Jew First with loyalties to it’s morally & ethically corrupt as well as racist Leadership of Israel & AIPAC in any country? But they are acceptable in their colony AMERICA and another colony in the making India ruled by coward & brain dead Hindu Leaders because of their hate for their own fellow Muslim citizens.
Those who are thinking Obama will bring Change to America they must know that when it comes to Jews/Israel this “Change” Champion says “No I can not change any thing when it comes to Israel/Jews.’
Obama’s has chosen his Cabinet on 2 criteria only either the person should be a Jew or must be a blind supporter of Israel with an Israel Loyalty certificate from CLINTONS . The only person even being a Jew with required qualifications but still does not qualify is Monica Lewinsky!
Can my fellow citizens of my great country America wake up to take control of our country from Israeli’s/Jews?
Dave Makkar
http://www.citizensfordemocracynj.org
Sorry Dr. Paul, gotta disagree with you on this one. The Arabs have been shooting rockets at Israel for quite some time. I will agree that we should let Israel push their enemies into the sea and keep our noses out of their business when they drop Nuclear Bombs on Iran.
Arabs are the problem.
AMEN!!!
Lucas,
Arabs have been shooting rockets at Israel for quite some time??? Alright when there is an issue you need to actually investigate that issue and look for the source. Just think of a mental problem. You cant just treat a mental problem without figuring out the cause first. Same applies with politics. Look back at the early 1900s and you will know why exactly they are doing that. and come on are yo really comparing home made rockets with long range missles and one of the biggest air force fleets in the world?? interesting. Arabs are the problem? alright lucas you are right, why dont we jst kill all arabs?? That solves the problem right lol?. no Arabs jews and christians, are not the problem. The problem is ignorance and unfairness. Learn a little bit about the history of the middleeast and about what arabs have gone through with occpiers and you will understand why things are the way they are right now. Arabs did not jst wake up one day and decided to kill everyone.. You guys are talking about arabs like we animals. Do not you think that we humans and we want to live life peacefully? come on wake up people.
“It’s been going on for more than 50 years, because there has been a pretty strong case made for the Jewish people being treated quite badly, and emotionally there was an argument for having a place they can call their homeland, and people bought into this.”
That’s the most neutral and unbiased description of the creation of Israel I have ever read. Thank you, Ron Paul, for not being a sycophant to the Zionist Lobby like most other politicians.
If Israel’s founding fathers had known that there would still be bloodshed 60 years later, would they have chosen a different location for Israel instead?
What about Malta, Madagascar, Reunion, Puerto Rico, or some other faraway island? Wouldn’t we (and they, and the Palestinians) be much better off?
Gabriel, we are all people. We are made from flesh and blood. I don’t want to go into this but there was a time when the Arabs protected the Jews from the Christian oppression and were good neighbor’s I bet you didn’t learn that in school. Anyways that’s not the subject here. I’m surprised that you don’t know that Zionist system which is now in Israel is the same as the terrorists. They believe that they are the God’s chosen people and the rest of us should vanish. Don’t get it twisted now. If there was no Zionism in Israel there would the another situation but until that happens you can’t claim that Israel is like you said that Israel has been the only partner in peace. They have blood on their hands too.
Dave, you’re right and all who said on this issue that we should stay out of their business.
Israel is not a baby country they can protect themselves and other side have a right to defend them selves as well.
With respect,
A fellow Jewish American
Gene,
I don’t think anyone else in the world would finance our war with Mexico, especially if they were bankrupt. Nobody disputes that they have a right to protect themselves. The US should let them handle their own business.
Dave
Wow. I have so much respect for Ron Paul. He knows the difference between right and wrong.
Good interview.
Gabriel, no disrespect but this is for you, read it.
History of US Weapons Shipments to Israel
The stockpiling of US made bunker buster bombs by Israel has been ongoing since 2005:
“The United States will sell Israel nearly 5,000 smart bombs in one of the largest weapons deals between the allies in years.
Among the bombs the [Israeli] air force will get are 500 one-ton bunker busters that can penetrate two-meter-thick cement walls; 2,500 regular one-ton bombs; 1,000 half-ton bombs; and 500 quarter-ton bombs. The bombs Israel is acquiring include airborne versions, guidance units, training bombs and detonators. They are guided by an existing Israeli satellite used by the military.
The sale will augment existing Israeli supplies of smart bombs. The Pentagon told Congress that the bombs are meant to maintain Israel’s qualitative advantage [against Iran], and advance U.S. strategic and tactical interests.” (Jewish Virtual Library: September 21-22, 2004, Haaretz / Jerusalem Post.)
The actual shipments of US made bunker buster bombs started in 2005. The US approved in April 2005, the delivery of:
some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” including some 500 BLU 109 ‘bunker-buster bombs. The (uranium coated) munitions are said to be more than ‘adequate to address the full range of Iranian targets, with the possible exception of the buried facility at Natanz, which may require the [more powerful] BLU-113 bunker buster [a variant of the GBU 28]‘” (See Michel Chossudovsky, Planned US-Israeli Nuclear Attack on Iran, Global Research, May 1, 2005)
Unusually Large U.S. Weapons Shipment to Israel: Are the US and Israel Planning a Broader Middle East War?
Now you tell me who is doing what. Listen, I agree that Hamas should be removed no question about it. To answer your question why they teach their children to hate is because their country is getting smaller and smaller and more and more people are dying since 1947. Israel is expanding it self every day. How would you feel if lets say your state was cut in half and you were treated like no human, controlled and humiliated by the other governing body. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t raise up and say enough is enough. I spoke to some Rabbis and also fellow Jewish Americans that say Israel should have never been a state in the first state (Zionist state) . That’s the problem to the whole situation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffUTRjQSihk&feature=related
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53252
Your lack of understanding of the history involved in the area leads to your ignorance. You need to read Wikipedia and get a balanced view of the history. Before Israel “occupied” the land you are referring to as the country of Palestine it was occupied by Egypt and Jordan. Before that it was under the umbrella of the Ottoman empire. To this day Palestine does not exist. The only sovereign nation is Israel. During the 1967 war they obtained a huge amount of land from both Jordan and Egypt. This was a defensive war and the conquest of the land was used as a defense mechanism to prohibit further attacks from enemy neighbors. The years that followed Israel gave back some land to Egypt and to Jordan to sign peace treaties. There has not be a war since these treaties have been signed between these two nations. Before Israel most of the land was inhabited by the nomads that had live stock grazing the land for thousands of years. Once Israel was founded it sparked huge economic growth for the region. People move where there are jobs. Arabs throughout the region began to immigrate. They moved where other Arabs lived. They worked and lived with the Jews in peace. Then Arafat (who is Egyptian) came and created the PLO in an attempt to over throw the Israeli government. He received support from Arabs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. Riots broke out Egypt killed 20k protesters, Jordan also did the same. Israel and Lebanon the two democracies have been dealing with the problem ever since. Unfortunately for Lebanon they have been able to take over. And the once great country has been turned into nothing by the Muslim extremist. Israel was able through compromise allow the PLO to take ownership of the Westbank and Gaza. They kept the boarders open and Israel maintains the security of the area. So if for example Egypt attacked Gaza, Israel would provide support for Gaza. Israel has been the only partner in peace. They have been the only one whom was willing to compromise. Once Arafat saw how much money there was to be made by promoting his people as victims of the Jews. The antisemitic world was pouring money at him. He collected around 12 billion dollars by the time he died. His french wife is being paid 10 million dollars a year for the rest of her life. While as you know the people her husband represented are struggling for food. Educate yourself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab-Israeli_conflict#1967-1973 on the conflict. What I want to see is the foreign aid bill separated. As it stands we give money to everyone or no one. If the money will help provide US interests I am all for supporting them. A partnership with Israel benefits the US greatly. We get a lot for it. The money we send to every African nation is just throwing money down the toilet.
be it egyptian, palestinians or lebanese, all the middle east land belonged to the Arab muslims. Where the hell Jews came in from? … Christians first did a genocide of Jews in Europe and after that, to get fully rid of them, got them settled on the muslim land of palestine. United Kingdom when captured the palestine and Jerusalem, was it not a foreign occupation, the same colonization which Europe has been carrying over for centuries ??? … tell me with an unbiased view, what right the christians have to occupy the palestine and use it to get Jews settled in there ??? … The very presence of the Jews and the illegal state of Israel is an unjustified occupation and is the root cause of all the violence in middle east. UK and USA, the biggest supporters of Israel, should take these Jews to their own land i.e. in UK or USA if they feel so much sympathy for Jews.
Whole of the land occupied by the illegal so called state of Israel belongs to muslims. Its palestinian land. This terrorist and illegal so called state of Israel must be wiped off from the face of earth to claim peace worldwide. Hope, America do get some more leaders like Raun Paul who does not follow the zionists instructions.
Muneer –
Hello – the land belonged to Arab Muslims? Islam did not even exist until around 632 A.D. (That’s when Mohummad died). So no valid argument that Arab Muslims always had the land. There is evidence, however, that the Jews were there at the time of Christ (that’s 600 years before Islam) and stories going back to the time of the Patriarchs. BTW – do you know what a Palestinian is? No, no one does. Palastine is what the British called it when they took over.
True, they were likely Arab nomads in the land – of course, there is no indication they did anything about the Roman occupation – so must not have been too interested in the land back then.
And how about the time of David and Solomon? We’ve got the architecture (and reminents of the Temple) to show that the Jews were settled in what is now Israel LONG before Mohammud was a twinkle in his mother’s eye. Centuries before.
The only claim that the Palestinians have on the land is the very same UN Resolution that gave Israel claim to the land.
And by the way, PLENTY of Jews do live in the USA and UK. Why don’t Arab “brothers” help their own?
Read Wikipedia?!? There is a reason why newspapers refuse to cite it for information. While some of the info is true, some items are incorrect or biased.
WOW. you really just cited wikk lol. Alright you really need to understand or actually read some history books buddy lol. You really made me laugh out loud. You first stated that Arafat was an egyption. well I am sorry you are wrong, he is not. He has a little bit of an Egyption accent because he was raised in an area close to the egyption border but that is about it. Gabriel,
FYI palastine did exist at one point. Brush up on your history a little. The only sovereign nation is Israel?? Define sovereign? 1967 was a defensive war?? They took land and used it as a defense mechanism ? Israel sparked a huge economic growth???? Where in Israel?? Yes it did in israel cuz it was backed and funded by western countries… My ancestors are from palastine. They didn’t live peacefully after 1948.. My family was kicked out of their homes. They took their lands, businesses, homes, and everything they owned. My grandparents lived in tents in camps for several years. I have many friends and family in that region and palastinians have no rights at all. Ofcourse 1948 arabs that were able to stay in Israel are treated better than palastinians, but they are discriminated against. They have special license plates…… can you believe that??? Yep, no lie. Lebanon was neve a democracy fyi lol. Man you are realy ignorant when it coems to middleeastern politics. Do you even know anything about 1978 or 1980 or 1982. Do you know anything about he Israel invasion to Lebanon??? Do you know about the Lebanese civil war? Do you know how or why it happeneded?? Lebanon muslim extremist?? Lol youobviously never been there. And your comment about Isreal maintain the borders, you really gave a great example lol…. If Egypt attacked gaza, Israel would provide support for Gaza???? Are you serious?? Antisemitic?? Did yo jst call arabs anti-Semitic? You idiot, we are semitic too lol. Arafat had a French wife?? Wow intenersting surprisingly she has an Arabic name and she is from jeruslem lol…… well but I do want to agree with you on one point that you actually got right. Arafat did steal a lot of money from the palastinians and his government was corrupt.
My advise to you is never to tell anyone to educate themselves and referring them to wiki lol. Man My college professors would have kicked my out of school if I cited wiki lol. African nations throwing money down the toilet…….. Please tell me how partnership with Israel have beneifted us????? I am sorry man but I really cant take you seriously. You made no valid or even right points at all. Almost everything you said was wrong. Congrats you are officially an IGNORANT…… PEACE!
Nice to hear from an Arab man. I am Catholic. What many people do not understand here in the United States is that there is no separation from church and state. (First, it Is NOT in the Constitution.) But, our educational system does not teach everything about all religions and their peoples coming to the U.S. The “christian” public government controlled education system is very biased towards their “christian” view. Therefor the “christian” view has been the only view taught. (Now it is the zionist view.) The whole complete history of the U.S. is never even close to the truth. Can you believe how many people do not know that the first settlements, the first church, the first successful area was no where near Plymouth Rock. The first settlers lived in harmony with the native americans. When they owned slaves, those slaves stayed in a family unit and received a salary. With this salary they were able to buy their children’s and grandchildren’s freedom. Joliett and Marquett one of them was a Catholic priest. Carroll from Maryland could not vote for himself when he was elected. Catholics were not allowed to vote, along with many other christians. Freedom of religion in the beginning meant you were free to practice “my” religion, not yours. Do you think that the original founding fathers meant all men, women and children were created equal. Or, like I believe, they meant all white, “christian”, rich men were created equal. The propaganda that has been dished out in our educational system for over 200 years is a false history. (Many people have had to fight for equal rights that those white, “christian”, rich men had.) Now the media’s propaganda has added to that false world history and current events. We still do not have freedom of religion and speech. There is no separation of the governments “christian” religion and the rest of the people. We still are not found to be created equal in the eyes of God OR this nation. Muslims are the most pro-life people I have ever met. (Unfortunately, more pro-life than a lot of Catholics, and extremely more pro-life than almost all so called christians.) (Why are Muslims not fighting more against abortion?) How can any pro-life christian support any kind of war. Christ came to speak of peace with thy neighbor. He asked forgiveness. He did not say go out and murder thy neighbor. Birth control means: to control the birth of a child – dead or alive. Zionist believe that through population control they will control those around them and the rest of the world. This includes killing the unborn, killing the embryo in the petri dish, killing the people in the streets, etc…
(St. Augustine in Florida was the first successful settlement in the U.S. And this is where the first church was built.)
Obviously your lack of understanding of the history and geography of Israel. Israel contains no oil they import all there oil from Mexico and the US. The Arab nations will not trade with them. The money we give to Israel comes back to us in many forms. Many of the technologies that help us fight the war have been born in Israel. Israel has contributed the unmanned drone which has helped us more then any other weapon fighting terrorists. They have invented new Armor for tanks and other APCs that protect our troops from injury. So before you go complaining we are giving money to them. We should first change the foreign aid bill to have each country dealt with independently. This way we can vote on not giving African countries or other places that do not provide anything for us.
The fact that Ron Paul said no to this bill which would cost nothing accept proclaim support for Israel and to reiterate that Hamas is a terrorist organization. So the fact that he said no to this is terrible. He should support the removal of Hamas and continue negotiations with the lesser of the two evils the Palestinian Authority. Peace will come when they stop teaching there children to hate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGbP55HGi8&eurl=http://www.facebook.com/home.php
It is not Ron Paul’s place to support one regime over another. It is his job (as well as the rest of the congress) to protect the interests of the American people. Choosing a side is handwaving and he is above it. That’s why he didn’t vote for it.
The battle their has been going on much longer than the US has been around and anything we do their can only get the world upset at us.
And aren’t the American people’s interests protected by supporting fellow Democracies over oppressive regimes?
Democracies are mob mentalities. I prefer the true freedom that only the inherent rights of a constitutional republic can offer.
I agree with Gabriel. We must stand with Israel, the country that is morally in the right, our strongest ally in the world, and has basically taught us everything we know about counter-terrorism. The palestinians are terrorists, they are the underclass of the Arab world, uneducated, violent, nothings. Why do not their own neighboring countries take them in? That’s where they belong, out of Israel, Gaza should be Israel’s, there will never be peace with that geography. But that’s for them to fight out.
Now, I agree with Ron Paul, the issue of funding is different than this sort of moral and political support. We give billions in aid to countries that are enemies of one another. Stop all aid. If it’s a monetary exchange, goods or technology, for money, fine, we are buying a product. But just giving away endlessly, bailouts at home and abroad, sheer financial lunacy.
look up the dancing Mossad….
And I don’t believe anyone is a nothing. What makes us believe we are better than anyone….just because we are more opinionated? We still sit solidly behind whatever some corrupt politician says is true, listen to bought media pundits instead of waking up and realizing that we have been fleeced by those we expect to protect us.
If you pay attention to all the ways the government and the elite are getting rich while we pay the way, you’d be astounded. But because you are lied to by all the sources you rely on – you can watch them doing bad things right in front of your face and still not recognize it.
Look up Aaron Russo’s Freedom to Fascism and you’ll get an awakening.
Peace..
Check your history. After World War II the land that Israel is on was stolen by the U.N and the U.S.. No other country would except the Zionist in their own country with the exception of the U.S. Thus a new country (or state) had to be created. Palestinians were murdered and their land was stolen so that Israel could have their own country. They were not satisfied with the small piece of land that they invaded. They have continued to invade the surrounding area. Repeatedly killing Palestinians and stealing more land. They are creating a genocide of the Palestinian people. They will not be satisfied until the whole Middle East is there’s. Israel does not have the RIGHT to exist. Just like the U.S. or any other country has the RIGHT to exist. We must act in a humane way in order to continue to deserve to exist.
Oil is what helps fund millitaries, and the millitaries protect oil funds.. Its a vicious cycle.
I must agree with ron paul on this.. the main reason I enjoy ron paul is his foreign policy philosphy, especially when he talks about blow black.. Like I just stated before, we gave iraq 80 billion dollars in the eighties for weapons against iran and we did the same with afganistan to help defend from the soviets. Look at us now, we are in war with Iraq and Afganistan and we are doing the same thing to Israel as we did in the countries which we are in war with now.. We are pumping more weapons into the middle east and setting us up for another war in the future. Who knows, once we run out of oil in iraq, kuwait and saudi arabia, we might try to push Israel for oil because we helped them, and they are going to refuse because they will be able to fight for their land with the weapons we gave them.
We have a huge history of intervening with countries for oil. After the war in 1944, we controlled 40% of the middle east oil reserves. By 1955 we were in charge of 50% of the oil in that region and imported 90% of europes oil from there.. When the Ayotallah Khomenei’s Islamic Revolution occured in the eighties, the United States and Iraq were in fear of Iran taking control so we helped fund Iraq to go to war with Iran for about a decade.. In the early 90’s Iraq tried to take over Kuwait’s oil to help pay for their war deficit, so we attacked Iraq.
God help us if we dont stand with Israel What would the US do if Mexico shot rockets at us every day then they hide in schools
Hamas is not Palestinians. The death toll of palestinians is over 1200 and a large number of them are women and children. Israels death Toll -14 and 10 were soldiers, 4 killed by friendly fire.
The amount of force and the firing on Schools and Hospitals is not right. And for your information Israel have basically had Palestinians cordoned off in Gaza with no food, water or medical. Basically a concentration camp. I think if mexico were to cut off lets say Texas from supplies and such as I mentioned – sending missiles flying wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Why is the cry for Israel all about self defense but Palestine is called terrorists for doing the same thing?
Say no to War on either side. You don’t go out picking fights with your neighbors do ya?
Peace
Yea, well perhaps if the oh so caring Arab nations really cared, they’d have integrated these “refugees” into their societies and it wouldn’t be an issue.
If we cut Texas off, Mexico would grant them rights and adopt them – not keep them locked up in a no-man’s land.
The Arab nations intentionally refuse to allow them to integrate or emmigrate since the Palestinian-Israeli problem keeps their people distracted from the realities that they live in oligarchies and repressive regimes with few civil liberties. Not much different, actually, then what’s happening here in America where the PATRIOT Act has slowly diminished our Constitutional Rights in the name of a war on terror. Bush learned well from his Saudi Prince friends – keep the people occupied, and they won’t notice what their government is actuallly doing.
Didn’t you hear? Texas is talking about dumping the U.S.
We can not be the policemen of the world is what Republican Martin Luther King was talking about. Leave them alone and they will go home. These other countries can not just allow these refugees to come into their country. These people have no jobs and no money. They must live off the welfare system that is in place on these alien lands. These governments can not support these refugees. They are taxed to the limit. All are suffering because of these wars. The U.S. refuses to send any aide to these people and countries in need.
The definition of a terrorist is someone who invades and causes terror in another land. Is that not what the U.S. is doing with over 700 military bases in over 130 countries. The U.S. is the terrorist!!!!
Iran will be the next country the U.S. will attack on the behalf of Israel. WHY???
The next American Revolution is just around the corner.
Funny, if you spoke as freely as you do now in other places what would happen?
In the USA – nothing – it’s a freedom and right
In Israel – nothing – they have freedom of speech
In Gaza – they’d probably take you into the street and kill you (or maybe just do the “right” thing and get your child to strap dynamite on their bodies and seek out innocents to kill.) And don’t tell me their all innocent – did you fail to see the pictures of hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians dancing (YES DANCING) in the streets on September 11?
If you feel so strongly that we’re a Terrorist Nation – then exercise your freedom, pack your bags and leave – WE DON’T WANT YOU!
PS – don’t tell me Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or any one of a number of EXTREMELY wealthy oil rich countries cannot take the Palestinians – the fact is they don’t want them. They have been rejected by their own “brothers” And before they started engaging in such regular terrorist acts, the Palestinians will tell you they lived decent lives under Israeli rule – I know, I lived there in 1988 (during the first Infadata) and most Palestinians had no qualms with Israelis – but when you elect a terrorist government, you will be treated like terrorists. And when you compound that with being chickenshi*t inhumane people who strap bombs on children and attack their enemy from hospitals and schoolhouses, and intentionally place innocent lives in danger, well, you reap what you sow.
I agree with Dan. Pack your bags and leave.quickly!!! In fact..go extra fast!
I also saw the idiots celebrating and dancing in the streets on television after the attact on the twin towers. Sick..Heartbreaking. I spent long months trying to get over this horrific attack. It still effects me
Christine…You just need to go if you feel such hatred for this country. This country does not need you around.
The women and children both Gaza and Iraq are going to Syria. That is where the refugee camps are.
Did you see on youtube where the journalists from Israel were tracking the planes before they hit the World Trade Centers. They were rejoicing with the very first hit. They were dancing in the streets right here in our New York City. So, don’t talk until you know all who were dancing in the streets. At least the Muslims were in their own country dancing in the streets and not like Israel dancing on U.S. soil.
Mexico would not send rockets into the U.S. Because here in the United States we believe in Human Rights. This was in the Denver Post written by Peter Peterson
“It’ about human rights
In the 1960s, we had humna rights riots in our own ghettos. The issues in the West Bank and Gaza are the same: segregated housing, police brutality, and un-equal education, employment opportunities, business opportunities, housing, and health care.
The difference is that we did not drop bombs on our ghettos. We acknowledged the inequalities, and started our journey toward equality. South Africa and Northern Ireland addressed these issues in a similar manner. But Israel refuses to acknowledge and work on solving them. Military might will not result in safety for Israeli or American citizens, as long as human rights issues remain unaddressed.”
Go to IfAmericansKnew.org
Ignorance is bliss. There is a lot of ignorance on the facts regarding Israel and the U.S.
Educate yourself to the the truth. Be armed with the truth. Then be a beacon of light with the truth.
Teach others the truth. Fight peacefully with the truth. Bring the light of truth to others.
The word and the truth will spread.
In 2008 we gave Israel 6.8 million dollars every day. This was in cash that they could do what ever they wanted with. Imagine if we spent that much money here in the U.S. We could have better health care. We could have better schools. We could have help for the homeless. Instead we choice to give this money to the fourth richest nation in the world.
I believe in supporting Israel..It is Biblical. If you believe in the bible, then it should be so. Israel is the apple of God’s eyes. There has been waring since Issac and Ismael and that is Biblical.Please support Israel.
We try to support Israel, but we import oil from people like saudi arabia that hates them. They stopped selling us oil in the seventies because we backed up Israel and it caused bad problems in our economy.. I think now we’re trying to get them to sign a treaty with one another.
We would no longer be dependent with drilling .Thank u Sean for not boiling my tush in oil(he he). Was at a site today and they are totally hate mongers for this site…this is why I visited. I do not agree w/all, but some I do agree. Funny how when a site spews hatred for another so much, that a person gets curious I do agree w/auditing the Fed. Reserve.
ya, politics suck. There’s always stupid arguments, but i think all philosphy can be inspring whatever you really believe.. u should check out this short movie if you get a chance. Its kind of neat.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6732659166933078950
Sean,
I am in the back woods of the south and have slow dial up. It takes me months and I can prepare a 7 course meal and plow the lower back forty before I can down load anything. Wish I could..
oh. it was this movie done by these people called the john birch society, which was an organization formed in the fifties to fight against communism.. its nothing special, some pbs type stuff.
No god that I believe in would allow his “chosen people” to suffer the horrible things that the jews have. Furthermore, a biblical argument is irrelevant in a political discussion. Congressman Paul makes good arguments that the so called support that we give Israel is actually doing more harm to your god’s people than good. If that is true, do you still want to give them money? Also, I can support Israel without giving them billions in aid every year.
I am outta this site if it does not support Israel. Just was visiting here because of a site that truly hates this sitewhich was “: The Coalition of the Swilling”. They were so extreme that I visited here.Not tryin to get on nerves…but truly believe in Israel. It will all come together in latter days. Thank u all for being pleasant…
I truly believe in auditing the Revenue…U go on that!!!
You can support israel without giving them money. Since when did we have to pay people to be our allies?
Jewish history, just like the United States says (although it is not part of our constitution) separate church from state. The Jewish law for the orthodox, says they should not belong to any land. They are supposed to belong only to God. When a country was illegally created for Israel it broke not only international law, but also Jewish law. So, how can you expect their God to protect them when they, the chosen people, are not even obeying “their” God’s law.
This is so true. Feel free to visit NKUSA.org (Neturei Karta – Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism)
This is what’s going on over there in russia and around the world. and this is why we get in the middle of fights.
“Russian oil production fell by around 1% last year, official data showed, the country’s first annual decline in a decade after large increases in previous years and a sign of things to come.
The Energy Ministry data showed that December crude and gas condensate production fell 1.6 percent, month-on-month, to 9.66 million barrels per day, bringing the annual average output to 488.105 million tonnes or 9.78 million bpd.
The data also showed that Russian oil exports via pipeline monopoly Transneft fell by more than 5% to 4.19 million bpd (209.152 million tonnes) last year from 4.43 million bpd (220.597 million tonnes) in 2007.” – Mikael Höök
The largest lobbying group in Washington D.C. is Israel. As long as they control both political parties, Israel will always get the favored vote. PLEASE contact your Washington politicians and both political parties that you will be watching their vote on Israel and will vote accordingly during the next election. I have been writing my Congressman Ed Perlmutter. He is very strong pro-Israel. He believes that if he were not he would lose his seat in D.C. Come next election I will be armed with the truth on this issue and other issues like “end the fed”. Everyone needs to do the same.
There is too much war in the world, peace between gaza and israel will be good for all.
Finally, Ron Paul is showing some guts concerning the one issue that almost everyone else is too scared to touch. A few years ago, what he said in this interview, both explicitly and between the lines, would have ended the political career of just about anyone. But times have changed and Americans are waking up. I hope Ron Paul continues spreading the message, eventually influencing Congress to end our irrational support for this failed, ungrateful, racist and murderous state.
Ungrateful? Racist? Murderous? After 9/11 the U.S. started wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is flirting with the same in Iraq. In the name of the war on terror we violate the soverignty of Pakistani air-space and you’re calling Israel, a county that was attacked on the eve of its creation, a country that is surrounded by enemies, racist and murderous? The Gaza Strip is run by a government that vows to destroy it and Israel is in the wrong? Why don’t you step into Congress and yell out that the U.S. Government and its people should be destroyed and driven into the sea. Let’s see how quickly you find yourself in jail – and we have Freedom of Speech here in the U.S. Are you aware that Arabs hold seats in the Israeli Parliment? Geez, this country goes nuts because a congressman wants to place his hand on the Koran (his holy book) in a country that supports Freedom of Religion. And Israel is ungrateful, racist and murderous?
Alright, time to get back to your meeting with the Imperial Dragon and plan your next cross-burning.
Your statement was very emotional and overstated, I think you have a few screws loose. Americans are allowed to criticize Israel. Deal with it, we are waking up and will soon change the way we interact with Israel. If this is a threat to you, get the fuck out of this country, you consider yourself something else before calling yourself American.
And your last sentence exposed you as a racist, as it is prejudicial and hateful.
before saying anything i want everyone to know that i’m an Israeli Jew. so i couldn’t possibly be anti-semitic (or could i)
Israel should be ashamed of it self to what it have doing to the Innocent Palestinian people, i my self severed in the Israeli so called defense army, and yes every day at night we blasted people’s homes and abused innocent people based on orders.
imagine getting beaten up just for travelling from city to another, or getting woke up in the night by a blast and 50 soldiers in the middle of your bedroom.
and don’t give me the Palestinian terrorists blow Israeli people speech, this has been happing for more than 50 years by now, sure their are some how you might justify fighting against, but this is going against an entire community.
and what about blind folded tied up people how get shot, is this justified??
some day america will get to trail for its help to Israel, i am asking you to help Israel to end abusing Palestinian and make peace with it neighbors, so that both can live
cut the army and financial aid, help persecute criminals, and support moderate views and the peace process, this is the best help you can give