July 26, 2014
According to the Congressional Budget Office,
“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since
World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $121 billion
(current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost
all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance,
although in the past Israel also received significant economic assistance.”
Other special benefits also flow to the Israeli military. Each year, the U.S.
pays for about 20 percent of Israel’s overall military spending, and the total
places Israel as the 16th largest military spender in the world. “In 2007, the
Bush Administration and the Israeli government agreed to a 10-year, $30 billion
military aid package for the period from FY2009 to FY2018.” Obama has renewed
that pledge.
The U.S. routinely supports Israel’s
policies and avoids condemning Israel for its rights violations against
Palestinians. It may never have done so. This week, for example, the U.S. cast
the sole vote against the U.N.
Human Rights Council Resolution concerning the Occupied Palestinian
Territory. The vote was 29-1. A link to the full text of the resolution
is here. (The texts vary slightly in different reports.)
Because the U.S. government has made
itself virtually one with Israel, we must ask the question: What exactly is the
U.S. supporting when it supports Israel? One cannot arrive at answers to this
question without examining Israel’s history. One may make a start by reading
Theodor Herzl’s 1896
pamphlet “The Jewish State”, a visionary tract. This provides insight into
the goals of Herzl and his assumptions behind colonizing Palestine. How the
colonization actually worked out has not been as he planned. Israel continues
to be a problematic state, an expansionary state, and what is worse, a
dangerous nuclear power state. Wikipedia has a number of articles on the
history. This
one provides a start. One thing the U.S. supports when it supports
Israel is what Israel is doing in Gaza at this moment.
Murray Rothbard has a highly
readable and valuable account of the history up to 1967.
Although America has stood in theory as
a melting pot and a country that favored the assimilation of many peoples from
all over the world, and in practice was against Black Nationalism, the U.S.
government has supported Jewish Nationalism in Israel. It has supported a
society that could only support such a state by being exclusionary and
segregated, or even ethnically cleansed. The philosophy behind that state
rested on Herzl’s assumptions, which in my view were deeply flawed. He simply
ignored the native population of Palestine. He simply asserted that Jews were a
people one people, that assimilation was out of the question and that a Jewish
State was a solution to anti-Semitism. All of these assertions are
questionable. He declared that “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home.”
Can any people or ethnic group of today return to the place where their
ancestors originated with the idea of displacing its current residents and
making their own State? No one would approve of such an idea. Anyway, this
“historic home” idea was really not true
of all Jews after 1,800 years had passed and Jews had had many, many homes in
many lands. It was an appeal to a subset of Jews who wanted to emigrate and
maintain their culture with others of their kind. Nor could this idea justify a
Jewish State governing Palestine and its then current Arab inhabitants. But in
addition Herzl’s philosophy in practice assumed a much more militant and
exclusionary form as new generations appeared after him. In particular, David Ben-Gurion
was an exponent of power and force.
Israel is a brutal state as the latest
excesses of destruction and killing of innocent Palestinians in Gaza show.
That’s what the U.S. supports.
No comments:
Post a Comment