The new military aid deal is worth a total of $38bn over 10 years, beginning in budget year 2019. The $3.8bn-a-year agreement is an increase from the current $30bn package; however, the new MoU includes funds for missile defence that have previously been added as top-ups. The deal also phases out Israel’s right to spend 26.3 percent of the aid money on its domestic arms companies.
For decades, Israel has been the leading recipient of American aid for surpassing other countries. The present aid package is called the largest single pledge for military assistance in US history.
The New York Times found it worth asking whether ever increasing military aid to Israel make sense.
Though US and Israeli officials cite regional threats by way of justifying the huge aid package, the most frequent victims of Israeli military offensives are the Palestinians. Munitions on Israel’s shopping list, say analysts, may very well be used in future assaults on the Gaza Strip. Nadia Hijab, Executive Director of al Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network, notes that the US government has managed to claw back some of its own – or rather some of its tax-payers’ – money by phasing out the portion of aid Israel can spend on its own defence industry.
These caveats, and the fact that the increase of aid in real terms is not as significant as some Israeli politicians had hoped it would be, have led some – including former Israeli premier Ehud Barak – to accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to secure the best deal possible.
The primary lesson that the increasingly extremist Israeli right will draw from this agreement is that there are no significant international consequences, but rather, significant rewards for their behaviour. This behaviour, has included not just exponentially accelerating colonial expansion in the West Bank, but also brazen interference in domestic American politics like Netanyahu’s open alignment for Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections, and the more recent efforts to mobilise the US Congress against the White House in the matter of the Iranian nuclear agreement. None of this, of course, makes life any better for Palestinians living under nearly 50 years of Israel’s military occupation.
The US would do well to heed the words of one of its Founding Fathers and its first President George Washington when in his farewell address he argued for a policy of enlightenment and tradition that placed reason above passion and emotion, and sought a foreign policy driven by a dispassionate, reasoned attempt to further U.S. interests, while being careful to cultivate fair and peaceful relations with other nations.
We do not know when the American government and the people will learn before it is too late for the world peace that Israel is an anti-Muslim racist country and the most powerful terrorist group behaving like a brutal colonial power. It needs American money and weapons for butchering Palestinian Muslims and denying them statehood. Israel is the prime cause of anger and terrorism among Muslims. Its Prime Minister is being condemned for genocide.
