Note - the Israelis never pay their debts.....how much money have we given the Israelis in the last 7 years and to do what? Sending in spies - maybe this Chandra Levy and Monica Lewinsky thing goes a little deeper than one knows? After all it would ot be the first time an enemy sent in a prostitute to do in a vulnerable over the hill male with a little influene? Now here in our area what they did to get people off welfare, they let them work it off bit now ..... saba The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers With $6.3 Billion in U.S. Aid, Israel Can Do a Lot of Damage to U.S. Taxpayers By Ruth E. Steele September 1995, pgs. 88-89 How much harm can you do with $6.5 billion? According to anti-smoking activists and the U.S. government's Food and Drug Administration, that's about what the American tobacco industry spends on advertising annually. With it cigarette companies hook 3,000 new teen-age smokers a day, of whom an estimated one-third eventually will die of tobacco-related causes. That's 365,000 deaths a year of consumers who use cigarettes exactly as directed and thereby pay back all the costs incurred by the companies in addicting and killing them. If that record looks hard to beat, look again at Israel. It receives roughly $6.3 billion every year from the United States in military aid, foreign aid, other U.S. government grants, and an annual $2 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees (see table). With that money it manages to do extensive damage both overseas and in the United States, and may eventually cause just as many deaths as does the tobacco industry. For example, money being fungible, the Israelis use a lot of that loan guarantee money for construction within their borders to free up other money to spend outside them. That's how they fund the burgeoning Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, for example, and the huge construction program currently underway to link those settlements with Israel and with each other through a network of new high-speed roads that, not coincidentally, also will cut off Palestinian towns and villages from Jerusalem and from each other. The end result, it now appears, will be the death of the Oslo agreement which was signed with so much fanfare only two years ago on the White House South Lawn. The present cost in lives is only a few hundred each year, but the potential cost dwarfs even the smoking toll. The problem of displaced Palestinians, who currently outnumber all of the Jews in Israel and in another two generations may outnumber all of the Jews in the world, now will start festering again. To date it's given the world four Arab-Israeli wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, plus the big Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and several smaller ones throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The Palestinian problem was the catalyst for the 15-year Lebanese civil war in which 150,000 people died, and it was a pretext for Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf war with its still continuing toll of deaths from combat, disease and malnutrition. (Saddam told his supporters that securing Kuwait's oil fields, presumably for the Palestinians, was the first step of the Arab return to Jerusalem.) Resumption of the Palestine problem means more trouble for Americans abroad and at home. It is outrage over the plight of the Palestinians, and the inability of the Islamic world to do anything about it, that motivates religion-besotted fanatics to blow themselves up with Iranian-financed car bombs all over the Middle East. It was a major tool for recruiting volunteer terrorists, most of whom had a direct Palestinian connection, by the mysterious Ramzi Ahmad Yousef, apparent mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who claims to be half Palestinian himself. Because the Israelis seem to have decided, instead of carrying out the Oslo agreement, to use part of their unlimited supply of U.S. funding to finance the colonization of all of the rest of Jerusalem and the West Bank, there will be more such terrorism in America's future. As for the rest of the Arab world, it is U.S. money that finances the continued Israeli colonization of Syria's Golan Heights from which, regardless of what the U.S. media reports, Israel never has offered to withdraw. (Not once in the endless talks with Syria have Israeli negotiators offered "full withdrawal now for full peace now." Instead they've talked about full Syrian recognition now and a later Israeli withdrawal, in stages�but only if Israeli voters approve it.) That's a formula for indefinite extension of Israel's war with the Arab world, which the present Israeli government could not continue without America's open-ended commitment to Israel's new and increased level of U.S. funding, based upon American government guarantees of private loans which Israel never will repay. (In its entire history, Israel has never repaid a U.S. government loan. All eventually are forgiven by Congress and, until they are forgiven, a U.S. law�the Cranston amendment�mandates that the annual level of U.S. economic aid to Israel never can dip below the level of annual interest Israel owes on still outstanding loans from the U.S. government.) That's a lot of damage abroad from Israel's annual $6.3 billion in U.S. government grants and loans, but it's not the whole story, and perhaps not even the worst of it. In fact, it appears that some of that U.S. taxpayer money that flows to Israel finds its way back to the United States�to corrupt the American political system. (Saba Note: Consider Marc Rich and ADL) Ostensibly, any such U.S.-originated Israeli government funds that reach American Jewish organizations are used to make American Jews both more conscious of their religion and more interested in Israel. In fact, however, some of it seems to be directed by the government of Israel into the lobbying and propaganda focused by these organizations on Congress and the U.S. media to keep U.S. taxpayer aid flowing to Israel. The bulk of expenses for those marvelous trips to Israel organized by American Jewish groups for mayors, state legislators, state governors, congressmen, police officials, young American leaders of all races and religions, and even the wives of congressmen and federal officials aren't paid for by the American sponsors. They're paid for by organizations in Israel operating, one way or another and to varying extents, with funds collected from American taxpayers. In that respect Israel lobby money has something in common with tobacco lobby money. Although the latter comes from smokers, it is used to subvert any federal action to educate smokers about the dangers they face, and federal action to keep their children from becoming addicted. By a variety of maneuvers which would be called money laundering if it were done by drug kingpins instead of a government, U.S. taxpayer money is recycled from Israel back into the U.S. political system to subvert any congressional action to educate American taxpayers about the misuse of their money, or to reduce the amount of that money that Israel receives. It seldom can be proved, but on occasion the actual launderers have been spotted in action. A former Boston lawyer and dual national named Harold Katz was implicated in such actions twice, but the Israeli government has refused to make him available for questioning, and the U.S. government hasn't tried very hard. It was Katz who used U.S. dollars to acquire the two residential apartments near the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC which were used to backstop the Friday visits to embassy-based Israeli intelligence personnel by U.S. Navy counterintelligence specialist Jonathan Jay Pollard. There he delivered satchels full of U.S. government documents and received directions as to which documents should be stolen during the coming week. Later, when auditors caught Israeli Gen. Rami Dotan diverting U.S. military aid funds for as-yet-undetermined purposes, it turned out that it was Katz and his daughter who actually scurried from one Geneva bank to another with shopping bags full of currency, obliterating the paper trail for U.S. dollars clearly destined for recycling into Israeli accounts for purposes unknown. Another example is the famous transfer of $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei via then-Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams for use by Oliver North's beloved Nicaraguan Contras. The sum was "lost," but was too big to be forgotten. In the course of the Iran-Contra hearings the myth was concocted that, because Abrams inadvertently transposed two digits, instead of going into a numbered account used to support the Contras, it "accidentally" wound up instead in the account of an unnamed "Swiss businessman" who didn't report the error until the missing money was traced, by which time it had accumulated $252,000 in interest. In recent U.S. media accounts the myth has taken on a life of its own, with Oliver North's loyal and beauteous blonde secretary, Fawn Hall, supposedly doing the accidental number fumbling. The truth is that the "Swiss businessman" was in fact an Israeli-Swiss dual national very close to present Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. The same businessman has been involved in other shady deals to extract money from such diverse sources as U.S. oil companies and Saddam Hussain's Iraq, and divert the funds to other uses either by the Israeli government or the Israeli Labor party. To date there's been no "smoking gun" demonstrating diversion of U.S. foreign aid funds via Israeli institutions back to American advocates of Israel or even to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal Washington lobby. The latter claims it raises the full $14 million it needs to pay for its Capitol Hill quarters and some 120 staff members in its Washington and regional offices from its claimed 40,000 American members. That's $350 per member, In fact it's unlikely that a membership organization with such a small base could support such an elaborate infrastructure. AIPAC's Arab-American counterpart, the National Association of Arab Americans, which is registered to lobby like AIPAC on causes of concern to its membership, has a current nationwide staff of exactly three people. The flurry of resignations and dismissals within AIPAC's board of directors and paid staff when the Israeli government passed from Likud to Labor control tells the same story. Whatever AIPAC's American membership may have thought, the government of Yitzhak Rabin did not like the people who had been running AIPAC during the Menachem Begin-Yitzhak Shamir era. So AIPAC directors were changed. He who pays the piper calls the tune. In the absence of a paper trail, how can any of this be proved? In the same way anyone can prove the world is round by sailing or flying steadily in the same direction. Neither a ship nor a plane leaves tracks, but if one day the traveler is back where he started, there's no other explanation. In any case, the Israel lobby has the least visible support of any major lobby in Washington, yet it is the most feared. That's why, with virtually every federal program, including foreign aid, already taking or scheduled for deep cuts in the course of balancing the federal budget, congressional leaders have proclaimed that in fiscal year 1996, just as in fiscal year 1995, cuts in aid to Israel, and to the two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, that have made peace with Israel, are "off the table." The tobacco industry can do a lot of damage with $6.5 billion a year, so long as its customers continue to use its products as directed. The Israeli government seems able to do equal damage with slightly less, but only because it it not using the money as directed, and seldom gets caught. Ruth E. Steele covers political developments in the western U.S. for American and foreign publications. This Issue�s TOC Current Issue Back Issues Contact Us Today's News WRMEA News Activists' Corner Resources Subscribe About WRMEA� Home � Copyright 1995-1999, American Educational Trust. All Rights Reserved. �
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