Cost of Israel to AmericansBy Richard CurtissThe writer is a...

Cost of Israel to Americans
By Richard Curtiss

The writer is a former US diplomat and is currently executive editor of the magazine Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.



By now many Americans are aware that Israel, with a population of only 5.8 million people, is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, and that Israel's aid plus US aid to Egypt's 65 million people for keeping the peace with Israel has, for many years, consumed more than half of the US bilateral foreign aid budget worldwide.

What few Americans understand, however, is the steep price they pay in many other fields for the US-Israeli relationship, which in turn is a product of the influence of Israel's powerful US lobby on American domestic politics and has nothing to do with US strategic interests, US national interests, or even with traditional American support for self-determination, human rights, and fair play overseas.

The Israel-US relationship has cost a significant number of American lives. The incidents in which hundreds of US service personnel, diplomats, and civilians were 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-centred Middle East policies.

First is the financial cost of Israel to US taxpayers. Between 1949 and 1998, the US 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.

In the 1997 fiscal year, for example, Israel received $3 billion from the foreign aid budget, at least $525 million from other US budgets, and $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the 1997 total of US 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 US federal budget, Israel has received since 1949 a grand total of $84.8 billion,excluding the $10 billion in US government loan guarantees it has drawn to date.

And if you calculate what the US has had to pay in interest to borrow this money to give to Israel, the cost of Israel to US 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 US government by October 31, 1997, cost American taxpayers $23,241 per Israeli. That's $116,205 for every Israeli family of five. These figures
do not include any of the indirect financial costs of Israel to the United States, which cannot be tallied.

One example is the cost to US manufacturers of the Arab boycott, surely in the billions of dollars by now. Another example is the cost to US consumers
of the price of petroleum, which surged to such heights that it set off a worldwide recession during the Arab oil boycott imposed in reaction to US support of Israel in the 1973 war.

Other examples are a portion of the costs of maintaining large US Sixth Fleet naval forces in the Mediterranean, primarily to protect Israel, and
military air units at the Aviano base in Italy. Many years ago, the late Under-secretary of State George Ball estimated the true financial cost of Israel to the United States at $11 billion a year.

Even our European and Asian allies have joined in deploring the perpetual American tilt towards Israel. In a recent vote on a UN General Assembly resolution calling upon Israel to curb further encroachments on
Palestinian lands by Jewish settlers, only the US and Micronesia voted against it. Of the 185 UN member nations, all of the others, without exception, supported the resolution or abstained. Yet Americans seem oblivious to such examples of how their Israel-centred Middle East policies are isolating the US in the world.

Next is the cost of Israel to the American domestic political system. In December 1997, The Fortune magazine asked professional lobbyists to select
the most powerful special interest group in the US. They chose the American Association of Retired Persons, which lobbies on behalf of all Americans over 60.

In the 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-supervized 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. 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 US 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 scepticism about the
US 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.

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 US Navy for the
National Security Agency to monitor Israel and Arab military communications during the fighting.

Major losses of American lives at the hands of Arab forces opposing Israel are better known. These include the loss of 141 US service personnel in the bombing of the US marine barracks in Beirut in 1984. They also include the loss of several US diplomats and local employees of the US government in two bombings of the American embassy in Beirut.

Other such events include the bombing of the US embassy in Kuwait, the taking of American hostages in Beirut of whom three were killed, the deaths of Americans in a series of Middle East-related skyjackings, the deaths of 19 US service personnel in the bombing of the Al Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1997 assassination of four American accountants working for US oil company in Karachi.

Claims that there are positive aspects of the US-Israeli relationship seldom stand up to scrutiny. During the Reagan administration it was labelled for the first time a "strategic relationship" conferring benefits on the US 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 per cent of the world's proven oil and gas
reserves. Apologists for Israel also describe the US-Israeli cooperation in weapons development. The fact is that the one or two successful joint weapons programs have been largely US-financed, while for their part the Israelis have repeatedly sold to rogue nations US weapons turned over at
no cost to Israel.

It is a sad but proven fact that the Israeli government also has obtained secret US military technology which Israel has sold to other countries. For example, after the US sent Patriot missile defence 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 US State Department's inspector-general. As a result, Washington has been forced to develop a whole new generation of missile technology able to penetrate the defences China has developed as a result of the Israeli
treachery.

Perhaps the most shocking is the little-known fact that by now 90 per cent 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.