Truth and dare in US aid to Israel

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-100214.html



Truth and dare in US aid to Israel
By Chase Madar
Feb 10, '14

We Americans have funny notions about foreign aid. Recent polls show that, on average, we believe 28% of the federal budget is eaten up by it, and that, in a time of austerity, this gigantic bite of the budget should be cut back to 10%. In actual fact, barely 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid of any kind.

In this case, however, truth is at least as strange as fiction. Consider that the top recipient of US foreign aid over the past three decades isn't some impoverished land filled with starving kids, but a wealthy nation with a per-head gross domestic product on par with the European Union average, and higher than that of Italy, Spain, or South Korea.

Consider also that this top recipient of such aid - nearly all of it military since 2008 - has been busily engaged in what looks like a nineteenth-century-style colonization project. In the late 1940s, our beneficiary expelled some 700,000 indigenous people from the land it was claiming. In 1967, our client seized some contiguous pieces of real estate and ever since has been colonizing these territories with nearly 650,000 of its own people. It has divided the conquered lands with myriad checkpoints and roads accessible only to the colonizers and is building a 440-mile (708-kilometer) wall around (and cutting into) the conquered territory, creating a geography of control that violates international law.

"Ethnic cleansing" is a harsh term, but apt for a situation in which people are driven out of their homes and lands because they are not of the right tribe. Though many will balk at leveling this charge against Israel - for that country is, of course, the top recipient of American aid and especially military largesse - who would hesitate to use the term if, in a mirror-image world, all of this were being inflicted on Israeli Jews?

[sabbat hunter]

1. one major error

That I see right away. the 700k claimed to be expelled.

Of the 700,000 people that left the forming state of israel in 1948-49, about 1/3rd were forced out, 1/3rd left on their own, and the final 1/3rd left due to Arab commanders on the ground telling them to leave. Those numbers are from historian Benny Morris.