- For many years the American media said that "Israel
receives $1.8 billion in military aid" or that "Israel receives
$1.2 billion in economic aid." Both statements were true, but since
they were never combined to give us the complete total of annual U.S. aid
to Israel, they also were lies, true lies.
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- Recently Americans have begun to read and hear that "Israel
receives $3 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid." That's true. But
it's still a lie. The problem is that in fiscal 1997 alone, Israel received
from a variety of other U.S. federal budgets at least $525.8 million above
and beyond its $3 billion from the foreign aid budget, and yet another
$2 billion in federal loan guarantees. So the complete total of U.S. grants
and loan guarantees to Israel for fiscal 1997 was $5,525,800,000.
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- One can truthfully blame the mainstream media for never
digging out these figures for themselves, because none ever have. They
were compiled by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. But the
mainstream media certainly are not alone. Although Congress authorizes
America's foreign aid total, the fact that more than a third of it goes
to a country smaller in both area and population than Hong Kong probably
never has been mentioned on the floor of the Senate or House. Yet it's
been going on for more than a generation.
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- Probably the only members of Congress who even suspect
the full total of U.S. funds received by Israel each year are the privileged
few committee members who actually mark it up. And almost all members of
the concerned committees are Jewish, have taken huge campaign donations
orchestrated by Israel's Washington, DC lobby, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), or both. These congressional committee members
are paid to act, not talk. So they do and they don't.
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- The same applies to the president, the secretary of state,
and the foreign aid administrator. They all submit a budget that includes
aid for Israel, which Congress approves, or increases, but never cuts.
But no one in the executive branch mentions that of the few remaining U.S.
aid recipients worldwide, all of the others are developing nations which
either make their military bases available to the U.S., are key members
of international alliances in which the U.S. participates, or have suffered
some crippling blow of nature to their abilities to feed their people such
as earthquakes, floods or droughts.
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- Israel, whose troubles arise solely from its unwillingness
to give back land it seized in the 1967 war in return for peace with its
neighbors, does not fit those criteria. In fact, Israel's 1995 per capita
gross domestic product was $15,800. That put it below Britain at $19,500
and Italy at $18,700 and just above Ireland at $15,400 and Spain at $14,300.
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- All four of those European countries have contributed
a very large share of immigrants to the U.S., yet none has organized an
ethnic group to lobby for U.S. foreign aid. Instead, all four send funds
and volunteers to do economic development and emergency relief work in
other less fortunate parts of the world.
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- The lobby that Israel and its supporters have built in
the United States to make all this aid happen, and to ban discussion of
it from the national dialogue, goes far beyond AIPAC, with its $15 million
budget, its 150 employees, and its five or six registered lobbyists who
manage to visit every member of Congress individually once or twice a year.
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- AIPAC, in turn, can draw upon the resources of the Conference
of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a roof group set
up solely to coordinate the efforts of some 52 national Jewish organizations
on behalf of Israel.
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- Among them are Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization,
which organizes a steady stream of American Jewish visitors to Israel;
the American Jewish Congress, which mobilizes support for Israel among
members of the traditionally left-of-center Jewish mainstream; and the
American Jewish Committee, which plays the same role within the growing
middle-of-the-road and right-of-center Jewish community. The American Jewish
Committee also publishes Commentary,one of the Israel lobby's principal
national publications.
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- Perhaps the most controversial of these groups is B'nai
B'rith's Anti-Defamation League. Its original highly commendable purpose
was to protect the civil rights of American Jews. Over the past generation,
however, the ADL has regressed into a conspiratorial and, with a $45 million
budget, extremely well-funded hate group.
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