Death, Taxes & US Aid to Israel

"The chairman of Westfield Group, Frank Lowy, has warned that all sport will have to contract in order to survive the upheaval caused by the credit squeeze. While attending sporting events was often seen as a distraction in times of economic stress, Mr Lowy, who is also the chairman of Football Federation Australia, said sport was not immune from the tightness of the current financial markets. 'I think the world has been living beyond its means, I think the world will have to contract, so will sport have to contract, it is as simple as that', he told ABCTV's Offsiders yesterday." (Sport will be forced to shrink, Sydney Morning Herald, 13/10/08)

The thing dearest to Frank's heart, though, the Zionist settler-colonial project (aka wiping Palestine off the map) will be immune to financial contraction: "US presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has promised not to cut foreign aid to Israel if he is elected in November, a spokesman for Obama has said. In a statement to the Israeli business daily Globes, the spokesman said he would honour existing agreements pertaining to foreign aid and as such was committed to 'increasing aid to Israel to $30bn over 10 years'." (Obama won't cut aid to Israel, news24.com, 5/10/08)

As Mearsheimer & Walt remind us: "Israel now receives on average about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year... about 75% [of it] military aid... In per capita terms, this level of direct foreign assistance amounts to a direct subsidy of more than $500 per year for each Israeli. By comparison, the number two recipient of American aid, Egypt, receives only $20 per person, and impoverished countries such as Pakistan and Haiti receive roughly $5 per person and $27 per person, respectively... All this largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is not a poor or devastated country like Afghanistan, Niger, Burma, or Sierra Leone. On the contrary, Israel is now a modern industrial power." (The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, pp 26 & 30)

And here's the big picture: "Conflicts in the Middle East [since WW II] have been very costly to the US, as well as to the rest of the world. An estimate of the total cost to the US alone of instability and conflict in the region - which emanates from the core, Israeli-Palestinian conflict a amounts to close to $3 trillion, measured in 2002 dollars. This is an amount 4 times greater than the cost of the Vietnam war... Even this figure underestimates the costs because certain classes of expenditure remain unquantified. In particular, no reliable figure is available for the cost of 'Project Independence', Washington's lavishly promoted effort to reduce US dependence on oil from the Middle East. That effort... was designed primarily to insulate Israel from any new 'Arab oil weapon' after 1973/74, and may easily have cost $1 trillion... Similarly, aid to Israel - and thus the regional total - is also understated, since much is outside of the foreign aid appropriation process or implicit in other programs. Support for Israel comes to $1.8 trillion, including special trade advantages, preferential contracts, or aid buried in other accounts. In addition to the financial outlay, US aid to Israel costs some 275,000 American jobs each year." (The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion, Thomas R Stauffer, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003)