Not for the first time, Israel’s budgetary process, which must be completed by Dec. 31, is in trouble. By a single vote, the Sharon Cabinet has approved cuts of almost $1.5 billion in government expenditure next year. However, the proposals are likely to have a rough ride when they are placed before the Knesset. This is because Israeli politics is a patchwork of alliances with tiny political parties, most of whom demand barely concealed payola for their support.
The ultraorthodox Shas party has demanded, and been given, huge tax exemptions and payoffs to its supporters as the price for its support for Sharon’s government. Before the budget can pass into law, it is likely that several other political minnows will also demand, and be given, their share of the slush fund that is financed by Israeli taxpayers. Thus we have the likely scenario of an austerity budget that will make it through parliament only as a result of some distinctly unaustere handouts to a minority political group.
This unedifying spectacle is a demonstration of the falsehoods that underpin Israel’s very existence. A country built upon land stolen from others now steals from itself to sustain itself.
The original image of Israel was of heroic agriculturists who made the sterile desert bloom. That some of the most productive areas, such as the orange groves around Jaffa, had been blooming for generations in the hands of their Palestinian owners was conveniently forgotten. The long-term consequence of Israeli agricultural expansion beyond the traditional patterns practiced for centuries was the fatal depletion of aquifers and the collapse of the water table, especially in the Jordan Valley.
In the last 20 years, the Israelis have sought to recast their international image as that of a high-technology powerhouse. Boosted by the flow of immigrant scientists and technicians from the former Soviet Union, it looked, for a while, as if this new development was going to stick. US high-technology companies, many of them with Zionist connections, went out of their way to include Israel in the dotcom boom. In the biggest deal in Israel’s corporate history, US information technology giant Lucent bought Chromatis, a local fiber-optic company for $4.5 billion. Within a year, the US company was reeling from the international collapse in the dotcom market and as part of its emergency cost-cutting measures, it closed down Chromatis.
While in the following days, we watch Israeli legislators maneuvering to extract the biggest payoff in return for passing a budget that will impose austerity upon the man in the street, we should not forget that Israel has always and will continue to rely for its economic survival upon the United States. It is US aid, organized by the US Zionist lobby, together with direct subventions from lobby itself, that has sustained the Israeli state. It has also been US-supplied armaments that are being used to oppress the Palestinian community, in what is becoming an ever more clear act of genocide.
One saving method, of course, will not be considered by the Israeli government: an end to the expensive and brutal crushing of the Palestinians.
