In my previous article (Aug. 10, 2007), I presented the mystery of why Israeli officials are calling for an end to American economic aid to Israel and America’s obedient response to that request. It has much to do with Israel, the company.
Many years ago, I asked an official with a major American arms manufacturer why the US arms industry is so compliant with the Israeli lobby. You would think with over 20 Arab countries and hundreds of millions of Arabs, they would be a much bigger potential market than tiny Israel. In addition, Israel never pays for its arms from the US; it receives them as a gift from the American taxpayer every year.
He just looked at me and smiled. He explained that it isn’t the arms industry that gives the weapons to Israel, it is the American taxpayer who pays the bill. The arms manufacturers get paid the full amount. And he pointed out that the Arab and Muslim world still buys arms from the US arms industry. They have to, to keep up with the Israelis.
But he noted another reason that the Israeli lobby and their friends in Congress wield so much power over the industry. He remarked that almost all of the American arms sales to other countries must go through a Congressional approval process and, if the arms industry doesn’t show proper deference to the Israelis and their lobby, the lobby is powerful enough to cut off arms sales to a country from a totally different part of the world, for example, in Latin America.
When asked if there wasn’t anything that the Israelis do that “steps over the bounds,” he commented that they “steal our technology,” produce weapons and arms from the “stolen technology” and sell these weapons to certain countries that our arms manufacturers cannot by law do business with, for example, China. “They’ve got us coming or going,” he commented.
Let’s look at Israel, for a moment, not at Israel, the country, but at Israel, the company. Israel is and has been one of the top countries in arms sales throughout the world. In terms of per capita arms sales, it is probably leading the field. For example, Israel sells more arms worldwide than Brazil, a country with over 30 times the population of Israel.
In 1996, the report “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” was written for the Israelis. It contained six pages of policy recommendations for the then prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1996 Israel’s newly elected prime minister relied upon the US Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000” including neocons Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser to do that report.
The paper’s call for a “clean break” from failed policies of the past such as “land for peace” and a new concentration on the realities of “balance of power” in the region were striking for their realpolitik approaches and high dependence on actions and resources of the US government. The report also emphasized breaking away from the economic dependence on the United States.
Implicit in the report was the replacement of that economic dependence with an Israeli economic independence fostered by fields such as technology and international arms sales. Also by convincing the Congress and the US public that Israel was defending America’s interests in the region through military superiority, the report also implied that we should continue to give arms to Israel and even increase the amount that we give them.
Many analysts also saw the Israelis gaining further free access to any American technology that the Israelis could obtain through these arms transfers. And this would allow Israel to unfairly compete with us for arms sales to other countries through the gift of our technology, which cost our industry a significant sum to develop.
Israel has utilized its sizable arms trade for decades in increasing both its own domestic arms production as well as providing significant income for the Jewish state. According to a top secret CIA report made public in 1979, “Israel’s program for accelerating its technological, scientific and military development as rapidly as possible has been enhanced by exploiting scientific exchange programs. Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service) plays a key role in this endeavor. In addition to large-scale acquisition of published scientific papers and technical journals from all over the world through overt channels, the Israelis devote a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence. This has included attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the US.”
In 1983, the US General Accounting Office, GAO, pointed out, “Israel’s technological exports are heavily dependent on foreign components. In Israel’s fastest growing industry, the electronics field, about 35 percent of the knowledge is acquired from the United States in licenses production or technology transfer. Almost every arms production includes a US input.” The GAO suggested that Israel needed to become a major exporter of high-tech products to obtain the foreign currency it needed to solve its tremendous debt problems. Unlike most other arms manufacturers, Israel exports 75 percent of the total production of its military industries. Israel’s military industry is dependent on exports for its survival.
Additionally, for more than a decade, the US has been raising concerns about Israeli weapons exports to China. In the summer of 2000, the US forced the Israelis to cancel the sale to China of a Phalcon, an airborne radar system equipped with advanced Israeli-made aeronautics loaded on a Russian-made plane. The Israelis had to return $350 million in that aborted arms deal and between the botched Phalcon and additional Harpy arms deals with China.
So you see, Israel really does have us “coming and going,” as the arms manufacturer official told me. And if you look closely at the projected $30 billion 10-year arms gift to Israel from the US taxpayer, you will notice that the $3 billion a year that we formerly gave Israel, initially half in economic aid and half in military aid, is being replaced by $3 billion a year in military aid alone. And fully 25 percent of that amount is in cash that the Israelis can spend at home.
As I mentioned in my last article, the Israelis aren’t acting in an unselfish manner. And, we aren’t really cutting Israel off from economic aid. We are just helping to create yet another chapter for Israel the company.
