Five reasons U.S. aid to Israel is a bad investmentBy Grant F. Smith, Director of Research, IRmep, August 30, 2016 Israel and its U.S. lobby are pressing President Barack Obama to sign an executive agreement pledging $45-$50 billion in military and other support to Israel over a ten-year period. The secret negotiations have hit so many administration roadblocks that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making a special visit to the U.S.—on the pretext of receiving an award from a neocon think tank—but in reality angling for a meeting with Obama. Israel wants a greater percentage of U.S. taxpayer aid dollars to be spent in Israel, rather than flowing into U.S. military contractors. Israel’s side also opposes Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) caps on its flexibility to continually lobby Congress for additional aid for “joint” projects, such as anti-rocket defense systems, which mostly go to Israeli contractors. It is surreal that Israel is even
asking Obama to sign on the dotted line rather than waiting
for the next president to promise aid. The Israeli
government pulled out all the stops opposing the
administration’s signature foreign policy achievement—the
JCPOA—going as far as offering
bribes to Congress and conducting espionage on U.S.-led
negotiating sessions. However, Netanyahu has calculated he
stands a better chance at extracting a new deal from Obama
than whoever next occupies the Oval office. The majority of Americans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly oppose U.S. aid to Israel , according to polls fielded in 2014 and 2016. Growing numbers would rather boycott, divest and sanction Israel for its human rights abuses than provide the arms and blanket diplomatic support (commonly stipulated in these MOUs) that enable the abuses to continue. Beyond that, there are five lessor known reasons Americans should be actively opposing U.S. aid to Israel: 1. U.S. aid to Israel yields a huge negative return on investment From a
strictly green-eyeshade perspective, U.S. aid to Israel is a
horrible investment. The late Harvard economist
Thomas Stauffer in 2002 tallied the cost of Israel to
the United States since 1973 to be $1.6 trillion. Stauffer
included the oil crisis triggered by Arab governments in the
aftermath of wars fought with Israel and other costs
emanating from Israel’s violent repression of the
Palestinians. Since Stauffer’s death in 2005, no other
high-profile economist has taken up the thankless task of
calculating such figures, though fresh data to feed such
models has been piling up. It is now the consensus view that
America was
attacked on 9/11 because of U.S. troops stationed in
Saudi Arabia and unconditional U.S. support for Israel. The
9/11 attacks cost
$3.3 trillion according to one conservative estimate. Israel lobbyists
often claim that U.S. foreign aid to Israel is an investment
that yields “dividends”
and is therefore a “bargain.”
If we assume aid is an investment and adjust for inflation,
publicly known aid through 2011 is $233.6 billion. If we
then assign unconditional U.S. support for Israel half the
blame for motivating 9/11, an actual return on investment
calculation is possible. The ROI of U.S. aid to Israel
considering only half the costs of 9/11 is negative
806 percent.
By any measure, this is an
extremely poor return. 2. U.S. Aid to Israel is not a significant “U.S. jobs creator” Many pundits are now spinning the
proposed new MOU as a “U.S. jobs creator,” particularly in
view of the pending restrictions against spending much of
the aid in Israel. But how many jobs do military sales
actually generate? Pitifully few. The top five military
contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General
Dynamics and Northrup Grumman claim to employ nearly a
half-million, on annual 2015 revenues of just under a
quarter trillion dollars. At $463,069 to support a single
direct job, military equipment and service vendors employ
many fewer employees per dollar of revenue than most other
industries. Looking back, even if Israel spent 100 percent
of its past ten-year $3.1 billion annual MOU dollars on “top
shelf” U.S. military goods, like the
Joint Strike fighter, it would have produced less than
7,000 direct U.S. jobs.
Military contractor revenue to support one direct job
However, Israel’s largest U.S. "purchases" by volume are not high-tech goods, but rather the jet and diesel fuel it needs to reach its ever-growing number of designated enemies both in territories it illegally occupies and neighboring countries. In April, 2016 Israel notified Congress of its need for 864 million gallons of aviation and diesel fuel on average priced at $3.09 per gallon. Such commonplace commodity purchases drag the number of jobs supported in the U.S. by the MOU down to embarrassingly low levels. Redirecting such tax dollars to projects inside the U.S., in particular for rebuilding desperately-needed infrastructure, would employ many more Americans per dollar spent than military contractors while providing tangible benefits to the commonweal. The U.S. construction industry supports a job for every $174,000 in output. The proposed $5 billion in aid proposed for Israel could instead unleash the restoration power of nearly thirty-thousand American construction workers—rather than a future of bloody Israeli military onslaughts on Gaza or Lebanon or yet-to-be determined targets. 3. U.S. aid enables Israel to forever avoid a meaningful peace deal Back in 1960, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency predicted what has since come to pass. If Israel were able to achieve military hegemony in the region, it would lose interest in pursuing peace with the Palestinians and its neighbors through meaningful and justified concessions. The very aid that most Americans now oppose makes resolving the oldest, most disruptive conflict in the region impossible. In turn, U.S. support generates periodic blowback against the U.S., in the form of oil embargoes, terror attacks and loss of goodwill across the globe. 4. U.S. aid to Israel offsets Israel’s nuclear weapons development costs The
CIA’s special national intelligence estimate based its
prediction of Israeli regional military hegemony on its
acquisition of nuclear weapons. Since the beginning, Israel
has relied on being able to
surreptitiously source materials, know-how and
technology from the U.S. and evade punishment when its
agents were caught in the act. Charities raising
hundreds of millions in the United States, such as the
American Committee for the
Weismann Institute for Science count on the IRS and
the rest of the U.S. Treasury to look the other way and pretend clandestine
nuclear weapons development has some sort of social welfare
function. American taxpayer dollars devoted to providing
Israel with military goods including nuclear capable
aircraft and commodities therefore offset, subsidize and
empower Israel’s clandestine development of nuclear weapons.
This situation—well known and endlessly explored in foreign
news media—makes the United States the butt of jokes at
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) conferences.
In the
mid-1970s, during investigations into the illegal diversion
of weapons-grade uranium from U.S. contractor
NUMEC
to Israel, Senators Stuart Symington (D-MO) and John Glenn
(D-OH) amended the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to ban any
U.S. aid to clandestine nuclear powers that were not NPT
signatories. Since the law went into effect foreign
aid including estimated assumed intelligence support—which
the CIA refuses to divulge
under the Freedom of Information Act—has reached an
inflation-adjusted $234 billion in taxpayer outlays.
Eager to secure the political support and related campaign
contributions from America’s soon-to-be $6 billion per year
Israel lobby ecosystem, administrations flout the
law by pretending not to know whether Israel has nuclear
weapons, despite ample information in the public and
government domain. At this critical juncture, America’s only hope is that the courts issue an injunction against future illegal aid —and order an overdue claw back of the $234 billion unlawfully distributed in the past—to be spent on legitimate purposes in the future. This judicial act would remedy a boondoggle so vast, entrenched and long-running it makes even scandals such as Teapot Dome seem like tempests in teacups.
Grant F. Smith is the author of the new book,
Big Israel: How Israel's Lobby moves America.
On August 8, 2016 he filed a
lawsuit in federal court to
block U.S. foreign aid to Israel and claw back aid illegally
delivered since 1976. |