On December 9, 2002, staff writer David Francis wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, that “Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion [Dh5.88 trillion] since 1973. If divided by population, it is more than $5700.00 per person”. Francis was quoting an estimate reached by Thomas Stauffer, who is a consulting economist of great standing in Washington. The importance of Stauffer himself and his research and outcome justifies more elaboration. The losses in dollars sustained by the US for her blind support of Israel are also in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to the figures of Stauffer who was commissioned by the US Army War College to tally the total costs of US Middle East policy whose cornerstone is to fully support Israel economically, militarily, politically and otherwise. Stauffer also estimated the cost paid by Washington for its support of Israel during the 1973 war, which triggered the Arab oil embargo against the US. The effect was a deep economic recession in which “the US lost $420 billion and a boost in oil prices costing another $450 billion”. The same economist calculated the amount of tax free Israeli bonds sold in the US every year by American Jewish organisations exceeding $50 billion, as “a net drain on the American economy”. According to Stauffer, “the oil embargo forced America to set up storage facilities to store oil which till 2001 has cost America $134 billion”.
There are 3,600 Jewish organisations whose assets are worth more than $160 billion, earning more than $14 billion tax-free dollars a year, which are being used mostly to aid Israel. By using (indeed, exploiting) ‘the guilt feeling’ of the western world in the aftermath of the holocaust, Israel makes sure that its survival as a Zionist state is protected at all costs by the western world, especially with its very solid alliance with the US. Israel can never maintain its colonial/Zionist status without being ‘a Spartan military state’ surrounded by deadly enemies. Israel has to fabricate a convenient enemy to serve its agenda of keeping the US tied to its military adventurism in the Middle East. Saddam Hussain had to be demonised. He became ‘the enemy’ to convince Washington to wage war against him. “A new neo-conservative republican lobby was created by David Wurmser and his Israeli-born wife, Meyrav”, according to their bio displayed on the internet. Saddam became “the new devil” after the demise of “the evil empire”, the name of the Soviet Union coined by conservative republicans and their political base, the fundamentalist Christian right, the so-called “Zionist Christians”, the most ardent supporters of Israel in the US.
The neo-conservative republicans, spearheaded by former vice-president Dick Cheney and his strategic assistant, David Wurmser with the help of the Likud (and other extremist Zionists) lobby in Washington convinced president George W. Bush to wage two simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq costing the US dear lives of her youth and pushing the American economy into a bottomless hole, turning the surplus of president Bill Clinton of $1.7 trillion into a deficit of more than $17 trillion at the end of the Bush administration.
The blind US support of Israel has contributed significantly to the bankruptcy of the American economy, which is now threatening the national security of the entire western world. In the present global political scene, we are witnessing today two Takfiri sides (one “Islamist” and the other “Jewish”) trying to negate each other, disguised by a false religious garb that absolutely has nothing to do with true Judaism or true Islam. Both sides are racing to commit suicide. On one side comes Al Qaida (and its off-shoots) doing it knowingly, hoping to take with it the maximum number of its enemies. On the other side is the extreme religious and ultra-nationalist right in Israel, which is in absolute denial, busy fabricating ‘convenient enemies’, while ignoring the humongous deadly threat knocking on Israel’s doors in the Golan Heights and in Sinai with Al Qaida’s favourite “weapons of mass destruction”, as coined by the CIA.
The rejection of the two-state solution by Israel and opting instead for the total Judaisation of historical Palestine is threatening to lead to the continued isolation (and some even say the demise) of the state of Israel, according to many western politicians and several intelligence agencies as well as the J. Street lobby of the Union of Reform Jews of America. A just peace with a real independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a fair resolution to the issue of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes and land, according to international legality spelt out in United Nations resolutions, is the only guarantee for the survival of the Israel and its Jews. But Israel has to liberate itself, first, from its apartheid/colonial Zionist garb (against the Palestinians and other Arabs), which sowed the seed for its self-isolation and perhaps eventual destruction.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.