Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

On September 13th, the AP headlined “Israel to get $38 billion in US military aid over 10 years”, and they called that “the largest batch of military assistance the U.S. has ever pledged to another country.” This money is donated, instead of anything being sold to Israel: it comes from U.S. taxpayers, and is a commitment regardless of whether Israel continues to violate the Camp David peace accords (such as by building illegal settlements) or any other treaty or international law.

On 8 June 1967, Israel intentionally attacked and sank the USS Liberty, slaughtering 34 of our sailors, and injuring another 172. The official U.S. government inquiry by an independent study Commission headed by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, found that, “after eight hours of aerial surveillance, Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against the USS Liberty, the world’s most sophisticated intelligence ship.” “Unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on the Liberty’s bridge, and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into our ship.” “Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded.” “There is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.” “Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.” “The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of the Liberty.” “Surviving crewmembers were later threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and were abandoned by their own government.” “The White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people.” “This attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crewmember has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack.” “There has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.”

The USS Liberty Veterans Association delivered to the Executive Agent for the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, on 8 June 2005, their own 35-page study report backing this up and urging retaliation. It quoted from Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time of the USS Liberty attack. He supported, as Helms put it, “the board’s finding that there could be no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.” The Veterans Association concluded that, “the fact that the Israeli government and its surrogates in the United States have worked so long and hard to prevent an inquiry itself speaks volumes as to what such an inquiry would find. The USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc. respectfully insists that the Secretary of the Army convene an investigatory body to undertake the complete investigation that should have been carried out thirty-eight years ago.” Their study and urging were simply ignored.

Israel violates the 1978 Camp David peace accords, and blatantly violates many international laws, in a regime that is apartheid if there is any meaning at all to that term. Israel is a ‘democracy’ only if apartheid South Africa was: it’s not a democracy. It doesn’t even have a Constitution. (A man-made Constitution — a prerequisite to any democracy — would offend Israel’s religious Jews, who insist upon the Torah being the foundation of the country’s laws. Israel as a Jewish nation is, in that sense, like Saudi Arabia as a Muslim nation, except that the Sauds use the Quran instead of the Torah. A religious-based nation can never be a democracy: it’s intrinsically a dictatorship, obtaining its constitution from some ‘holy’ Scripture, allegedly from ‘God’ not any humans. Of course, just as America’s aristocrats call Israel an ‘ally’, they also call Saudi Arabia an ‘ally’, though both of those governments are actually enemies of America.)

The question here isn’t whether we should go to war against Israel. If the U.S. didn’t support Israel, that would be enough, and there would then be some accountability for the Israeli government’s numerous crimes — the U.S. aristocracy wouldn’t be immunizing the Israeli government, as they now do.

The question, above all, is: Why does the U.S. government donate yet another $38 billion to an enemy nation? And, especially, why do we do this while not requiring the Israeli government even to adhere to ‘peace accords’ that our own government brokered?

There is no other enemy nation that we treat in this way. Though we (at least up until 28 September 2016) have protected the Saudi aristocracy, they pay for American weapons, while the Israeli aristocracy get American weapons donated to them by U.S. taxpayers.

To a large extent, Israel is the type of country that billionaires (mainly, but not only, Jewish ones), especially in America but also in other countries, want it to be: not only ethnocentric (or racist), but profoundly classist — an aristocracy (commonly called an “oligarchy”), instead of any sort of functioning democracy. On 17 March 2013 Haaretz bannered “How Foreign Donors Reshaped Israel: A Who’s Who”, and many of the same individuals in that list are also listed (though with fewer details of their political operations) on pages 52-53 of this, and (along with some of the non-Jewish aristocrats) here. It doesn’t take many billionaires to control a nation’s government.

On 16 January 2015, Haaretz headlined “How Netanyahu filled his primary campaign coffers with foreign donations” and reported that “Foreign donors almost entirely bankrolled the primary campaigns of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leading right-wing politicians.” “Each payment came from the United States except for one from Spain and one from Germany,” and “about half of Netanyahu’s financing was provided by members of three wealthy U.S. families.” These three were the Falics in Florida, the Books in New Jersey, and the Schottensteins in Ohio. They buy Israel’s government, and we will now be providing $3.8 billion per year of our tax-money to fund it, to do what these people want it to do, which is to provide the Israeli government the money to buy weaponry from Lockheed Martin and other American weapons-makers (and so recycle some of this American tax-money into the pockets of aristocrats who own or control those U.S. armaments-firms and the U.S. government).

On 23 July 2014, I wrote about “America’s Nazi Allies in Israel and Ukraine”.

On 20 May 2015, I wrote earlier on the question “Is Israel America’s Friend? Or America’s Enemy?”

Hillary Clinton is one of many U.S. politicians who equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism; she says: “Anti-Semitism has no place in any civilized society, not in America, not in Europe, not anywhere. Now, all of this work defending Israel’s legitimacy, expanding security and economic ties, taking our alliance to the next level depends on electing a president with a deep, personal commitment to Israel’s future as a secure, Democratic Jewish state, and to America’s responsibilities as a global leader. … So, my friends, let us never be neutral or silent in the face of bigotry. Together let’s defend the shared values that already make America and Israel great.” That equation, of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, is fraudulent. Zionism is simply another form of bigotry. Decent Jews, like all decent people, repudiate it. On 4 December 1948, many of them, including Albert Einstein, called by its proper name the man who became Israel’s Prime Minister on 21 June 1977 — Menachem Begin: writing to The New York Times, they called him, and the ideology that he led in Israel, “this latest manifestation of fascism,” and they said: “It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.” Such “top leadership of American Zionism” produced, in Israel 29 years later, the apartheid (‘democratic’) selection of Begin to become Israel’s Prime Minister. A nation like that is not a ‘friend’ of America if America is to be democratic; it’s instead an enemy-nation, of any democracy.

Despite what politicians such as Hillary Clinton commonly imply or even assert, acknowledging this fact is not ‘anti-Semitic’, but instead anti-fascist. Albert Einstein and the other signatories of that letter were Jews who were patriotic Americans; Hillary Clinton and her ilk still stand as condemned by them, and some of the people who were thus condemned (like Clinton herself) are not Jews. What is at issue here is nobody’s religion; it is instead political (and even moral) principle: the U.S. government is donating to a nation that is, and long has been, a fascist nation, an enemy nation, whose attack against the United States in 1967 continues to be met by the U.S. with increased gifts, instead of with condemnation, and with abandonment.

Thus, the question here is, very simply: Why?

FINAL NOTE: Some readers of this article have commented that Israel didn’t sink the boat. The intention was to sink it. But luck intervened to block that from happening. For full details, see Alan Hart’s phenomenally well-researched “Israel’s Attack on USS Liberty – The Full Story” — at http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/06/07/alan-hart-israels-attack-on-the-uss-liberty-the-full-story/ — which documents that Moshe Dayan had planned the attack as part of the 1967 6-Day War; and, “Dayan’s purpose was to prevent the spy ship giving President [Lyndon] Johnson warning of his intention to invade Syria.” Johnson had given Israel an okay to invade only Egypt, but to avoid attacking also the USSR’s ally Syria (which Dayan wanted to conquer but Itzhak Rabin strongly opposed Dayan about; Rabin ended up being assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli fascist, after which, fascism reigns without effective competition in Israel). The failure to sink the Liberty was despite Israel’s fascists, no reflection of anyone’s decency. Johnson dropped the matter because he didn’t want the Democratic Party to lose the support of America’s ethnocentric Jews — political reality.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.