Ten months after 1400 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, their leaders are already consenting to burying the investigation.
15 years after 85 Judaics were killed in Argentina, Israeli leaders are relentlessly pursuing the investigation, bringing it to every forum, hot on the trail of perpetrators, collaborators and every conceivable clue.
Once again, the Palestinians are repeatedly outfoxed and outmaneuvered by their Israeli enemies.
Being only human, after a time I confess to becoming exceedingly exasperated with the almost unimaginable torpor of dull-witted Arabs and the contrasting dynamic energy of shrewd Israelis. I admit that this is a generalization; fallout from my exasperation. But there is a kernel of truth in it.
Sometimes, in my darker moments, I am given to wonder, short of a miracle of God, if the Palestinian nation will ever be anything other than a stateless, occupied territory, due to their own gross ineptitude. Intellectually, they don’t think or fight like the Israelis. Many people will reply, thank God for that.
I am not referring to military fighting, however, but to “warfare” in terms of strategic public relations psychology, which includes relentless, one-track mind, pit-bull tenacious, pursuit of war criminals without an inch of compromise or retreat. This is the Israeli way. It has paid huge dividends for their statecraft, not all of it sinister. Whether it is 85 innocent dead in Argentina, or hundreds in Gaza, the dead are entitled to justice, i.e. bringing the killers to trial, whether it be months or years later.
After 60 years, wonder of wonders, at long last the Palestinians have a respected Judaic jurist, Richard Goldstone, to step forward in an international United Nations human rights forum, and courageously announce that Israelis committed war crimes in Gaza and then lied about it. What do the Palestinian leaders do with this golden apple dropped into their laps? They trade the Goldstone report away as a diplomatic concession to nebulous “negotiations” with Netanyahu being conducted by Obama’s mainly Zionist diplomats.
The Palestinian Stepinfetchits, after decades of being victimized by every imaginable American ruse, decoy, snare and deceit, and dozens of U.S. funded Israeli massacres entailing the brutal and ruthless elimination of whole neighborhoods, still believe –still believe! — in the good faith of the White House.
Unless President Barack Obama resolves to expunge “special” from the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship,” this entangled alliance will continue to ensure that the U.S. is portrayed as guilty by its association with Tel Aviv’s thuggish behavior in Palestine and elsewhere. And by the U.S. insistence that Israel not be held accountable under international law.
On July 3rd, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren claimed “Iran nuke could wipe Israel off the map in seconds.” An accurate translation reveals that what the president of Iran proposes is that Zionism be “erased from the pages of history.” But why quibble over words and their intent when Israel’s intent is to create a consensus that ensures war with Iran?
Two days after Oren’s saber-rattling speech, Vice-President Joe Biden was asked in a televised interview whether the Obama Administration would restrain Israeli military action against Iran. President Obama was then out of the country. A self-proclaimed Zionist, Biden responded, “Israel can determine for itself—it’s a sovereign nation—what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAZmO80dLfE
Unfamiliar with the refrain, “loose lips sink ships,” Biden’s cavalier comment evoked memories of Vice President Dick Cheney who routinely waited until his boss was out of town to make bellicose remarks that moved the U.S. steadily closer to war in Iraq.
Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, scrambled to offset the impression left by Biden’s comment. Astute strategists know it is the small impressions that, step-by-step, form the consensus beliefs that shape policy-making. It was the gradual drip, drip, drip of such impressions that created the (false) consensus belief that Iraq had WMD, ties to Al Qaeda and mobile biological weapons laboratories.
Pro-Israeli pundits quickly claimed that, with Biden’s comment, Washington had given Tel Aviv the green light to attack Iran. Mullen grabbed media attention to reconfirm the obvious: an attack on Iran could have “grave and unpredictable consequences.”
Arrogant, Aggressive & Above the Law
What has Israel done to quell these global jitters? Tel Aviv ordered a long-range Air Force exercise covering the same distance as from Israel to Iran. It dispatched through the Suez Canal a Dolphin class submarine, three of which are widely believed capable of launching a nuclear missile attack. And it sent a “message” to Iran by sailing two Saar class missile ships through the canal into the Red Sea, putting them within striking distance of Tehran.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News played its usual supporting role by announcing Israeli Navy Prepares for Potential Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities. To date, Barack Obama has shown little inclination to say no to Tel Aviv and show he means it. Instead, his administration has staffed up with advisers who are disproportionately pro-Israeli—more so even than the Bush and Clinton presidencies.
When in February he failed to support the nomination of Ambassador Charles Freeman as Director of the National Intelligence Council, Obama served global notice of just how much influence Israel wields over U.S. foreign policy. Opposition to Freeman was led by Steven Rosen, a former executive of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though you would never know it from reports in mainstream media, Rosen had been indicted under the Espionage Act for transferring to the Israeli embassy classified Pentagon intelligence on Iran.
Adding insult to the Freeman injury, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder approved the withdrawal of charges against Rosen and co-conspirator Keith Weissman, another AIPAC executive. After receiving a 12-year sentence for conceding his complicity, Pentagon Iran analyst Lawrence Franklin saw his sentence reduced to time served under house arrest and was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. So much for accountability.
Just as he said not a word on Gaza, Obama remained silent on Freeman. Left to twist in the wind by the commander in chief, Freeman withdrew his nomination. When he vowed not to remain silent in his critique of the Israel lobby, Washington Post editors denied there was such a lobby, dismissed his critique as a “conspiracy theory” and attacked his comments as a “crackpot tirade.”
Though AIPAC avowed it took no stand on the appointment, reports confirm it leaned on key senators and later boasted that Obama was a “pushover.” In a fiery rejoinder to his critics, Freeman noted, “This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.”
Palestinians are correct to wonder how Americans could be so unresponsive to their abuse at the hands of a U.S. ally. What those in the Middle East fail to grasp is that Americans do not know. How could they? Mainstream media is dominated by pro-Israelis and the Israeli lobby politically dominates U.S. foreign policy in the region. http://criminalstate.com/blog/?p=99
Freeman was correct in the mid-1990s when he described the lobby’s “virtual hammerlock on American foreign policy.” The only difference now is that Israeli influence has grown far more systemic. An admirer of Israel, Freeman cautions: “Right now it is doing itself in and taking us with it.” By seeking to induce the U.S. to wage war in Iran, Tel Aviv confirms its agenda has little to do with U.S. interests and everything to do with its expansionist goals for the region.
Self-censorship in both politics and media precludes Americans from knowing the perils that accompany the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Nor do Americans know the horrors that this alliance has imposed on Palestinians. Activist Alison Weir dedicated an aptly named website to educating Americans: If Americans Knew. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
Those who know are rarities. Those who know and criticize Israeli policy are routinely smeared with the toxic charge of anti-Semitism. Following Israel’s assault on Gaza, a high profile intimidation campaign against an academic critic at the University of California worked its intended silencing effect on academic critics nationwide. http://criminalstate.com/blog/?p=94
The behavior of this extremist nationalist enclave thrives in darkness, a condition that aptly describes U.S. media coverage of conditions in Palestine. Steadily more Americans are working to make Israel’s thuggish conduct transparent but the numbers are few and the challenges great.
The U.S. is branded abroad as a nation governed on the basis of informed consent. Yet pro-Israelis maintain a virtual lockdown on information and debate on Israel. The fight for Palestine must be waged and won in the U.S. where the appeasement of Israel relies on a lack of knowledge. If Americans knew, their support would be withdrawn. The U.S.-Israeli relationship will remain “special” only so long as Zionism can continue to operate in the shadows.
The first half of this production features the late Norman Dodd, who in 1953 was the chief investigator for Congressman Reece’s Special Committee On Tax Exempt Foundations. The clip is an excerpt taken from a 1982 interview conducted by G. Edward Griffin in which Dodd testifies as to how both the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace (“Peace”, according to Karl Marx “is the lack of opposition to Socialism”) and the Rockefeller Foundation actively sought America’s involvement in the first world war via the infiltration and subsequent subversion of the U.S. State Department. Dodd also tells of of the hidden agenda of these elitist organisationd to rewrite American and world history after the war had ended.
Aside from the Carnegie Foundation’s activity that saw American participation in the first world war – as testified by Norman Dodd – further insight is provided courtesy of Benjamin Freedman who speaks of the significant and pivotal role of the Zionist Federations of the world in securing American involvement. Benjamin Freedman – formerly known as Benjamin Freidman – was a Zionist sympathiser prior to him discovering its’ true ambitions whereupon he committed the remaining years of his life and fortune attempting to educate the American people about the perils of Zionism and the power they wield over the entire U.S. government. The second half of this video production is given to a pertinent excerpt from the famous 1961 speech that Freedman gave at the Willard Hotel, Washington D.C. before an audience of concerned American patriots.
Benjamin Freedman articulately narrates a historically accurate account of how the World Zionist Federations contrived certain events that led to America’s involvement in world war one. Freedman also describes the ‘prize’ that the Zionist Federations of the world received as a result of them manipulating the Americans to participate in the war that was supposed “to end all wars”. The Zionists’ ‘prize’ was the Balfour Declaration whereby Great Britain – then the occupying force in Palestine – ‘permitted’ the total “Jewish” colonisation of Palestine which was to ultimately lead to the ‘birth’ of the State of “Israel” in 1948. It must be stated that without the input of Zionist stooge Adolf Hitler there would be no Israel. Using the time-honoured trick of the ‘Hegelian dialect’, Hitler and the Nazis fomented “anti-Semitism” so that European Jews could be rounded-up and processed, with those deemed “fit” being transported to Palestine to populate the long envisioned State of “Israel”, while those who were deemed “useless”, genetically inferior and/or opposed the move were murdered.
A zip-file 2.7 megabytes in size containing some of the resources used during the research of this video is available for download.
• Israel has the inalienable right to pursue terrorists in the Gaza Strip and everywhere else they are hiding.
• Israel has the inalienable right to attack houses, mosques, churches, United Nations shelters, schools and hospitals to kill terrorists.
• Israel has the inalienable right to expropriate the land of Palestinian farmers for Israeli Jewish settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to arrest, torture and brutalise Palestinians who resist the expropriation of their land.
• Israel has the inalienable right to restrict the movement of Palestinians from one place to another in order to protect the settlements it has built on land expropriated, by inalienable right, from Palestinians.
• Israel has the inalienable right to demolish the houses of Palestinians, provided: the land on which the houses stand are needed for Israeli settlement; the owners of the houses are related to terrorist suspects; or Israeli military commanders determine that demolition is necessary.
• Israel has the right to erect concrete walls within the occupied territories to put more land on the Israeli side of the line for future use by Israeli settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to establish road networks that non-Israeli residents of the occupied territories are forbidden to use.
• Israel has the right to instruct the President of the United States how the Secretary of State must vote at the United Nations, which criminals must be granted presidential pardons and how he should treat other nations of the Middle East.
• Israel has the inalienable right to a minimum of $1,500 per Israeli Jewish citizen every year from the American Treasury.
• Israel has the inalienable right to the most sophisticated and lethal American weaponry.
• Israel has the right to deploy any and all American weapons on terrorists, whether in violation of international law or agreements with the United States not to deploy phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilian populations.
• Israel has the inalienable right to defy United Nations resolutions and World Court rulings. (A corollary of this right means that United Nations resolutions do not apply to Israel.)
• Israel has the inalienable right to accuse those who disagree with its occupation “anti-Semites,” unless the dissenters are Jewish, in which case Israel has the inalienable right to declare them “self-hating.”
• Israel has the inalienable right to demand the dismissal of American academics, journalists and politicians who voice opinions that question any of Israel’s inalienable rights.
• Israel has the inalienable right to invoke the memory of the victims of Nazi persecution to exempt itself from blame for any of its actions.
• Israel has the inalienable right to determine what rights the Palestinians have.
Thus,
• The Palestinians have no right to resist military occupation, confiscation of land, seizure of their water supply, collective punishment, arbitrary taxation, torture, public beatings, school closures and the destruction of crops and orchards.
• The Palestinians have no right to disobey Israeli soldiers’ orders or to appeal for outside assistance.
• The Palestinians have no right to non-violent civil disobedience, to armed struggle or to international representation to present their case.
• The Palestinians have no right to withhold taxes that pay for the Israeli occupation.
• The Palestinians have no rights, except those granted to them by the Israeli authorities, whose inalienable rights may not be contested.
Gaza’s offensive against Israel continued today, sharply escalating with a ground incursion that cut off the southern part of Israel from the north.
The Israeli death toll climbed past 400, at least 60 of whom were civilians, according to UN estimates. 4 Palestinian civilians have been killed as a result of Jewish settlers firing rockets into Gaza in response to the military operation led by Hamas.
Cloud bursts with flaming smoke trails were seen over Israeli cities as Hamas employed white phosphorus munitions. The use of such munitions as weapons targeting soldiers or civilians is prohibited by international law, but Hamas says it is only using the munitions legally to provide a smokescreen for its ground offensive.
There have been reports of Israelis with chemical burns from the phosphorus rounds entering hospitals, but the reports could not independently confirmed since Hamas has refused to allow any foreign journalists to enter Israel.
The United States led an effort at the United Nations to issue a resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities, but the effort was blocked by Russia. The Russian ambassador to the UN said, “We don’t want a one-sided cease-fire that would see Gaza end its operations only to allow Israel to continue firing rockets into Gaza. We are seeking a sustainable cease-fire.” Russia has repeatedly reiterated its demand for Israel to recognize Gaza’s right to exist and renounce violence. Russia’s foreign minister said earlier this week, “Israel is responsible for ending the cease-fire. Gaza has the right to self-defense. No nation would sit by and just watch as rockets exploded in their towns, hitting homes and schools, without a response. No country would tolerate that.”
Israel’s rocket attacks against Gaza sharply escalated after Gaza’s offensive began 9 days ago. Prior to that, no Palestinians had been killed since the cease-fire began last year on June 19. Israel’s Labor Party led by Ehud Barak agreed to the truce in exchange for an easing of the siege of Israel by Gaza.
Barak is also the head of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), which Hamas lists as a terrorist organization.
During the first week of the cease-fire, Hamas soldiers fired upon Israeli farmers near the border in at least seven separate incidents. An 82-year old Jewish man was wounded in one of the incidents. The IDF claimed that this was a violation of the cease-fire, but Hamas responded by announcing a “special security zone” along the border in Israel and warned that it would fire upon any Jews that entered the zone.
At the same time, Hamas also stepped up its operations against the IDF in the Negev region, stating that the cease-fire only applied to northern Israel. Two Jewish militants were killed in one targeted assassination.
Tzipi Livni’s Kadima group responded by firing rockets into Gaza City. The Labor party urged Kadima to observe the cease-fire so that the siege of Israel would be lifted. Hamas warned Barak that his party would be held responsible for any rockets fired from Israel into Gaza by other groups and closed border crossings once again after a brief respite in which it allowed several of trucks to cross into Israel delivering humanitarian supplies.
The IDF claimed that Gaza’s firing at Jewish civilians and closing of the borders was a violation of the cease-fire, but held to the truce until after November 4, when Hamas launched an airstrike into Israel, killing 4 militants and injuring several others. Hamas said the Jewish militants were digging a tunnel under the border in order to cross into Gaza to kidnap a Hamas soldier. Hamas released satellite images with arrows pointing to what a spokesman said was the location of the tunnel. Hamas also blamed Barak’s IDF for violating the cease-fire by launching rockets in response to its airstrike.
Human rights organizations have criticized Hamas for its policy of blockading Israel, which they say had brought the Jewish people to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The present military offensive has worsened the situation for Israelis, many of whom have no electricity. Many bakeries in Israel have run out of bread and cannot make more. Israel’s overflowing hospitals are running out of fuel to run generators, and the blockade has prevented them from receiving medical supplies which would assist in helping those injured in the present conflict.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh yesterday rejected the charges, saying “There is no humanitarian crisis in Israel. The humanitarian situation in Israel is exactly as it should be.”
Haniyeh also dismissed charges that Hamas forces were targeting civilians in its operations. “Hamas does everything to prevent the loss of life of civilians,” he said. “Israelis were even warned to leave areas where the terrorists are hiding. We are only targeting militants. It is Israel that is using human shields in violation of international law. It is Israel which is responsible for the loss of innocent lives.”
Critics of Hamas argue that Jews have no place to flee since Gaza has closed the borders and has bombed numerous targets deep within Israeli territory so that no place is safe.
A top Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was killed earlier this week when Hamas targeted his apartment building. His wife, Sarah, and two sons, Yair and Avner, were also killed in the bombing.
The UN’s estimate of 60 Israeli civilians killed counts only women and children, and is therefore only a minimum figure. The UN is unable to estimate the number of men that were combatants versus civilians and has said this number is therefore likely to be extremely conservative.
Russia’s Pravda newspaper reported today that most of the men arriving at Israeli hospitals appeared to be civilians. Most seemed to be coming in with their wives and children who were injured along with the men in Gaza’s bombing raids. None were identified as members of the IDF.
Member states of the European Union criticized Russia’s decision to veto any resolution calling for a cease-fire. Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “We need an end to the violence now. The blame-game can continue afterward, but the immediate goal should be to stop the bloodshed.”
A spokesman for the Kremlin said Hamas needed more time to root out “the infrastructure of terror” in Israel and to cripple the IDF’s ability to fire rockets into Gaza towns. “Russia is leading the effort to achieve peace in the region,” he said, by seeking “a sustainable Cease-fire.”
Israel’s current air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip has left about 1,000 Palestinians dead, including 400 women and children. Several thousand people have been wounded and dozens of buildings have been destroyed. An estimated 90,000 Gazans have abandoned their homes. Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which began more than two weeks ago, has been denounced by the Red Cross, multiple Arab and European countries, and agencies from the United Nations. Demonstrations in Pakistan and elsewhere have been held to denounce America’s support for Israel.
It’s well known that the U.S. supplies the Israelis with much of their military hardware. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has provided about $53 billion in military aid to Israel. What’s not well known is that since 2004, U.S. taxpayers have paid to supply over 500 million gallons of refined oil products — worth about $1.1 billion –- to the Israeli military. While a handful of countries get motor fuel from the U.S., they receive only a fraction of the fuel that Israel does — fuel now being used by Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and tanks to battle Hamas.
According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, between 2004 and 2007 the U.S. Defense Department gave $818 million worth of fuel to the Israeli military. The total amount was 479 million gallons, the equivalent of about 66 gallons per Israeli citizen. In 2008, an additional $280 million in fuel was given to the Israeli military, again at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. The U.S. has even paid the cost of shipping the fuel from U.S. refineries to ports in Israel.
In 2008, the fuel shipped to Israel from U.S. refineries accounted for 2 percent of Israel’s $13.3 billion defense budget. Publicly available data shows that about 2 percent of the U.S. Defense Department’s budget is also spent on oil. A senior analyst at the Pentagon, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, says the Israel Defense Force’s fuel use is most likely similar to that of the U.S. Defense Department. In other words, the Israeli military is spending about the same percentage of its defense budget on oil as the U.S. is. Therefore it’s possible that the U.S. is providing most, or perhaps even all, of the Israeli military’s fuel needs.
What’s more, Israel does not need the U.S. handout. Its own recently privatized refineries, located at Haifa and Ashdod, could supply all of the fuel needed by the Israeli military. Those same refineries are now producing and selling jet fuel and other refined products on the open market. But rather than purchase lower-cost jet fuel from its own refineries, the Israeli military is using U.S. taxpayer money to buy and ship large quantities of fuel from U.S. refineries.
The Israeli government obtains the fuel through the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, and pays for the fuel and the shipping with funds granted to it through Foreign Military Financing (FMF), another Defense Department program. (In 2008, Congress earmarked $2.4 billion in FMF money for Israel, and $2.5 billion for 2009.) The dimensions of the FMS fuel program are virtually unknown among America’s top experts on Middle East policy. For his part, the Pentagon analyst was surprised to learn that FMS money was even being used to supply fuel to Israel. “That’s not the purpose of the program,” he says. “FMS was designed to allow U.S. weapons makers to sell their goods to foreign countries. The idea that fuel is being bought under FMS is very, very odd.”
The fuel program, in fact, raises a number of pressing questions. The shipments have occurred during times of record-high oil prices, when American consumers have been angered by motor fuel prices that in 2008 exceeded $4 per gallon. Given those high prices, it appears to make little sense for the U.S. government to be promoting policies that reduce the volume of — and potentially raise the price of — motor fuel available for sale to U.S. motorists.
The U.S. fuel shipments are part of a sustained policy that has widened the energy gap between Israel and its neighbors. Over the past few years, the Israel Defense Force has cut off fuel supplies and destroyed electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Those embargoes and attacks on power plants have exacerbated a huge gap in per-capita energy consumption between Israelis and Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. And that sharp disparity helps explain why the Palestinians have never been able to build a viable economy.
Edward S. Walker, former president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, says the fuel supply program is emblematic of U.S. military support for Israel. Walker, who has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, explains that the FMF money allows the Israelis to “do with it what they want. They can buy equipment or fuel. It’s their choice, not the government’s choice. It’s the only program where we give someone a blank check and they can use it any way that they choose.”
Given the recent spike in oil prices, which helped send the U.S. and the world economy into a tailspin, and Americans still smarting from paying $4 at the pump, says Walker, “Why are we supplying fuel to Israel when we are paying such high prices?”
Since 1948, oil has been a critically important commodity for both the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli economy. And Israeli leaders have long worried about their energy security. In 1957, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, “The only sanctions which could defeat or break us are oil sanctions.”
In 1967, Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran precipitated the Six Day War. The Straits, writes Israeli historian Michael Oren in his book on the conflict, “Six Days of War,” were “a lifeline for the Jewish state, the conduit to its quiet import of Iranian oil.” In 1973, the Yom Kippur War (Arabs call it the Ramadan War) led to the Arab Oil Embargo, an event that still reverberates in the U.S., particularly in the fanciful political rhetoric about the desire for “energy independence.”
The U.S.-Israel oil relationship goes back to 1975. In September of that year, Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, struck a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that led the Israelis to partially withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The agreement required Israel to pull out of the Giddi and Mitla passes and relinquish the Sinai oilfields the Israelis had captured during the 1967 war.
In return, Kissinger agreed that America would provide multibillion-dollar economic and military subsidies to Israel. He also agreed that the U.S. would supply Israel with oil in case of any emergency. That agreement was formalized in 1979 about the time of the Camp David peace talks. It says that the U.S. will “make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport” for the oil that it purchases. The agreement concludes by saying that the U.S. and Israel will “meet annually, or more frequently at the request of either party, to review Israel’s continuing oil requirement.”
Since 1979, the agreement has been quietly renewed every five years. (The most recent approval of the document was done by the U.S. State Department in November of 2005.) The U.S. does not provide any other country the same insurance.
Nor does any other country get anything close to the volume of fuel that Israel does under FMS. In 2004, more than 140 countries received FMS aid from the U.S. Of that group, only about 13 countries received fuel of any kind through the FMS program and the biggest recipient, after Israel, was Singapore, which got $7.3 million in fuel. That year, Israel received 17 times more FMS fuel than all of the other countries combined.
Why did the U.S. Defense Department begin providing oil to Israel in 1986? And why does the program persist, particularly given that Israel no longer sees its refineries as strategic assets? The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which manages the FMS and FMF programs, referred questions about the program to the Israeli government. The press office of the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to numerous requests about the program.
While the rationale for the oil transfers remains elusive, the facts behind Israel’s refinery privatization are freely available. In 2006, the government sold the Ashdod refinery to Israeli tycoon Zadik Bino for about $500 million. And in early 2007, it sold the larger refinery in Haifa to a group led by Israel Corp., the shipping and chemicals conglomerate, for $1.5 billion.
The sale of the refineries marked a major turning point in Israel’s attitude toward oil. In its earliest years as an independent nation, Israel’s survival was made possible by using crude from the Soviet Union and Venezuela. From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Iranian crude was the lifeblood of the Zionist state. Later still, the Israelis relied on the Kuwaitis. Today, the Russians are providing much of Israel’s crude needs. And the sale of the refineries is indicative of the Israeli government’s confidence in its ongoing ability to purchase the oil it needs on the international market.
Nevertheless, the FMS fuel shipments to Israel have continued. The most recent shipments for which records are readily available occurred in July and October 2008.
On July 7, 2008, the spot price for U.S. crude oil hit a near-record of $141. That same day, the San Antonio Business Journal reported that San Antonio-based refiner Valero Energy Corp. had been awarded a contract by the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) worth $46 million to provide fuel to Israel. Valero has won a number of lucrative contracts from the DESC, the Defense Department agency that handles all of the Pentagon’s bulk fuel purchases. On Oct. 9, the Journal reported that Valero had been awarded a $235 million contract under FMS. Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero, says that the company “doesn’t talk publicly about its contracts.”
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that U.S. taxpayers are paying the shipping costs to move the fuel from refineries — many of them on the Texas Gulf Coast — to Israeli ports at Haifa or Ashkelon. Shipping costs vary but one specific bid called for shipping costs of $.30 per gallon. Officials with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that manages programs that “strengthen America’s alliances and partnerships,” has confirmed that the costs to ship the fuel from U.S. refineries to Israel have been paid for with FMF money designated for Israel by Congress.
The huge FMS fuel shipments are puzzling to the Israelis. Amit Mor, CEO of Eco Energy, an Israeli consulting and investment firm, has worked on energy issues in his home country for about two decades. In a recent e-mail, Mor says that “there is a paradox” in the fuel shipments that Israel gets from the U.S. He said that the privately owned Israeli refineries export jet fuel in “FOB prices,” while the defense ministry imports jet fuel in “high CIF prices,” with the funds of U.S. military assistance.
FOB, short for “free on board,” means that customers must take possession of the fuel at the refinery and then pay for all shipping and related costs to get the fuel to its final destination. On the other hand, as Mor explains, the Israeli military is importing fuel from U.S. refineries located 7,000 miles away, while incurring the CIF, short for “cost, insurance and freight,” of moving the fuel that distance.
Mor says Israeli refiners have “complained about this issue” but have had no luck with the Israeli government. He goes on to say that “it is the U.S. government that insisted for some reason to continue with this historical, costly and inefficient arrangement.”
Energy analysts squabble about a myriad of issues. But if there is one truism that draws near-universal agreement, it’s this: As energy consumption increases, so does wealth. And while that truism holds for oil use, it is particularly apt for electricity. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their 2005 book, “The Bottomless Well,” “Economic growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity — always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of modern industrial history.”
That statement underscores the significance of the FMS fuel shipments to Israel, many of which have occurred at or near the time that the Israeli military has attacked the electric power plants of its neighbors.
In late June 2006, Israeli aircraft fired nine missiles at the transformers at the Gaza City Power Plant, the only electric power plant in the Occupied Territories. (One of the original partners in the project was Enron, but that’s another story.) The missiles caused damage estimated at $15 million to $20 million and, for a time, made Gaza wholly reliant on electricity flows from Israel. The 140-megawatt power plant, owned by the Palestine Electric Co., was insured by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., an arm of the U.S. government. Thus the U.S. was providing fuel and materiel to the Israeli military, which destroyed the plant, but it was also paying to fix the damage. Call it cradle-to-grave service.
The Israeli attack on the Gaza City Power Plant offers a stark example of how the FMS fuel helps assure that Israel stays energy rich while many of the citizens in neighboring regions live in energy poverty.
Two weeks after the attack on the Gaza City plant in 2006, during Israel’s monthlong war against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft attacked the 346-megawatt Jiyyeh power plant, the oldest electric power plant in Lebanon. Those attacks resulted in the largest-ever oil spill in the eastern Mediterranean. About 100,000 barrels of fuel oil that was stored in tanks at the Jiyyeh site flowed into the sea, creating an oil slick that stretched for more than 150 kilometers.
The attacks on the Jiyyeh plant occurred on July 13 and July 15. Those dates are important because they underscore the timing of the U.S. fuel transfers to Israel.
On July 14, 2006, the U.S. military issued two press releases. In one of them, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced that it would be providing up to $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to the Israeli government. The other release, put out at 5 p.m. Eastern time, came from the Defense Logistics Agency, which said that it had awarded a $36.7 million contract to Valero as part of another JP-8 supply deal for Israel.
The July 14 release contains this rather bland description of the fuel deal: “The proposed sale of the JP-8 aviation fuel will enable Israel to maintain the operational capability of its aircraft inventory. The jet fuel will be consumed while the aircraft is in use to keep peace and security in the region. Israel will have no difficulty absorbing this additional fuel into its armed forces.” The release goes on to claim that the “proposed sale of this JP-8 aviation fuel will not affect the basic military balance in the region.”
While the attacks on the Jiyyeh plant were important, Lebanese citizens could get electricity from other power plants in the country. That was not true in Gaza, a province in which electricity has always been in short supply. According to the CIA Fact Book, the Gaza Strip ranks dead last — 214th out of 214 countries and territories listed — in the amount of electricity consumed. According to the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Agency, in 2004, the average Gazan used about 654 kilowatt-hours of electricity. By contrast, the 7.1 million residents of Israel consume about 6,295 kilowatt-hours of electric power per person per year, nearly 10 times as much as the average Gazan.
Although more recent energy consumption data for Gaza is not available, there’s no question that the endemic poverty in the West Bank and particularly in Gaza, is due, largely, to a continuing lack of energy resources. And the Israelis have frequently cut off the flow of fuel and electricity, which has exacerbated the Palestinians’ energy poverty.
Over the past few years, the Israelis have cut off the flow of energy to Gaza as retribution for various transgressions. And those cutoffs have forced the Gaza City Power Plant to shut down for lack of the fuel oil it needs to operate. When the power plant is idled, most of the residents of Gaza City are left without power and overall power supplies in the Gaza Strip decline by about 25 percent.
In May 2006, Israel cut off the flow of oil into the Occupied Territories after the Islamic group Hamas won local elections. In January 2008, the Israelis closed the border crossings into Gaza, which resulted in a fuel shortage that closed the Gaza power plant. In April 2008, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency stopped distributing aid in Gaza after it ran out of fuel. The Israelis stopped the fuel flow as retribution for attacks that killed two Israeli civilians and three Israeli soldiers. In November 2008, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency was again forced to suspend work due to lack of fuel. The fuel shortage occurred after Israel closed the border into Gaza in response to rockets and mortar shells that had been fired into Israel from Gaza.
The disparity in energy consumption between the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and their counterparts in Israel is just one element in the centuries-old story of tragedy and conflict in the region. But with the U.S. squarely on the side of the Israelis in the Gaza campaign, the potential for an angry backlash against the U.S. appears to be growing.
And that anger will likely only increase when Arabs begin to understand that much of the fuel that the U.S. is giving to Israel is being refined from Arab oil. The Valero refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, which has won several of the FMS contracts for Israel, is a big buyer of Mideast crude. During the second quarter of 2006, according to data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the refinery got about 40 percent of its crude oil from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
In short, U.S. taxpayers are paying for U.S. energy companies to buy Arab crude, ship it across the Atlantic to refineries in the U.S., refine it, and then ship it back across the Atlantic so that the Israel Defense Force can use it in its wars.
While the origination point of the crude may only matter to part of the Arab world, it is becoming apparent that bloodshed in Gaza is further complicating America’s efforts to gain credibility as an honest broker in the region. Anti-U.S. sentiment is not in America’s long-term interest, says former diplomat Chas Freeman, a man whose résumé in international affairs extends back nearly four decades.
Freeman is a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as well as a former assistance secretary of defense. He served as Richard Nixon’s chief interpreter during Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Now the president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank, Freeman says the FMS fuel program for Israel runs counter to long-term goals of resolving the Palestinian conflict and America’s stated goal of protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. The Defense Department has assumed “unilateral responsibility for the protection of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf, and yet it’s assuming responsibility for the delivery of aviation fuel for the Israeli military,” he says. “That’s confused and contradictory.” The program, he adds, is “one of many elements of our relationship with Israel that is very hard to explain.”
Freeman may be correct, but the House of Representatives has scant doubt about continued U.S. support for Israel. Nor has Congress shown much interest in the fuel shortages among Palestinians. On Jan. 9, the 14th day of the fighting in Gaza, the House passed a resolution sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.” The vote was 390 to 5.
Two days before the vote, UNICEF estimated that 800,000 Gazans did not have running water and 1 million were living without electricity.
The Annapolis Conference was a Middle East “peace” conference held on November 27, 2007, at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, United States. Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a spokesman for the Neturei Karta International, had a pertinent and factual message for those in attendance that day.
On the same day (November 27, 2007) Zionist and fake “Jew” Rabbi Dov Lior of the Yesha Rabbis Council called an “emergency meeting” in order to discuss the upcoming conference. During the meeting, Lior stated that peace would only be achieved by “[cleansing] the country of Arabs and [resettling] them in the countries where they came from.”
If “Rabbi” Dov Lior’s aims were to be achieved that would mean that all of the land that now constitutes the State of “Israel” would, in reality, be resettled by its’ rightful owners, namely the Arabs and, in particular, the Palestinians.
If, on the other hand, the “Jews” that occupy the land that constitutes the State of “Israel” were ‘cleansed’ and resettled to the countries where they came from then Russia, Eastern Europe and Turkey would gain, between them, around 7 million extra citizens.
In July 2007 the 25,000 strong Iranian Jewish community refused millions of dollars of bribe money (courtesy of the US taxpayer) to persuade them to emigrate to the State of “Israel”. So much for Iran’s alleged “anti-Semitism”.
Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein writes in his best selling book, The Holocaust Industry:
“Invoking the holocaust is a ploy to delegitimise all criticism of Jews”, he adds, “By conferring total blamelessness on Jews the holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure.
You can see how this “holocaust dogma” is at work in the media right now to ensure that the State of “Israel” is ‘immunized’ from “legitimate censure”.
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