Lukethedrifter1's List: Palestine Essentials

• American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this).
• Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products
• Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949
• Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 — on a par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it.
• Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country.
• Many more Jews live in America than in Israel

• Resolute American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.

   
• The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly
• halid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus “the American people … on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people
• As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world’s Muslims, has said again and again: “we have … stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of our disagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine….”
• It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.
• Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them.
• no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it.
• Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets.
• It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.
• Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses.
• No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.
• It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.

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