Analysts say politicians hold their tongues on giving additional US aid to Israel for fear of being labeled as anti-Semitic.
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By David R. Francis
Israel, celebrating its http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3990, has proved to be an expensive ally for the United States.
Since its birth, Israel has received at least $114 billion from the US in direct foreign economic and military aid, says Shirl McArthur, who periodically updates his Israel cost estimates for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WREMA).
That estimate, Mr. McArthur notes, is conservative. For instance, he has not factored inflation into that $114 billion cumulative sum. The late Washington economist Thomas Stauffer did that calculation several years ago. He found total official aid to Israel, up to 2002, came to $247 billion. He added other costs of US support of Israel (interest on debt, higher oil prices, etc.) to reach a highly controversial total of $1.6 trillion.
For comparison, the cost to the US of the Iraq war is running about $144 billion a year.In March, a Memorandum of Understanding from the White House to Congress urged an additional $30 billion in military aid to Israel, a sum spread at about $3 billion a year through fiscal year 2018. Currently, Israel ranks as the top recipient of American foreign aid ($2.4 billion in 2007 by an official calculation) if reconstruction money for Iraq is excluded. Next are Egypt ($1.8 billion) and Afghanistan ($1 billion).
Up to now, the presidential candidates have largely ducked the question of what they would do to further peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.
“It’s quite remarkable it has not been raised,” says Stephen Walt, coauthor of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a controversial book published last year. “They have gotten a free pass on details for a peace process.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0512/p15s01-wmgn.html