"Above and Beyond" for Israel
- Details
- Written by Josh Ruebner, US Campaign Josh Ruebner, US Campaign
- Published: 17 May 2012 17 May 2012
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has a hard hitting editorial about our military aid to Israel. It turns out that Israel is decreasing its defense spending by 5% and increasing taxes on the wealthy in response to popular demands in Israel to look after social needs. How does the US with our own severe budget crisis and lousy economy respond? By planning to give Israel 30% more in military aid, almost another billion dollars! And this additional money goes towards an profit making Israeli military contractor!
Josh Ruebner talks about it here:
Thursday, May 17, 2012
"Above and Beyond" for Israel
Is the United States "going above and beyond for Israel?" According to the Washington Post's Walter Pincus, the answer is yes. In his column today, Pincus asks provocatively, "Should the United States put solving Israel’s budget problems ahead of its own? When it comes to spending, it appears that the United States already is."
What draws the ire of Pincus in today's column is the fact that nearly $1 billion of additional money for weapons to Israel is working its way through the appropriations process this year, in addition to a record-breaking $3.1 billion in military aid. We wrote about this development last week in Mondoweiss.
Pincus notes the absurdity of providing Israel more than $4 billion in weapons this year, even though doing so will likely bring the United States closer to painful across-the-board budget cuts next year. He writes: "So here is the United States, having added to its own deficit by spending funds that it must borrow, helping to procure a missile defense system for Israel, which faces the threat but supposedly can’t pay for it alone."
Read the entire column here.
After you read the column, please add a positive comment to Pincus's brave truth-telling and then spread the word to your friends via social media.
You can also write a letter-to-the-editor in support of the column. Instructions on how to do so are here.
Let's make sure that the Washington Post hears plenty of encouragement and support from us for printing such an important opinion!
Of course, we've been making for case for years that military aid to Israel comes at a moral and financial cost that we simply can't afford. Learn more about the budgetary trade-offs and the moral impact of providing weapons to Israel at our websites www.aidtoisrael.org and www.weaponstoisrael.org.
Pincus's column is yet one more piece of evidence that discourse around U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinian people is changing in dramatic and positive ways. Help us continue this momentum by signing up to receive a packet to educate and organize people in your community to end U.S. aid to Israel.
When you do, you'll be joining activists in more than 1,000 cities across the country who are doing this work and helping to shift the discourse as a step toward ending U.S. complicity in Israel's human rights abuses of Palestinians.
About eighty protesters in Portland yet again protested the annual Oregon American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) gathering on April 29th. This year's event was marked by an even greater amount of paranoia and secrecy by AIPAC: the event was not widely announced, the keynote speakers were not promoted, the media was not invited, people who tried to attend were arbitrarily refused entry, and the guests were subjected to searches of purses and metal detectors after passing checks by police and AIPAC security.
mber of the AIPAC crowd tried to get police to take down our largest "tower of peace" sign which proclaimed "No War On Iran." He claimed the sign blocked traffic. The police informed him that they had looked at the sign and determined it wasn't a problem.