Socialist Viewpoint

U.S. taxpayers give over $14 million each day to Israel. This is more than all the starving countries of the world put together get from the United States. (Source: [email protected]). Journalist and author, Richard Curtiss, gives the higher figure of over $15 million a day. He wrote, “Between 1949 and 1998, the U.S. gave to Israel, with a self-declared population of 5.8 million people, more foreign aid than it gave to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the West Indies combined. The total population of this vast region includes over 1,054,000,000 people.”

As Americans learn about what their tax money is paying for, an important campaign to end U.S. support for Israel is gaining momentum.

Fueling this campaign is the daily war being waged against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli state. Over 1000 Palestinian civilians, including children, toddlers, and infants, were killed by Israeli tanks, rockets and guns in just the last 16 months. And over 6000 were maimed.

The list of weapons supplied to Israel by the United States government includes F-16 fighter planes, Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, patrol boats, naval and tank artillery armed with 76mm, 105mm and 120mm high explosive rounds, M114 TOW rockets and hell-fire air-to-ground missiles, shoulder-fired LAW rocket launchers; 40-90mm mortars; anti-personnel cluster bombs; bullets for machine guns and sniper rifles, rubber and plastic coated metal bullets. The U.S. also has supplied armored pile drivers and armored bulldozers to destroy Palestinian homes, olive groves, and farms.

There is also a campaign directed at the makers of bulldozers and other heavy-duty earth-moving equipment to cease selling their products to Israel because of the criminal uses to which the Israeli settler state puts such equipment.

In short, there is nothing positive about U.S. aid to Israel. Noted writer C.G. Estabrook has correctly called Israel a “wholly owned U.S. subsidiary” (see Jan. 2002 Socialist Viewpoint). Estabrook claims that the Israeli economy “is ‘unviable’ because it survives as a military outpost of the United States,” and would collapse without the billions of dollars it receives in U.S. aid.

A National Student Conference of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement takes place this month at the University of California in Berkeley. The first of the five goals for the conference are: “1. To kick off a national divestment campaign on university campuses. 2. To build the resources for activists, particularly those who are community-based, to coordinate a national Stop U.S. Aid to Israel campaign.”

The other three goals are: to build the broader Palestinian solidarity movement working with the global justice movement; to draft a statement of unity for the conference participants; and to create a national organization of student Palestinian solidarity activists.

United States support for Israel is one of the pillars of the “War on Terrorism.” In fact, Israel has drastically escalated its acts of war against the Palestinian population since September 11 with increased assassinations and demolitions of Palestinian homes. Like other regimes throughout the world, Israel is using the excuse of September 11 to make its own war against the poor, indigenous peoples of the region. And U.S. support for Israel has continued unabated. Without U.S. support, Israel could not make war on the Palestinian people.

What is needed is a broad campaign to end all U.S. support for the state of Israel. A campus campaign to divest university funds from Israeli companies or American companies doing business in Israel is a good means of getting a public discussion about U.S. support for Israel underway.

The campaign to divest U.S. funds from South Africa played a big educational role in winning majority U.S. support for the campaign to bring down apartheid. Now such a campaign can challenge Israeli apartheid and Israeli Bantustans although it will be a much more difficult project in the United States than the anti-apartheid movement was.

In the case of South Africa, only American Nazis and extreme right-wingers in the United States supported the white minority rule of South African apartheid. But Zionism is a well-financed, highly organized, and vocal movement in the United States with substantial support of the Jewish population who have fallen for the propaganda that Israel represents the solution to the Nazi holocaust of 1930s and 40s Germany.

The divestiture campaign must undertake to teach students that Zionism is a creature of imperialist exploitation in the Middle East. It must show that Zionism (with imperialist support) created a settler colony on the lands of the indigenous population and used mass terror to remove the indigenous peoples in 1948, and continues, to this day, to use terror to establish and expand a Jewish country in the midst of the Arab world. This campaign will not be easy, but it is necessary.

American working people are becoming more aware that so many of their tax dollars (which are part of a very regressive tax system) are going to pay for Israeli terror against Palestinians. They can be convinced that this is wrong and that it should be stopped. The students can play a vital role in doing this convincing, by organizing and telling the truth.