Ever since the World War Two, the United States haven’t offered any of its allies as much military and civil aid as it offered “Israel”. Some 55% of the total aid has gone to the occupying state, amid an increasing pattern that started with $100 million annually, and ended with $3.8 billion under the agreement that was signed yesterday. More than a fifth of the “Israeli” war budget is from pure American donations that are represented by drones, missiles and ammunition to protect its qualitative superiority over the region’s armies and peoples.
Mohammad Bdeir/Al-Akhbar newspaper
Barack Obama has had what he wanted: to enter history as the American president who offered “Israel” the most huge military aid. However, we should add “so far” to the previous sentence. It is because tracking the history of the successive American administrations with the occupying state represents a climbing graph, making such donations the minimum from which the following administrations would start from.
Hence, the American president becomes the most generous president to offer “Israel” donations, in comparison with his predecessor, in which bilateral ties in his era became more cooperative on both security and strategic levels, according to the same comparison.
The story of the US aid for “Israel” started less than a year after its establishment. The born “state” back then was having very hard times economically, so the United States stood to offer an annual civil aid worth $100 million. This aid was mainly made for containing the Jewish immigration and buying food. Such annual donation lasted during the 1950s, in parallel with embargo on selling arms and military equipment.
President John F. Kennedy was the first to lift the embargo in 1962, in which he allowed selling “Israel” Hawk air defense missiles. His step was followed by that of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969), who more and more added the amount of US donations to “Israel”. He also allowed supplying it with assault weapons, such as the Patton tanks. Until then, France was main resource for supplying “Israel” with weapons, and following the 1967 war, the US monopolized it to this very day.
Over more than five decades, the American administrations were competing on how to please “Israel”. Developing strategic relations and offering both civil and military aids represented the platform of this competition. The first leap was recorded following the “Yom Kippur” war when the actual amount of donations hit a billion dollars. It then happened in 1979 when Tel Aviv received some $12.5 billion with respect to the actual current equivalence, or $2.6 billion actually. The donation came under the title of renovating the “Israeli” military power following the “Yom Kippur” war. The third time it happened in 1979, when Tel Aviv also received the biggest aid bundle ever in its history, as a reward for making the Camp David agreement: $15.7 billion, regarding the current value, for both donations and loans, or $4.7 billion according to the face amount at the time.
In 1984, the Allen Kristin amendment was issued, providing a decrease in the amount of debts offered to “Israel” in order to increase the amount of donations. Directly in the following year, the amount of offered aids jumped to $3.5 billion, a part of which was allocated for boosting the “Israeli” economy, which was collapsing after the “Israeli” invasion of Lebanon. Since then, until 1998, the United States had offered Tel Aviv annual aids worth $3 billion, distributed as follows: 1.8 billion of military aid, 1.2 billion of civil aid. In 1998, Prime Minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, took some measurements in which he cancelled the civil aid in favor of the military one, which then hit $2.4 billion before reaching $3 billion.
“Israel” continued receiving military aid from the United Stated on an annual basis, under the foreign military aid offered by the US to allied states in the world. During George W. Bush’s rule, the annual aid frame turned to be decimal, in which the MOU memorandum of understanding was signed on August 16, 2007, identifying the total amount of military aid for $30 billion between 2009 and 2018. The memorandum set a condition in which “Israel” would spend the donations in buying American weapons, while it is still allowed to transfer some quarter of the amount into its local currency to buy military equipment from the “Israeli” military products. The memorandum, renewed and re-signed yesterday, would cover the period between 2019 and 2028, with a total amount of donations hitting $38 billion.
Estimations summing the total of American donations offered for “Israel” over its history differ, yet the data published by the Congress research center in 2012 shows that their face value between 1950 and 2012 hit $112 billion, which is equal to $233.6 billion with respect to the actual value. According to the report issued by the research center, the accumulative value of those donations in the mentioned period is equal to 4% of the “Israeli” GDP. Besides, the donations don’t include the value of financial guarantees presented by the US to “Israel” over the past three decades, equal to $19 billion. They also exclude the additional military equipments donated by the American army to its “Israeli” counterpart. The report noted that “Israel” is the state that has received the greatest amount ever of American foreign donations since the World War Two.
According to “Israeli” economic magazine “Calcalist”, the face value of the donations until 2014 was $121 billion, $70 billion of which was for military aid. Adding $7 billion, the amount of donations received by “Israel” between 2015 and 2016, the total amount of donations received by “Israel” over 67 years is $128 billion, which is more than $250 billion according to the actual value of the US dollar. The magazine further added that the US military aid for “Israel” composes 20% of the “Israeli” security budget, estimated at some $17 billion.
Other than the generous annual aids, “Israel” receives US donations different from those provided under the signed memorandum. Those amounts are dedicated for funding private projects. One example is the Pentagon’s funding of the project to enhance and supply the “Israeli” army with anti-missile air defense systems. In addition, the United States stocks in “Israel” huge stockpile of ammunition, weapons and military vehicles worth some $1 billion belonging to Europe’s leadership in the American army. In this regard, the “Israeli” and the American armies signed an agreement that allows the former open the stockpiles and use their contents when needed, which actually happened in July 2006 war and the “Operation Protective Edge” war on Gaza in 2014.
…Special Donation for “Development”
Besides the current annual military donations included in the decimal agreement, “Israel” started receiving additional donations, especially under military development cooperation, namely in missile interception. Surveys stress that “Israel” received in that period some $2.3 billion to develop three missile interception systems for the short-range (the Iron Dome), middle-range (the Magic Wand) and long-range (Hetz).
Ironically, the amount of donations to develop the Iron Dome alone since 2011 reached $1.1 billion, including $351 million in 2015; however, the total “Israeli” budget set for developing this system since the beginning was only $200 million. Under the joint developing projects, it has been lately announce that an American contribution will be offered to develop technological solutions for the “tunnels problem”, which is expected to initially hit about $120 million.
Translated by website team
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