The key point in our analysis has been that, over the last 8 years or so, arms sales from U.S. weapons producers to Israel -- authorized by the government -- dramatically rise during or immediately after "peace talks," which reveals the total bad faith of Clinton's and Bush's diplomatic posturing.
Israel is the South Africa of our era, and it's time for a new divestment movement. For more information on the Israel divestment movement, visit www.sustaincampaign.org
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Deadly Aid: The U.S. South and Israel
By Jordan Green
Last April, a Hellfire missile slammed into the living room of 18-year old Osama Khorabi, killing the young Palestinian man who had aspired to join the Beit Jalla theater project in his hometown in the West Bank. The attack was part of a "preemptive strike" by the Israeli Defense Forces, though Khorabi was not known to have ties to any of the armed resistance groups in the occupied territories.
The Hellfire missile, designed as an anti-tank weapon, is made by Lockheed Martin Corp. at its massive production facility in Orlando, Florida. Along with Lockheed's F-16 fighter jet and Bell Helicopter Textron's AH-1E Cobra attack helicopters, both produced in Fort Worth, Texas, the Hellfire is part of a Southern arsenal of lethal weapons sold to Israel through the Foreign Military Sales program to underwrite the occupation of Palestinian lands.
Research by the Institute for Southern Studies shows that 66 percent of the armaments sold to Israel through the Foreign Military Sales program were produced in the South, overwhelmingly paying for the expensive F-16.
The first months of 2002 have seen unrestrained Israeli military assaults on Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories, answered in turn by waves of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli cities.
In the first week of March, Israeli F-16s rained a torrent of bombs down on Bethlehem, destroying the local Palestinian police headquarters. In attacks in the following weeks, Israeli soldiers rampaged through Palestinian refugee camps backed by live fire from tanks, and American-made Apache helicopters. The incursions coincided with indiscriminate roundups of Palestinian men between the ages of 15 and 40, resulting in the detention of as many as 2,000. Since the beginning of the new Intifada, the conflict has taken the lives of 359 Israelis and 1,218 Palestinians. The Bush administration has insisted that the Palestinian Authority must stop the violence before negotiations can take place.
During the last decade, Palestinians have experienced a strangulation of their economy and social conditions as a result of the accelerated confiscation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements, the development of restricted Israeli pass roads, and an intensification of military checkpoints.
Whether for reasons of ideology, hard-nosed foreign policy considerations, or the political support of pro-Israel political action committees, stalwarts of the Southern congressional delegation such as Senator Jesse Helms have found their interests increasingly tied to the viability of the state of Israel. In the current campaign cycle Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has received $41,000 from pro-Israel PACs while Democratic Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a member of the Armed Forces Committee, received over $35,000.
Helms, who likes to brag that he's "never voted for a foreign aid giveaway," told the Middle East Quarterly, in 1995 that "Israel is at least the equivalent of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Without Israel promoting its and America's common interests, we would be badly off indeed." Helms chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001.
The political clout of the Christian right, heavily based in the South, has also been influential in shaping Middle East policy. Following a March 13 United Nations resolution endorsing Palestinian statehood, Virginia Beach, Virginia-based evangelist Pat Robertson issued an alarm through his Web site, warning that Palestinian self-determination violates the Biblical prophesy of Jewish settlement.
"The United States led the way to say we want to take East Jerusalem back from the Jewish nation in defiance of the words of Jesus Christ," said the founder of the Christian Coalition, "and we want to give it to none other than the Palestinian Authority and Yasar [sic] Arafat who is a sworn enemy of Israel who has declared he wants to destroy it."
"I recommend very strongly that those in America begin to pray," Robertson concluded.
Jordan Green is an Editorial and Research Associate at the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, NC.