> it's true. And in the second place, American citizens do not profit by
> aid to Israel, they lose.
Financially they lose, but there's a dreadful symbolic compensation: a hateful, dire but palpable pleasure in murdering/stomping the oiligarchy's ideological mirage, namely the mythical fiction of "the Arabs" (translation: brown-skinned people who don't speak English) Most of the Fox news coverage was motivated by this all-consuming, dreadful hatred. One could feel it, emanating from the spittle-flecked announcers: the all-consuming Eye of Sauron.
The problem is, the external aggressions of the oiligarchy are tied to internal, US-specific class politics. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians -- physical apartheid, economic impoverishment, criminalization, all the way up to the abhorrent laws forbidding Palestinian-Israeli marriage -- is really a garish version of what the US has been doing to itself: the gating of communities, criminalization of the poor, the rape the welfare state, etc. A shocking 4.9% of all American males have been incarcerated at some point in their lives in 2001; the number is 16.6% of all African American adult men, 7.7% of all Hispanic men, but only 2.6% of all white men. If current rates persist, 6.6% of all US adult males -- including 33% of black males, and no, that's not a typo, that's *thirty-three-percent* -- will go to prison at some point in their lifetime:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/piusp01.pdf
-- DRR