Israel still gets $10 million a day

Consider some facts in the tempest blown up over President Barack Obama’s decision to allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and the part of Jerusalem occupied by Israel since it captured the territory from Jordan in 1967.

In allowing the resolution to pass, The United States effectively endorsed the position it has held with the rest of the international community, under all administrations -- Democrat and Republican -- that the settlements represent an illegal colonization of occupied territory and a real obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians as envisaged under a so-called two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has done everything he can to obstruct attempts by the Obama administration to get real negotiations going between the two sides, has condemned as “shameful” the Security Council resolution and the U.S. decision not to veto it. And certainly it’s true that his ability to resist real progress toward peace has been facilitated by a militant, corrupt Palestinian leadership.

So what impact will the U.N. resolution have on Israeli settlement activity?  Probably none. It will not stop Israel from expanding colonization. In fact, given the condemnation of the resolution and of President Obama from Donald Trump and his supporters, including some leading Democrats on this issue, settlement activity is more likely to accelerate.

And what of the notion that President Obama’s action represented an abandonment of Washington’s historic strong support for the State of Israel?

Answer: 38.5 billion dollars.

That’s the record amount the Obama administration agreed recently to give Israel over the next ten years in military aid. That works out to $3.85 billion a year, or more than $10 million a day from the U.S. taxpayer to the State of Israel -- $10 million a day, every day for the next 3,650 days. Israel has long argued that U.S. aid is not used to support activity the U.S. historically has opposed, like settlements, but getting $3.85 billion a year from the U.S. frees an equal amount from other revenue sources to pay for the settlements.

How much would that cost be? According to the Macro Center for Political Economics, a progressive Israeli think tank, the cost of support for the  “settlers and local governments running settlements” in 2015 totaled $368 million.

The U.S. gives that much in military aid to Israel in less than 40 days.

Chemi Shalev, a columnist writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, put it this way:

“In recent years, after President Obama desisted from efforts to advance the peace process, Netanyahu, his ministers and settler leaders had behaved as if the battle was over: Israel built and built, the White House objected and condemned, the facts on the ground were cemented in stone.

“You can have your cake and eat it too, the government implied: thumb your nose at Washington and the international community, build in the West Bank as if there’s no tomorrow and still get $38 billion in unprecedented [US] military aid.”