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| quote: | Originally posted by T_ALI
The fact that more than 900 people are DEAD is not propaganda!!! |
Neither is the fact that most of those people were terrorists.
Can't believe this thread is still alive. I guess I never posted a final response to the whole "USA is fighting Israel's war" thing, so here I go with that.
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The USA sends money to Israel. We know this. I believe last year on record it was something like $1.5 billion in foreign military aid and another $2 billion in general foreign aid, which is close to 1/3 of the total foreign aid budget. The next in line is Egypt; they receive about half as much as Israel does.
This is no small amount of money. That's not what I'm arguing, though. Palestine supporters believe that the war is funded almost entirely by the USA. They believe that Israel is a proxy for the USA in the same way that Syria and Lebanon are proxies for Iran. This is the part that isn't justified. Let's look at this in perspective:
Israel has a $200 billion economy, with about $50 billion in annual government revenue. They are receiving $1.5 billion in FMA from the USA.
Is this a lot of money? Absolutely.
Does it help Israel? Sure.
Would Israel wither and die without it? Not likely.
By comparison, the Palestinian Territories, at last estimate, had a GDP of under $4 billion. I have no idea what the actual government revenue was. Let's say they had $1 billion available for the war. If the Saudis are sending them even $500 million - that's 1/3 of what the U.S. sends Israel - then it's a 50% boost to their war chest.
And it's not just the Saudis - they receive funding from almost all of the Arab/Muslim nations and a huge assload from the U.N. The UNRWA, which pays for food, shelter, medicine, education, etc. for Palestinians, had a 2008 budget of $541 million, over 81% of that coming from the USA and the EU. This is no small number either, and because it creates a situation of virtually unlimited welfare in Palestine, it helps to fuel the massive population growth that is their primary weapon in the war (kill one terrorist, three more take his place).
Putting it all together, it doesn't really look like the USA is using Israel as a proxy. It's more like a little bonus they pony up to Israel for keeping the radicals occupied in the middle east so they don't crash more planes into American buildings. Yeah, I know, it wasn't Palestinians who did that; keep the quote in context please. What I'm saying is that it's like a birthday gift; a nice gesture, useful even, but not depended upon for livelihood.
As for some of the "evidence" that has been posted showing that the Israelis have a lot of American-made weapons, I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. The manufacturers are private companies, and very few countries have both the skill and manufacturing capacity to fuel a war. The USA is the largest exporter of arms worldwide; it's not just Israel buying. Russia comes in a distant second, and no other country exports even half as much as the top two.
So yes, Israel owns a lot of American weapons, and that's really very boring because so does every other country that the USA hasn't banned sales to. They make the best weapons in the world right now (in many cases using Israeli engineers!) so this is just common sense.
Can we put that issue to rest now?
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