Nader on Israel/foreign aid

 3. Media, explain this paradox: The Israeli government knows every street, alley, and building in tiny Gaza. It has this enclave under the most intense technological surveillance of any human population in history. It tracks who lives, works, moves, and the goods they buy. It collects DNA samples by family name and has loads of spies and informants. The U.S.-made Israeli aircraft pinpoint, with precision missiles, militants sleeping on known floors of apartment buildings. Yet, the Israeli military cannot locate in a timely manner the places where the garage-built, crude, inaccurate rockets are made and fired. Experts have said Israeli missile defense technology can respond to rocket launch sites in three to five seconds. What explains this contradiction?

4. The miasma of U.S. foreign aid programs merits media sunlight, especially given the lack of congressional oversight. This is an area of endless discovery. Enormous discretionary power regarding foreign policy has been given to the White House by Congress over the decades. What loans are quietly converted to grants at the insistence of lobbyists for foreign interests? How much of the foreign aid is used for purchases from U.S. companies and how much transfer of sensitive or top-secret technology slips through export restrictions under this rubric of foreign aid? The last and only GAO study on U.S. foreign aid to Israel was in 1978 and it revealed the astonishing latitude of pro-Israeli government administrations to give Israel special treatment.

A recent article by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that “U.S. law is clear: all countries receiving U.S. aid must meet human rights standards, and countries violating these standards are liable to be sanctioned and ineligible for U.S. funding…” But “when it comes to Israel, additional conditions do not apply and general human rights laws are almost never adhered to.” (See: Bringing Assistance to Israel in Line With Rights and U.S. Laws, May 12, 2021).

How many taxpayer dollars are going to fund unlawful activities in recipient countries? Whatever happened to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 1996 declaration before a joint session of Congress signaling the end of prosperous Israel’s need for U.S. aid programs to the standing ovation of the solons? How have foreign aid priorities helped despots and ignored areas abroad that have incubated local epidemics of new viruses and bacteria which could spread around the world?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/31/to-the-media-readers-need-to-know-more/