The U.S. Should Have Tied Its Foreign Aid to Israel to the Peace Process

I believe the U.S. has been making a big mistake for many years by not connecting its huge foreign aid package of $3 billion per year (for decades and now more) to Israel with a requirement that Israel stay committed to the peace process regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There have been many Israeli leaders who were against Israel being involved in such a peace process because they were against any future creation of a Palestinian state. Talk about selfish. That is what has caused all of this Palestinian anger that has been boiling for 70 years or more.

The U.S. should have done what it could have to prevent that from happening. If the U.S. would have threatened Israel with cutting off its foreign aid for this reason, and the Israeli government would have said no, then the U.S. should have cut off its aid. And I suspect that it that would have happened it would have been more difficult for Israeli right wing politicians like Netanyahu to have come to power. Instead, there would have been more Israeli politicians like Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and president, who was committed to the peace process and therefore did not reject the concept of a Palestinian state. And I would add to this that the U.S. should have told Israel that its turning a blind to preventing increasing Jewish settlements in the West Bank would constitute noncompliance to the peace process. President George H.W. Bush had so threatened Israel about those increasing settlements.

Now, President Joe Biden is having the U.S. support Israel carte blanche financially and militarily, thus with no strings attached, in its declared war with Hamas. For, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced most resolutely that Israel is about to “annihilate Hamas” in a huge ground war involving hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops swarming the tiny and very populated Gaza Strip.

Now, I do think Hamas is a terrorist organization that should not govern the Gaza Strip. But is that really a possibility–to exterminate Hamas? And how many innocent civilians, who may not even want Hamas governing them, are going to be killed from this? Already, in only two weeks, the death toll reportedly is Israel 1,400 and Gaza 3,500. And Israel has dropped so many rockets in northern Gaza to destroy the place.

President Xi of China is looking better about this than Joe Biden is. Despite the fact that Xi did not condemn Hamas as he should have for attacking Israel, but Biden did, Xi has not said hardly anything about it except to say lately that there needs to be two states. Thus, this brief statement by Xi does something very important–it recognizes the historical background of the Hamas attack on Israel, which is that Israel has to some extent caused this every increasing anger of Palestinians due to their suffering. But do you hear that from Joe Biden? NO! That will cause world opinion to swing to the side of Communist China and against the U.S., the leader of the Free World. And it will help China and Russia gain more influence in the Middle East. This is why in a my last post I accused President Biden of making an unbalanced speech supporting Israel. I’m for supporting Israel, but not unqualified.

So, as President Xi says, there needs to be two states. That’s what my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient of Philistia, is all about. It proposes an alternative to the traditional two-state solution. I think it deserves some attention. Why? Although this book was published 33 years ago, events have been moving since then in the direction I propose in the book–a very expanded Gaza Strip–a proposal that is easily grasped merely by viewing the map image on the front cover of the book.

Biden is calling on our nation to support his financial and military commitment to Ukraine and Israel, joining to the two wars together. But non-provoking Ukraine was totally innocent as Russia attacked it, whereas Israel is not totally innocent in this ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has lasted at least 56 years and arguably more.