23 July 2010
By Nicola Nasser* Since 1860, when the
American Jewish tycoon Judah Touro donated $60,000 --
a fortune for that time -- towards the construction of
the first Jewish settlement outside the old walls of
Jerusalem, public and private American funds have
aided the creation and territorial expansion of
Israel. Israel today is the foremost recipient of US
aid. According to a USAID green paper, between 1946
and 2008 Israel has received more aid than Russia,
India, Egypt and Iraq. In fact, the US has poured more
money into Israel than it did into the Marshall Plan
for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.
However, a recent New York Times article adds a
new dimension to the story. On 5 July, the Times
reported that, over the last decade more than 40
American groups have collected more than $200 million
in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlements in the
occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, indicating that
the US Treasury is effectively aiding and abetting
illegal settlement expansion and the Judaisation of
Jerusalem. While the New York
Times honed in on the irony of how a US government
organ was facilitating the funnelling of private funds
into activities and goals that ran counter to official
US policy, and as significant as this is, the article
failed to mention that the amount of private
tax-exempt "donations" pales in comparison to the
public funds that Washington has steadily poured into
the Zionist project. For example, the US federal
budget for 2011 has earmarked $3 billion in aid for
Israel, or 42 per cent of the total amount of aid to
be allocated to the so-called Near East for that year.
It is also interesting to observe that the policies of
USAID, an instrument that the State Department uses to
pursue the US's objectives overseas, also conflict
with Washington's official stances. USAID programmes
for the Palestinians effectively exclude East
Jerusalem. Its green papers and other official reports
and statements make frequent mention of "the West Bank
and Gaza" as headings for its activities, but rare are
references to East Jerusalem. It is as though, for
USAID, East Jerusalem is not an indivisible part of
the occupied territories, in spite of Washington's
official acknowledgement that it is and in spite of
the inclusion of East Jerusalem among the final status
issues in the US- brokered negotiating process between
the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, the
occupying power. One cannot help but suspect USAID --
and by extension the State Department -- of
perpetrating a certain calculated deception through
its deliberate and systematic omission of East
Jerusalem in its programmes and documents. PA officials in
Ramallah expressed outrage at the tax breaks for
private US donations to fund Jewish settlement
expansion in the occupied territories. One suspects
that the sentiment was primarily geared for local
consumption, because they were quick to stress that
the Palestinians were not ungrateful to the US and
urged USAID to keep up its efforts. "The US is the
chief supplier of bilateral economic and development
aid to the Palestinians, supplying more than $2.9
billion since 1994," wrote the Palestinian Investment
Promotion Agency (PIPA) on its website in May. "The US
helps facilitate the movement of Palestinian people
and goods, while improving the security of Israel," it
added, as though it and other PA agencies were somehow
detached from USAID "efforts" and the policies it is
helping to implement. USAID has slated $550.4 million
for the PA in its budget next year. The continuation
of this aid is contingent on the continuation of the
Palestinian Fatah-Hamas rift and the blockade. Nothing
is allocated for East Jerusalem and the bulk of the
funds are to be spent on "fighting drugs, law
enforcement and security programmes". However, the reference
to "facilitating movement" is even more suspect, and
requires further elucidation in light of the part this
aid plays in consolidating the occupation, entrenching
Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and
promoting the Judaisation of East Jerusalem.
Successive US administrations and the countless
shuttle visits by their envoys and emissaries have
failed to lift the military barriers Israel imposes in
the West Bank and around Jerusalem, to open a "safe
corridor" between the West Bank and Gaza, or to open
the crossings into Gaza even for the passage of
humanitarian assistance. But they have been superbly
successful in building "alternate" roads. These are
the ring roads planned by the occupation authorities
in order to link Jewish settlements that now control
42 per cent of the area of the West Bank, which does
not include the area of occupied territory that Israel
annexed to the Jerusalem municipality, according to
the BTselem human rights centre. The ring roads also
serve to carve the rest of the West Bank into cantons
densely populated by Palestinians. The Applied Research
Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ) reports that USAID funded
23 per cent of the ring road network built by
occupation authorities in 2004. Most of this roadwork
is located in areas B and C which comprise more than
80 per cent of the area of the West Bank and which
fall under the control of the Israeli occupation,
which supervises all road works. The donor countries
that are supervising and financing the "peace process"
had approved the construction 500 kilometres of such
roads, at the cost of $200 million, $114 million of
which was footed by USAID. Another 120 kilometres is
scheduled for completion by the end of this year. Most
of this segment will skirt around the Jewish
settlements in Greater Jerusalem, creating a wall of
paved highway to reinforce the barrier wall severing
the West Bank from Jerusalem and to reinforce the
tipping of the demographic scale in Greater Jerusalem
in favour of Jewish settlers and against its
indigenous Palestinians. The rest of the
roadwork, which snakes through the valleys and up the
hills and down the ravines of the West Bank, is hailed
as an "accomplishment" by the Salam Fayyad government
in Ramallah. Indeed, Fayyad goes further to boast of
these roads as Palestinian projects that "penetrate"
areas B and C and, therefore, "defy" the security
partitions of the West Bank as defined by the Oslo
Accords. In fact, neither can USAID claim these roads
as one of its "achievements" in facilitating the
movement of Palestinians under the occupation, nor can
the PA claim them as a subtle victory. As Suhail
Khaliliey, head of ARIJ's Urbanisation Monitoring
Department, explains, "What happens is that USAID
presents this package of infrastructure projects to
the PA and essentially says 'Take it or leave it.' So
the PA is basically forced to accept Israeli-planned
roads it doesn't want." Ingrid Jaradat Gassner,
director of the Badil Resource Centre for Palestinian
Residency and Refugee Rights, puts it more poignantly:
"It's sad that the PA is helping to build its own
cantons while the settlers control the main roads."
Last month, Fayyad
issued a statement denying that the PA contributed to
the construction of a network of roads proposed by the
occupying power. Ghasan Al-Khatib, a spokesman for the
Fayyad government, added that the PA was doing all in
its power to prevent the rise of "an apartheid system"
in the West Bank. Unfortunately, realities on the
ground belie such denials and assertions. *
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in
Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli – occupied
Palestinian territories. Comments 💬 التعليقات |