The US Agency for International Development will pour $147 million into Palestinian Authority infrastructure, education, health projects, and humanitarian aid, just six months after a funding freeze was imposed by President Barack Obama.
In October, US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (R-Fla) froze $192 million in US funding for Palestinian projects as Fatah head Mahmoud Abbas prepared to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in the United Nations. The bid for statehood, brought to the body in September, failed to gain international support.
Congress later released $45 million, then another $88.6 million, with limitations on where the money could be used.
The United States gives approximately $500 million a year to the Palestinians, millions of dollars of which have been used to train armed forces.more at source
A Conservative Estimate of Total U.S. Aid To
Israel: More Than $123 Billion
The current estimate by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs of cumulative total U.S. direct aid to Israel is $123.202 billion, updating the figure in our November 2008 issue. Because parts of U.S. aid to Israel are buried in the budgets of various U.S. agencies or in a form not easily quantified—such as the early disbursement of aid, giving Israel a direct benefit of interest income and the U.S. Treasury a corresponding loss—it is virtually impossible to arrive at an exact dollar amount.Our latest estimate is a conservative, defensible accounting of U.S. direct aid to Israel. It does not include the indirect benefits to Israel resulting from U.S. aid, nor the substantial indirect or consequential cost to the U.S. as a result of its blind support for Israel. Most significantly, perhaps, it does not include the costs resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of U.S. and allied casualties, and untold tens of thousands of Iraqi killed and wounded—which is widely believed in the Arab world, and by many Americans as well, to have been undertaken for the benefit of Israel.Among the real benefits to Israel that are not counted as a direct cost to the U.S. taxpayer is the provision allowing Israel to spend 26.3 percent of each year’s military aid in Israel rather than from American companies (no other recipient of U.S. military aid gets this benefit), which has resulted in an increasingly sophisticated Israeli defense industry.Loan Guarantees
Another indirect benefit to Israel is the loan guarantees that Washington has extended to Israel since 1972. While these have not yet cost the U.S., they have enabled Israel to borrow from commercial sources at more favorable terms and lower interest rates, since the U.S. guarantees payment of the loans should Israel default.Subsidies for Israel’s Illegal Colonists And Colonies
A real benefit to Israel that represents another indirect, but unquantifiable, cost to the U.S. taxpayer is the private, tax-exempt money collected by charitable American Jewish groups and then sent to support Israel’s colonists (“settlers”) and colony-related causes in occupied Palestinian territories, including by groups designated by the U.S. as foreign terrorist organizations (see November 2007 Washington Report, p. 30).The $3 billion or so per year that Israel receives from the U.S. amounts to about $500 per Israeli. The largest amounts have been military grants (Foreign Military Financing, or FMF) and economic grants (Economic Support Funds, or ESF). In August 2007 the U.S. and Israel agreed on a new, 10-year aid plan, beginning in FY ’09 and calling for no ESF and incremental annual increases in FMF, reaching $3 billion by FY ’11 and remaining at that level through FY ’18.Another ongoing item is so-called “migration and refugee assistance.” This originally was intended to help Israel absorb Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, but was expanded in 1985 to include “refugees resettling in Israel.” In fact, however, Israel doesn’t differentiate between refugees and other immigrants, so this money subsidizes all immigrants to Israel.Israel also receives regular grants from the “American Schools and Hospitals Abroad” (ASHA) program.A significant amount of aid to Israel comes from the DOD budget for so-called “joint defense projects”—although to date the Pentagon has shown little interest in these projects for its own use. Previous Washington Report estimates identified about $7.694 billion to Israel from the DOD budget through FY ’08. To that has been added amounts for FYs ’09, ’10 and ’11, as shown in Table 1. Of the $415 million shown for FY ’11, the most significant amount is the $205 million appropriated to support Israel’s “Iron Dome” short-range missile defense system.
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