In Allocating Aid to Israel, Congress Lost All Sense of Proportion

By Lucille Barnes

Before Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ April visit to the United States, the U.S. was committed to providing Israel a total of $5,505,300,000 in grants, military equipment and loan guarantees during the current 1996 fiscal year. (See “A Comprehensive Guide to U.S. Aid to Israel” in the February 1996 Washington Report, p. 7.)

In his April 28 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, President Bill Clinton offered more than $350 million in additional military and security assistance. It is not yet clear whether these promises, intended to bolster Peres’ prospects in the May 29 Israeli election and Clinton’s prospects in the November 1996 U.S. election, will raise this total, or will be funded in the coming fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, 1996.

Even without the new figures, U.S. assistance to Israel, with no more than 5.5 million citizens, amounts to an enormous $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman and child. Every Israeli family of five, therefore, receives the equivalent of 5,000 U.S. dollars in aid per year—every year. This is more than the average amount received by U.S. citizens on welfare, who represent a very small portion of the total U.S. population, but generate a great deal of political heat.

With total U.S. foreign aid worldwide now down to about $12 billion a year, aid to Israel, combined with the $2.1 billion in aid that goes to Egypt for keeping the peace with Israel, amounts to about half of the entire U.S. foreign aid budget worldwide.

Most Americans, despite the giant annual budget, find it difficult to visualize what $5.5 billion, amounting to $15,083,013.67 per day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, could buy it if were spent on American needs. Some examples may help.

This year, because of budgetary constraints, the National Science Foundation will cancel the customary midwinter airdrop of supplies and mail to two of the three research stations the United States operates in Antarctica. The annual drop customarily takes place in June, when surface temperatures drop to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Normally a large C-141 Air Force transport plane, accompanied part of the way by an air-to-air refueling tanker plane, flies nonstop from Christchurch, New Zealand, to Antarctica and back, dropping by parachute mail, emergency equipment, and fresh fruit and vegetables to the 256 scientists wintering over at McMurdo Station and at the South Pole. The flight also is utilized by scientists aboard the plane for winter observations over the darkened continent. This year there will be no mail, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables or aerial observations in order to save an estimated $1 million. That is the equivalent of one hour and thirty-five minutes’ worth of aid to Israel. We know how those 256 Americans would prefer to see their tax money spent. We suspect their fellow Americans would support them.

Moving up, the National Park Service cares for 5,000 historic structures in its Western Region, which stretches from the Pacific Coast states to Guam. Visitors who pay for admission to such sites as Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay often remark at the poor condition in which they find these historic landmarks. The reason is that the Park Service has only $1.5 million a year to preserve them—all of them. That, of course, could be doubled if the Israelis could forego two hours and 23 minutes’ worth of their aid this year.

Then there was the $550 million from the U.S. foreign aid total that in 1995 went to help support indigenous family planning programs all over the globe, comprising 45 percent of the total spent on the issue by all foreign aid programs in the world. Since population and environmental programs are two sides of the same coin, aimed at keeping the planet habitable until widespread availability of such information causes soaring birth rates in the Third World to level off sometime in the 21st century, many people feel there is no more important issue facing humanity today. Yet Congress is cutting the program drastically, both this year and next. Suppose, instead, the program were kept at its 1995 level by funding it entirely with 361/2 days’ worth of aid to Israel?

On a little larger scale, the U.S. Army is disbanding one-third of its 386,000 National Guard troops since they are not presently needed in Haiti, Bosnia or other places where U.S. troops have been serving overseas. It means the remaining citizen-soldiers may be called out more frequently for such peacekeeping operations, but the savings will be $1.1 billion. Of course another way to achieve the same savings would be to cut aid to Israel for 101/2 weeks.

Then there’s President Bill Clinton’s pie-in-the-sky proposal to put a computer in every public school classroom by the year 2,000—a program that not only would help American kids stay competitive with those growing up in other industrialized countries, but also make it possible for every class in the United States to hook up with the Internet. The president says it would cost $2 billion over the next four years and no one’s offering to pick up that bill. Suppose, however, that Congress just decided to fund it all in one year by diverting just 19 weeks’ worth of this year’s aid from Israel.

Actually, Congress could do all of the things suggested above, from dropping groceries to scientists at the South Pole to linking up every classroom in America to the Internet for $3,652,500,000 taken from Israel’s aid grants—and that would still leave Israel almost $2 billion this year. Egypt and Israel still would be the two largest recipients in the world of U.S. foreign aid.

The incredible size of the annual U.S. taxpayer handout to Israel is best illustrated by some “comparable” expenditures. As previously reported in this magazine, the total cost of reconstruction in Bosnia after three and a half years of war there is estimated at just under $6 billion. Of this, perhaps $3 billion will be paid by the World Bank and other international funding institutions, $2 billion by European Union countries, and up to $1 billion by the United States.

Why do the Israelis, who haven’t fought a war on their own soil since 1948, need annually from the United States more than the Bosnians are asking for their total reconstruction effort? The populations of the two countries are comparable—yet the Israelis demand every year from the U.S. alone what the Bosnians are asking from the whole world on a one-time basis and spread over four or five years.

As also previously reported in this space, the total costs of claims to all American insurance companies for damage from Maine to Puerto Rico inflicted by 19 hurricanes and tropical storms in 1995, the busiest Atlantic hurricane season in history—is $3.35 billion, just over half the damage to the U.S. Treasury of only one routine year’s aid to Israel.

The total cost of the devastating Jan. 17, 1994 earthquake in heavily populated Los Angeles County was $7 billion—just over the cost of one year’s aid to Israel, which has had no such natural disasters. Where is Congress’ sense of proportion?