Once Again, Israel Gets Away With Spending U.S. Aid on West Bank Settlements

By Lucille Barnes

No matter what U.S. law says, and no matter what the Israeli government does, U.S. President Bill Clinton manages to keep the level of its U.S. aid undiminished. He promised Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that he would not allow that level to drop below the fiscal year 1993 level in fiscal year 1994 and again in 1995.

It's a problem, since in a spasm of uncharacteristic probity Congress has decreed that for every dollar the Israeli government spends on its illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the president must deduct a dollar from Israel's loan guarantees for the following year.

This was done in each fiscal year since Clinton made his promise. And each time, the Clinton administration has found an excuse to put the deducted money back into some other part of Israel's aid. This year, U.S. investigators concluded that Israel had spent $300 million on Jewish settlements and provisions were made to deduct that amount from Israel's $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. (The U.S. promised Israel a total of $10 billion in loan guarantees at the rate of $2 billion annually, starting in fiscal year 1993.)

After the Sept. 28 White House signing ceremonies for a Palestinian-Israeli implementation agreement, however, Clinton promised Rabin that $240 million of the most recent deduction would be restored to Israel to facilitate the withdrawal of its troops from the West Bank. It's the first time we realized that bringing troops home apparently costs more than leaving them on duty in someone else's territory. Perhaps, having made this discovery, President Clinton will decide to keep more U.S. forces overseas to help balance the U.S. budget.

Since continuing aid to Israel at the 1993 level of $6.321 billion costs U.S. taxpayers $17,317,808 a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, we can think of some considerably better ways to save money. For example, so far as the United Nations is concerned, the United States now is the biggest deadbeat in the world. The U.N. is going to international banking operations to borrow the cash to keep its peacekeeping missions going because the 185 members now are $3.7 billion in arrears in their regular and peacekeeping assessments. Of that total, $1.81 billion is owed by the United States. Why not cut annual aid to Israel by less than a third this year (104-1/2 days' worth to be exact), and pay off all of America's outstanding regular dues and special assessments for U.N. peacekeeping operations, a good many of which are on Israel's borders anyway?

With record numbers of hurricanes hacking away at Atlantic Coast beaches this year, the running debate between the Army Corps of Engineers and owners of beach homes is heating up. The engineers say homes shouldn't have been built along those beautiful sandy beaches, and to prove it they point out they have spent $4 billion over the past 30 years on beach replenishment. How about deducting eight days' worth of aid to Israel to pay for this year's work? Or, better yet, why not deduct two-thirds of Israel's aid this year (231 days' worth) to pay for all the Corps of Engineers beach replenishment for the next 30 years, so that beach homeowners from Maine to Florida can have peace of mind for the next generation and a half?

In its efforts to balance the federal budget, Congress has elected not to fund the National Service Corps next year. The program has been operating at $475 million a year to put thousands of young Americans to work in non-profit agencies in exchange for minimum wages and a college grant of $4,725 for each year of service. Some people don't like the program because it was President Clinton's first major initiative. But others of the older generation recall how the GI Bill opened up opportunities for young people all over America, giving the country the greatest shot of upward social mobility in its history, and profoundly changing America for the better. Young people since have had less happy experiences with taking on student loan burdens that they couldn't pay off for years. So instead of scrapping the national service corps, which has the virtues of the GI Bill while solving the principal problem associated with student loans, why not divert 27-1/2 days' worth of aid to Israel to keep it alive and make it possible for talented and idealistic young Americans to earn a college education they might otherwise not be able to afford?

The Broadway Limited was synonymous with luxury and speed back in the days when movie stars and corporate executives traveled between Chicago and New York by train. Now it's more likely to carry foreign tourists, Americans on a budget and not in a hurry, or people who just don't want to drive or fly the 907 miles.

But on Sept. 9 Amtrak scrapped the route to save $17.3 million a year. Too bad they didn't check first with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal Washington, DC lobby, to see if its client couldn't spare just one day's worth of aid annually so that people riding between America's first and "second city" could see some scenery instead of just the tops of the clouds.

In the battle of the budget, probably more has been written about the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts than any other single item. Whether or not you think the feds should be messing around in American cultural life (subject, of course, to approval by the 535 esthetes in Congress), it's interesting to realize that the whole brouhaha is over an annual NEA budget of $167 million, or 9-1/2 days' worth of aid to Israel.

Will Congress someday start complaining about that? Just kidding, of course.

Lucille Barnes writes on national politics from Washington, DC.