How US bankrolling Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians destroys all hope of peace

 US secretary of state John Kerry and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu

 

Stop the War Coalition

 

Will Americans ever acknowledge their government's active role in destroying the chances for a just and lasting peace between Palestine and Israel?

The top recipient of U.S. foreign aid over the past three decades isn’t some impoverished land filled with starving kids, but a wealthy nation with a per-head gross domestic product on par with the European Union average, and higher than that of Italy, Spain, or South Korea.

This top recipient of such aid -- nearly all of it military since 2008 -- has been busily engaged in what looks like a nineteenth-century-style colonization project. In the late 1940s, our beneficiary expelled some 700,000 indigenous people from the land it was claiming.  In 1967, our client seized some contiguous pieces of real estate and ever since has been colonizing these territories with nearly 650,000 of its own people. It has divided the conquered lands with myriad checkpoints and roads accessible only to the colonizers and is building a 440-mile wall around (and cutting into) the conquered territory, creating a geography of control that violates international law.

“Ethnic cleansing” is a harsh term, but apt for a situation in which people are driven out of their homes and lands because they are not of the right tribe. Though many will balk at leveling this charge against Israel -- for that country is, of course, the top recipient of American aid and especially military largesse -- who would hesitate to use the term if, in a mirror-image world, all of this were being inflicted on Israeli Jews?

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