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Questioning U.S. - Israeli ties
By G. Jefferson Price III
Originally published April 18, 2006 - The Baltimore Sun

There's never really a comfortable time to speak or write critically of the extraordinary relationship between Israel and the United States.

The topic arouses passionate reaction. The suggestion that to criticize the relationship implies ill feeling toward Israel and, at its worst, anti-Semitism is almost inevitable. At the same time, criticism provokes the accusation that it means support for the Palestinians against Israel, meaning support for acts of terrorism inflicted on Israeli civilians, such as the suicide bomber attack that killed more than half a dozen people and wounded scores of others in Tel Aviv yesterday.

So one always approaches the subject with some trepidation. I have a lot of experience with this as a columnist and former foreign editor and Middle East correspondent for The Sun. One has to be very careful not to make mistakes when writing about Israel.

This need for caution came to mind in reviewing an article published recently by two of this country's most prominent academicians, John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard.

The article, which was published March 23 by the London Review of Books and appears in unedited form on the Web site of Harvard's Kennedy School for Government, is deeply critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship. It blames the relationship and all of its consequences on the huge domestic political influence of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its partners among America's Christian right and the neoconservative elite.

In the beginning of the article, the two academics succinctly lay out the extraordinary dimensions of the relationship:

"Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War II, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli ... especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

"Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the U.S., but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 percent of its allocation to subsidize its own defense industry. [Israel] is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the U.S. opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. ... Finally, the U.S. gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons."

Most people who pay attention to the U.S.-Israel relationship know this, though it's not much discussed. And if Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt had devoted themselves to that part of the truth and its consequences, with full support and documentation, it would have been a very worthwhile study.

But they went too far in many ways, the most important of these being the blame they lay on "the Lobby" for taking America to war against Iraq and for today's frightening relationships between the U.S. and Syria and the U.S. and Iran.

A large section of the article is devoted to the Iraq-Iran-Syria proposition. The flaw lies in what I see as the absurdity of the notion that it took the Israel lobby to persuade President Bush to invade Iraq or to take on Iran and Syria the way he is doing now. Certainly, Israel is a beneficiary of this posture and would encourage it. Certainly, the advocates of war against Iraq included some of this country's leading pro-Israel hawks. But they didn't need any pushing from Israel on this issue.

The article has generated a torrent of reaction. The attacks against the professors focus on this flaw and others in the article, instead of the undeniable imbalance of America's historic financial and diplomatic support for Israel. Too bad, really, for, as the professors assert, it is a point very much worth discussing.

G. Jefferson Price III is a former foreign correspondent and an editor at The Sun.

DOWNLOAD the John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt report mentioned .. CLICK HERE

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Historically, money laundering investigations have led police to narcotics and fraud schemes. But lately, the crime is leading police to coyotes and the people they smuggle, Simmons said.

DPS Sgt. Ernie Renfro said an illegal immigrant typically pays a smuggler $1,500 to $1,800 to be taken into the United States.

When dozens of immigrants come to the United States together, the coyotes end up with large amounts of cash that they cannot deposit or spend without drawing suspicion from financial regulators. So they must launder the money.

Authorities declined to say what techniques the smugglers use, but a Tribune investigation last year revealed that many coyotes move cash around through Western Union money transfer stores. This process helps obscure the link between the cash and illegal immigration.

“If we find out someone is laundering money, and we find out they are smuggling aliens, then we do the best we can to get leads of where the stash house is,” Renfro said. “Because these people are left there without food and water.”

After the illegal immigrants are discovered, local authorities call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transport the people, Simpson said. But federal authorities don’t always show up.

Simpson said about 60 percent of the time, ICE retrieves the immigrants. But the rest of the time police must let them walk away.

“I don’t know what to say except that historically we have to prioritize calls in the order of importance,” ICE spokesman Russell Ahr said. “There are occasions where there are actually lives in danger, so we have to go with that first.”

On Friday in west Mesa, the task force arrested five suspected human smugglers and handed over 61 undocumented immigrants to federal agents. The following night, investigators arrested four suspected human smugglers and found 13 illegal immigrants in an east Mesa hotel. Monday night’s surveillance led police to discover 81 undocumented immigrants crammed inside two condominiums.

“The more the money is interrupted through investigations,” Simmons said, then “the more people we’re getting in houses because (the smugglers) don’t have the money to ship them off anywhere.”

Task force officials would not comment on items confiscated during the raids — such as cash and weapons — because of pending investigations. The task force includes investigators from the Phoenix Police Department, DPS and the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.