Jewish clout in Washington

Israel's assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin has turned the Middle East peace agenda upside down, with the Israeli government ignoring calls for restraint and saying it would target all Palestinian 'militant' leaders including even Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

The US-sponsored peace roadmap now looks deader than the proverbial dodo. But President George W. Bush's refusal to join other world leaders in condemning Sheikh Yassin's assassination comes as no surprise, given the enormous clout the Jewish lobby wields in Washington.

So influential is this lobby (all the more so in a US presidential election year) that no US administration is willing to risk doing anything that could be construed by the American Jewish community as going against Israel's interests.

Which explains why Bush, in his first public comment on Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassin, said in Washington on Tuesday: "Israel has the right to defend herself from terror." The question, however, is, who will defend the Palestinian people from the barbaric acts of violence carried out by the Israeli army?

The villain of peace in Middle East is Israel, not the Palestinian people. But any US president who takes even a mildly tough line against Israel does so at his peril, as George Bush Senior found out to his cost in the 1992 election when American Jews ended up pouring money into Clinton's campaign because Bush Senior had refused to extend $ 10 billion worth of loan guarantees to Israel unless it agreed to attend the Madrid peace talks.

According to a report published in the London Economist in 1992, 60 per cent of all private contributions to Clinton's campaign came from America's Jewish community. Some reports appearing in the press at the time suggested that even Ross Perot's sudden entry into the 1992 presidential campaign as a third-party candidate may have been the handiwork of the Jewish lobby. Perot siphoned off 19 per cent of the Republican vote -- a major factor in Bush Senior's defeat.

Examples of the Israeli lobby's clout in Washington abound, as was seen, for instance, in June 2000 when the Clinton administration agreed to exercise a rarely used waiver to US law that enables Israel to spend more of its multibillion-dollar annual American military aid in Israel, for the purposes of indigenous weapons research, development and procurement.

After months of intense negotiations, an interagency group from the Pentagon, the State Department and the US Treasury acceded to Israeli appeals to waive provisions of the US Arms Control Act limiting the amount of money Israel can spend locally. Although the decision was intended as a one-time exception to be applied solely to Washington's pledged $ 1.2 billion Wye River assistance package to Israel, the precedent had been set for additional waivers for future aid packages associated with Middle East peace agreements.

President George W. Bush has continued this waiver policy, allowing Israel to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid on weapons research and development. Such research programmes have, among other things, enabled Israel to develop weapons systems that it is now offering for sale to other countries, including India -- with whom Israel has signed more than $ 2 billion worth of arms sales agreements in recent months, including one for the supply of three Phalcon aerial radar systems.

But the Bush administration's support to Israel goes far beyond such waivers. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government sent bulldozers into Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's compound in Rammalah in September 2002, reducing all the buildings except one to rubble and cutting off the compound's water and electricity, all Bush had to say on the subject was that Israel's action was 'unhelpful'.

This is the same Bush who has described Sharon as 'a man of peace'. That's like calling Jack the Ripper a man of non-violence.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post in September 2002, Sharon said that 'a great deal of thought' went into the Ramallah assault -- an apparent response to reports that senior Israeli military officials had expressed reservations about the operation to Sharon before it was launched. Israel TV quoted the officers as saying that Sharon wanted 'quick action'.

The so-called Wye River funding was pledged by President Clinton and endorsed by Congress after US sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in October 1998.

The Wye River precedent was also applied to $ 50 million in military assistance pledged by Washington as a result of Israel's May 25, 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon. The precedent was also applied to the multibillion-dollar military assistance packages that Israel received from the United States in 2001, 2002 and 2003.

Guidelines associated with US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) assistance require Israel to spend 73.7 per cent of its annual FMF money in the United States on US products and services. The remaining 26.3 per cent -- known as offshore procurement -- is converted into Israeli shekels and used to fund weapons programmes and related efforts deemed as high priority by Israel's ministry of defence.

US FMF grants to Israel for the year 2000 stood at $ 1.92 billion, with $ 505 million allowed in offshore procurement. Like previous grants, this whole amount of $ 1.92 billion was in the form of outright grants, meaning that Israel did not have to pay back the money (further evidence of the Israeli lobby's clout).

As for the $ 1.2 billion Wye River funding, US guidelines called for $ 315 million to be spent in Israel, with the remaining $ 885 million to be spent in the United States. But the June 2000 waiver allowed Israel to use $ 260 million of FMF funds to pay the US Army Corps of Engineers to manage major Israeli construction projects in Israel, thus, in effect, raising Israel's portion of offshore procurement to nearly 50 per cent.

The Israelis were jubilant. "This was a very creative solution and quite unprecedented. It allows us to preserve our offshore procurement for other critical priorities," crowed Brigadier Motty Besser, the then-director of the Israeli defence ministry's budget department and chief financial adviser to Israel's chief of general staff.

Besser said in June 2000 that he did not yet know how the $ 50 million promised by Washington as a result of the Lebanon 'redeployment' would be spent (redeployment is Tel Aviv's euphemism for withdrawing from its totally illegal occupation of southern Lebanon). "It's too early to tell exactly how it will work, but we hope we can follow the example set out in the Wye package," Besser said.

Although most of the military construction projects were relevant to the Wye River agreement and Israel's withdrawal from Palestinian territories, some were not, including the construction of a new high-rise military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Thus, Israel was, in effect, able to alter even the terms of the Wye River funding package to its own advantage.

Besser said the ability to use more offshore procurement for high-priority domestic programmes was only one of the ways that Israel sought to increase the purchasing power of its annual FMF assistance from Washington.

He said that every year since 1991, Israel has received its FMF money in a one-time disbursement at the beginning of the fiscal year, an arrangement that has resulted in a windfall to Israel of about $ 500 million in interest during the 1991-2000 period. In 2000, Israel received $ 450 million of its $ 1.9 billion FMF assistance package in advance.

Intriguingly, the waivers given to Israel by the Clinton administration came at a time when the US Congress was considering legislation to strip President Clinton of the authority to offer arms exemptions to US allies. The legislation took the form of arcane language attached to Senate Bill S2382, the 'Technical Assistance, Trade Promotion and Anti-Corruption Act of 2000'.

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted the new legislation. But the legislation did not strip the US president of his power to grant arms exemptions to Israel -- the most 'allied' of America's allies.

Jews presently comprise 2.3 percent of the population of the United States, and about 0.221% of the population of the world. There are 13,296,100 Jews (roughly) in a world of six billion persons.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation of Sweden to men and women who have rendered the greatest service to humankind. Between 1901 and 2003, 735 Nobel Prizes were handed out. Of these, 161 are Jews. This is 21.9% of all prizes, or roughly 100 times that fraction to be expected from the population distribution.

Literature

1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
2001- Imre Kertesz

World Peace

1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Chemistry

1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1972 - William Howard Stein
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1989 - Sidney Altman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus

Economics

1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1973- Wassily Leontief
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel
1994- John C. Harsanyi
1997- Myron S. Scholes 2001- Joseph E. Stiglitz
2001- George A. Akerlof
2002- Daniel Kahneman

Medicine

1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1944- Joseph Erlanger
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1947- Gerty Cori and Theresa Radnitz
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - David Baltimore
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
1977- Andrew V. Schally
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1994- Martin Rodbell
1997- Stanley B. Prusiner
1998 - Robert F. Furchgott
2000 - Paul Greengard
2002 - Robert H. Horvitz
2002 - Sydney Brenner

Physics

1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943- Otto Stern
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1945- Wolfgang Pauli
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1958- Il'ja Mikhailovich Frank
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1963- Eugene P. Wigner
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1967- Hans Albrecht Bethe
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972- Leon N. Cooper
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992- Georges Charpak
1995 - Martin Perl
1995- Fredrick Reines
1996- Douglas D. Osheroff
1996 - David M. Lee
1997- Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
2000 - Zhores I. Alferov
2003 - Vitaly Gi

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