Yamina party leader Ayelet Shaked spoke to emissaries from the LAVI movement on Sunday at the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem.
LAVI runs centers for Jewish identity in European countries and partners with the BRIT ḤAZON movement on educational programs and initiatives for Jewish students in North America.
The LAVI emissaries were meeting with movement leaders and BRIT ḤAZON activists prior to being sent out for a year to run centers of Jewish culture in Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland and Austria.
Shaked took a short break from her election campaign to give the emissaries an encouraging farewell address.
“The fight against assimilation is perhaps one of the most important goals of the leadership of our generation,” Shaked said. “We are in a real crisis.”
“Seventy percent of American Jews are assimilated,” she added. “It is an existential danger to the Jewish people and therefore it is very important that the Israeli government also show responsibility and invest resources in Diaspora projects to prevent assimilation.”
Following her remarks, Shaked invited everyone to ask questions and several BRIT ḤAZON student activists in attendance demanded to know if the Yamina party has a plan to free the State of Israel from dependency on the United States.
While Shaked agreed that Israel’s economy doesn’t need US foreign aid, she said she saw nothing wrong with Israel receiving free gifts.
When the activists further pressed her on how accepting money and weapons from the US actually limits Israel’s independence and has for decades allowed Washington to infringe on Israel’s sovereignty, Shaked resorted to generic political soundbites about Israel’s strength and independence.
What quickly became clear to our activists was that Shaked, like most politicians in the Israeli national camp, isn’t sufficiently knowledgeable in regards to how US aid works – how it’s actually an American government subsidy to its own arms industry and how it stifles the economic growth and independence of recipient nations.
Since the early 1970s, every American administration has placed heavy pressure on Israel’s political leadership to comply with Washington’s imperialist agenda for the Middle East. Using the aid as diplomatic leverage, US officials have succeeded in removing a number of Israeli leaders from office and pressuring others to comply with American demands.
Israel’s already tenuous situation became worse when former US President Barack Obama deepened our dependency on Washington with a ten year $38 billion memorandum of understanding agreed upon during the final year of his administration. This new MOU allocates $3.3 billion in military financing and $500 million in missile defense each year to Israel while altering the terms of the aid package.
Until Obama’s MOU, roughly a quarter of the aid could be spent on local Israeli products while a little over 75% of the money had to be spent on American weapons and equipment often more expensive and qualitatively inferior to Israeli versions of the same products.
According to the new MOU, however, 100% of the military aid must now be spent on American products, resulting in further losses for Israeli defense companies that have long ago lost their own country’s military as a client and have, as a result, resorted to arming human rights violators in various countries.
Throughout the world, economic aid is used by the the forces of empire as a means of controlling developing countries viewed as strategically important to American interests while at the same time funneling most of the money back to US companies (arms, oil, construction, etc.).
Once dependent on the money, these nations come under Washington’s control and are forced to comply with America’s imperialist policies – not only in their own regions but throughout the globe (Israel, for example, is the sole nation to vote together with the US at the United Nations against ending the embargo on Cuba).
Decades of receiving US aid has eroded Israel’s national sovereignty and has given American leaders dominion over nearly all areas of Israeli policy. It would be nice to have at least one faction in the next Knesset that understands the neo-imperialist nature of foreign aid and could be trusted to fight for a free and independent Israel. Although we’ve had such parliamentary voices in the past, it seems that even the most nationalist parties slated to pass the 3.25% electoral threshold on September 17 are largely ignorant when it comes to this crucial national issue.
