Two Studies Reveal the Shocking Cost of American Support for Israel
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The true cost of the alliance between the United States and Israel is a shocker according to two new studies. What the studies reveal is seldom investigated and reported. Yet the publication of the studies – along with the remarks of a former U.S. ambassador – help to explain the astonishing human, financial, and diplomatic price of American support for the Zionist state.
Studies published on October 7 by Brown University’s Watson Institute show that more people have died in Gaza from starvation and sickness than have been directly killed by the war – while the U.S. has massively increased its funding of Israel over the same period.
In a video published on October 15, independent Jewish journalist Glenn Greenwald hosts the authors of the two reports from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Greenwald has been extensively covering the Israel conflict and interviewed guests critical of the Zionist atrocities against Palestinians.
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Over 100,000 lives lost
Speaking to the author of the first study, Greenwald hears how the death toll in Gaza is likely far higher than the 41,000 deaths currently reported. Claiming a minimum of 67,000 additional deaths from malnutrition and sickness, Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ report says this would give a total of over 100,000 dead – in one year.
Her estimates follow a Lancet report, which put the death toll even higher: upwards of 186,000 deaths (direct and indirect) “could be attributable” to the war in Gaza as of June 19, 2024.
Many more, mostly civilians, have been killed since then.
Counting the human cost of this war, Stamatopoulou-Robbins said the higher totals she and The Lancet found were due to the inclusion of “indirect deaths” – caused by starvation and lack of medical treatment – a result of Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The Biden-Harris administration has, in recent days, condemned Israel for restricting food, water, and medical supplies into Gaza and has given the Israeli government a 30-day ultimatum to lift its self-declared siege. The U.S. government threatened on Sunday,October 13, to halt the supply of weapons and ammunition to Israel should it not permit aid to enter Gaza.
Growing numbers of Americans, including thousands of anti-Zionist U.S. Jews, are questioning why the massive, non-stop weapons supplies used to kill thousands of innocent civilians were not suspended long ago.
Loss of $300 billion
Greenwald also hears from William Hartung, one of the authors of a second paper on the financial cost to U.S. taxpayers of supporting Israel. Hartung hopes this will give Americans the power of information to question their presumed consent to ongoing U.S. sponsorship of Israel’s frequent assassinations and mass killings of innocent, defenceless civilians.
In this October 7 2024 report for the Costs of War project, the U.S. was shown to have spent over $300 billion dollars on Israel over 70 years. Yet there is, Hartung says, “little U.S. public awareness” of the real cost to the American taxpayer. He shows, “From 1951 to 2022, the U.S. provided Israel with an estimated $317 billion in assistance, including $225 billion in direct military aid.”
This figure is set to rise significantly, as “aid” to Israel has spiked in the past twelve months – with 2023 and 2024 excluded from the running total. Hartung’s report adds: “In just one year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel.”
This “aid” to the tiny nation of 9.4 million people (Worldometer population stats), representing 0.12% of the world’s population, has totalled more from America than the US has given to any other nation on the planet since WWII.
A slightly higher Wikipedia population figure oddly “defines the population of Israel as including Jews living in all of the West Bank and Palestinians in East Jerusalem but excluding Palestinians anywhere in the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and foreign workers anywhere in Israel.”
Jewish levels have been rapidly increasing, while Indigenous Arab and Christian numbers have been substantially declining because of war, increased discrimination, oppression and consequent death or emigration.
Why do Americans not hear of the real aid figure? In his report, Hartung explains, “It has been difficult for the U.S. public, journalists and members of Congress to get an accurate understanding” of the total amount of money sent to Israel. Total U.S. defence expenses have been impossible to calculate, $trillions are missing and reliable audits have been impossible to conduct for decades.
As the U.K.’s Independent newspaper reported last week, State Department spokesman Matt Miller was either unable or unwilling to give a simple answer to the question of how much money the U.S. gives to Israel.
Why do simple questions lead to “heated exchanges” like this?
As Greenwald points out, there is a simple answer. “This is a US/Israeli war in Gaza”. It is undertaken at the expense of the American taxpayer and is exacting a horrendous human toll.
Loss of influence
What has been the diplomatic price paid by the U.S. for this costly war?
Former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman believes that the U.S. alliance with Israel has left the United States “without any diplomatic influence in the region” – destroying U.S. power.
Speaking on October 9, Freeman further charged that the chief diplomat of the US, Antony Blinken, has “singularly failed in virtually every diplomatic endeavor that he’s undertaken”, being “as much a representative of Israeli interests and demands as he has been of those of the United States.”
This continues a trend of declining U.S. diplomacy identified by Freeman, who served as the United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia for 50 years.
Freeman told Durham University’s Global Policy Journal in 2023, “We don’t do diplomacy anymore.”
Freeman, who claimed his diplomatic career was ended by the Israel lobby in 2009, has consistently warned that U.S. diplomats such as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan are “remarkably inept” – and their attempts to coerce the world into submission are no longer effective. Blinken has claimed, by contrast, that the diplomacy strategy under the Biden/Harris administration had produced a diplomatic and domestic “strategy of renewal,” “…pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.”
By contrast, Freeman argued that the U.S. has lost control – a condition that is also self-inflicted.
“The world is now composed not of a dominant, single, unified domain dominated by the United States, as it may have been briefly after the Cold War,” Freeman wrote last year, saying that the Blinken school of “diplomacy” has helped to isolate the U.S.
“The world is composed of multiple competing regional centers — and we’ve done a good deal to bring that about.”
In a video from October 15 with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Freeman now charges that with Israel as a “pariah,” the United States’ sponsorship of the Israelis is cementing its regional and international isolation.
“Israel is now, of course, a pariah – regarded as a font of evil rather than a beneficial presence on the planet,” said Freeman, explaining that “…much of the world would like to see Israel destroyed, and the United States is right there alongside Israel”.
As a result, maintains Freeman, the U.S. is “suffering from the same loss of prestige, reputation and influence that Israel is.”
Yet this enormous human, financial and diplomatic cost is still not the bottom line for the U.S. The price of commitment to Israel may sharply rise, as the recent transfer of U.S. soldiers to staff THAAD ballistic missile defence systems could spark U.S. involvement in a war with Iran.
More loss… of American lives?
Freeman warns this signals “widening American involvement” in Israel’s plans for a regional war, saying the likelihood of direct U.S. participation “is increasing, not decreasing.”
He says a captive domestic audience in the center of U.S. power is applauding this escalation.
“There are a lot of people in Washington who seem to be delighted by the war in Lebanon” – itself a trigger for Iran’s targeting of Israeli military bases in a missile strike on Tuesday, October 1.
Yet Freeman also explains why the Biden-Harris administration has issued the “unprecedented” threat to halt arms supplies to Israel.
“There are a lot of people in this country who are just not prepared to overlook the evil that we are supporting [in Israel],” said Freeman, going on to explain that this is exacting a political toll on the Democratic presidential campaign. These people, said, Freeman, “will not support the Democratic ticket if we continue to aid Israel in its genocide, its mass murder, its forced eviction of people, its ethnic cleansing and its assassination campaigns as well as its efforts to widen a war in the Middle East.”
With news now reaching Americans about the true cost of the U.S.-Israel relationship and both Harris and Trump’s enthusiastic support for it, there is hope that American consent is now better informed and its decision-making shaped by something more urgent than winning elections. The wages of sin have been calculated. How long will Americans be happy paying them?
