According to a Nov. 14 Bloomberg report, the U.S. has been “quietly” pouring in weapons and ammunition from U.S. and NATO stockpiles for the invasion of Gaza. These are arms that are not part of the official Congress-approved military aid to the apartheid state of Israel. Quietly is Bloomberg’s weasel word for secret.
Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon has “quietly increased military assistance” to the Israeli apartheid forces, fulfilling requests for additional laser-guided missiles for its Apache gunship fleet, 155mm shells, night-vision devices, bunker-buster munitions, and new army vehicles. Bloomberg quoted an internal Defense Department list.
The military armaments go beyond the widely known provision of Iron Dome interceptors and Boeing smart bombs. As of late October, deliveries included all 36,000 rounds of 30mm cannon ammunition, 1,800 of the requested M141 bunker-buster munitions, and a minimum of 3,500 night-vision devices. The ammunition for AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships includes about 2,000 Hellfire Laser Guided missiles made by Lockheed Martin.
There can be no question that the U.S. is fully behind the apartheid regime’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, an operation that began after President Joe Biden’s theatrical public embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. It was the hug that launched an invasion.
Zionist-occupied Palestine — “Israel” — is an apartheid settler state, more like a U.S. colony. Joe Biden recently repeated a line he famously said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” Actually, they did invent one.
Although the British declared the creation of the settler colony in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, it was after World War II, with British power fading, that the Zionist state of Israel was founded (invented) with the backing of the United States. It couldn’t and wouldn’t have been done without U.S. backing. From that beginning, Israel could not have existed for even one day without U.S. financial and military support.
The United States has officially given Israel more than $260 billion in combined military and economic aid since World War II, plus about $10 billion more in contributions for missile defense systems like the Iron Dome, according to a U.S. News report. No other country in the world has received such military and economic support from the U.S. Some have even called it the 51st state of the U.S.
In a speech in December 1981, Gen. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, said Israel is “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security” (source: NYT article, Dec. 15, 1981).
The profits of this “American aircraft carrier” go to Big Oil and the military-industrial weapons manufacturers.
Taking over Europe’s gas market
Since the 1990s, Washington and Wall Street have been trying to take over the natural gas market in Europe from Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline was the primary route for Russian natural gas, and Nord Stream 2 was built to expand capacity. Before the NATO proxy war against Russia began, Victoria Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, declared that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” On Sept. 27, 2022, the pipeline was blown up by the U.S. military, as reported by Seymour Hersch.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the disruption of the Nord Stream pipelines a “major strategic opportunity for years to come” and highlighted that the “U.S. has become the leading supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe,” which is at a significantly higher price than the Russian natural gas.
LNG, delivered by ships, is the only alternative available right now to Russian natural gas delivered through pipelines. The top two suppliers worldwide of LNG are the U.S. and Qatar. The North Field East Project of Qatar Energy is an ExxonMobil, ENI, Total Energies, ConocoPhillips, and Shell partnership. They are talking of a pipeline across occupied Palestine to the Mediterranean to expedite deliveries to Europe.
The natural gas U.S. oil giant Chevron already plunders natural gas from the stolen waters off Palestine. Chevron operates a major natural gas facility, named Tamar, located 12 miles off the coast in the territorial waters of the Palestinian Territory of Gaza. As the New York Times reported, this has been projected to become a hub for exporting natural gas to Europe through the proposed EastMed pipeline.
Military-industrial profits soar
Never to be underestimated, “Wall Street eyes big profits from war,” was a Guardian headline on Oct. 30.
“Wall Street is hoping for an explosion in profits,” the Guardian reports.
“During third-quarter earnings calls this month, analysts from Morgan Stanley and TD Bank took note of this potential profit-making escalation in conflict and asked unusually blunt questions about the financial benefit of the war …
“Joe Biden has asked Congress for $106bn in military and humanitarian aid for Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian assistance for Gaza. The money could be a boon to the aerospace and weapons sector, which enjoyed a 7-percentage point jump in value …
“Greg Hayes, Raytheon’s chairman and executive director, responded: ‘I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking … on top of what we think is going to be an increase in the [Department of Defense] top line [budget].’”
Gary Wilson is the author of War and Lenin in the 21st Century.
Join the Struggle-La Lucha Telegram channel