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US will be held accountable for Israeli genocide on Palestinians: International lawyer

A Palestinian man kisses the hand of a relative by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, November 18, 2012. (AP photo)

Israel has been committing an incremental “genocide” against Palestinians and the United States will be held accountable for “aiding and abetting” the Zionist regime in this crime, an international lawyer and political commentator says. 

Barry Grossman, who is based on the Indonesian island of Bali, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday while commenting on a report which says that Israel is seeking a 60 percent increase in annual military aid from the US.

Under the existing agreement that was signed in 2007 and expires in 2017, Israel recessives about $3 billion of military aid every year. Israeli officials are reportedly demanding an average of $5 billion a year over the 2018-2028 period.

“Every dollar provided by US taxpayer to fund the occupation military, is a dollar that is freed up from Israel’s own budget to be used to bribe American politicians,” Grossman said.   

“While other allies and client states have their US military aid doled out in quarterly allotments, Israel receives all of its allocation in one lump sum early in the year,” he added.

“Israel also enjoys ‘fast-track’ status for weapons sales, meaning that it is able to bypass the Pentagon and make deals directly with weapons manufacturers.

“All of this is of course justified by disingenuous claims that the US is merely aiding Israel to defend itself against terrorist threats but in making this case, America’s corrupt political and security establishment invokes highly politicized notions of self-defense and national security which do violence to any reasonable definition of those terms.

“That same corrupt establishment also ignores that the occupiers are engaged in a massive continuing crime and can hardly be considered engaged in anything that can be called self-defense given that Israel has not openly engaged a foreign military threat since it lost the South Lebanon conflict which was the result of Israel’s military assault on Lebanon, after it had already been defeated in its war on Lebanon  which followed Israel’s large scale invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the 80’s.

“Moreover, the second intifada waged by Palestinians ended 10 years ago and, since then, and I say this categorically there has been a more than 90 percent decline in the incidence of lethal so-called ‘Palestinian terrorism’ claimed by Israel.

“In recognition of this unequivocal demonstration of Palestinian willingness to ‘give peace a chance,’ the occupiers have continued to seize more and more Palestinian territory,  kill and detain ever increasing numbers of Palestinian men, women, and children,  and  belligerently attacked Gaza in major operations like Operation Cast Lead and Operation Protective Edge, along with countless lesser operations – all funded by US taxpayers as a result of decisions made by corrupt politicians who have in one form or another been bribed, blackmailed, or threatened by Zionist lobbyists funded, as often as not, with  money saved as a result of US military aid to Israel.” 

Israeli troops with their tanks in a staging area near the Gaza Strip, November 18, 2012. (AP photo)
Palestinians gather around a destroyed house after an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, November 19, 2012. (Reuters photo) 
An emergency rescue worker carries a Palestinian child's body found in the Daloo family house rubble following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, November 18, 2012. (Reuters photo)

Grossman said that “the US political establishment ignores America’s own long standing professed policy which, like most of the wider international community of nations, considers so-called Israeli settlements in the [occupied] West Bank and Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem [al-Quds] to be unlawful, to say nothing the occupying force’s orchestrated and unrelenting violations of the internationally recognized laws of conflict and occupation.”

“Of course with roughly 8 percent of the US economy comprised of weapons related industries and military and law enforcement spending, the US economy has become a war economy, so the willingness of its political establishment to champion ever increasing amounts of military aid to Israel at the expense of US tax payers, for that reason alone, should not be surprising to anyone,” he stated.

“Indeed, bearing in mind the multiplier effect associated with government fiscal spending, every dollar of aid not given to Israel has the effect of contracting the US economy by an amount several times greater than the dollar saved. In other words, the US economy has become very much dependant on America’s obscene levels of military spending which, in aggregate, are as much as the rest of the world combined,” the analyst stated.

“The US is addicted to war in the same way heroin addicts are unhappily addicted to opiates, typically as a result of some spiritual ailment which they suffer. If the US was a person, those who care would organize an intervention with the aim of putting it through a detoxification and subsequent counseling program,” he noted.

“But since we are stuck with the status quo, Americans need to understand that in the same way drug addicts are eventually held to account for the crimes they are compelled by their addiction to commit. The United States will certainly be held to account for its crimes in aiding and abetting Israel’s slow genocide on Palestinians,” Grossman concluded.


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