Israel has made an initial request for its annual U.S. defense aid to increase to as much as $5 billion when its current aid package, worth an average $3 billion a year, expires in 2017, US congressional sources said on Wednesday.

Israel wants $5 billion per year in military aid for 10 years, for a total of $50 billion, the congressional aides said. It has been signaling that it wants more money to counter threats it says will arise as a result of the international agreement on Iran's nuclear program, which Israel's government has staunchly opposed.

Congressional and other US officials cautioned that negotiations on the new aid deal were still in the early stages and the proposal is not yet at the stage where it has been formally brought to Congress, which must approve the funds.

"First they have to negotiate with the White House," one senior congressional aide said of Israel.

One would expect the Israeli government to put an end to attacks by the settlers of Adei Ad on Palestinian civilians. In fact, it rewards them by planning to legalize their West Bank outpost.


During the second Sukkot holiday and the weekend preceding it, Yesh Din investigators documented 29 incidents of assault on Palestinians and their property by Israeli civilians (note that these are only the incidents known to us). The majority of the Israeli media did not report on the incidents, which included an attempt to set the home of a Palestinian family on fire using a firebomb, as well as an assault on an ambulance near the village of Burin. In a series of cases, IDF soldiers reportedly stood idly by and did not prevent attacks on the innocent or their property, despite their legal obligation to do so.

People unfamiliar with the events in the West Bank may think that ideological violence by Israeli civilians only appears as a response to terror attacks. In reality, such attacks take place on ordinary days as well. The response of those responsible for law enforcement in the West Bank – the Israeli government and the IDF – is the same: to ignore Israeli law breakers as much as possible. Israeli civilians know that when they go on the prowl, not only (despite the claims of the Minister of Defense) will IDF troops treat them less harshly when they throw stones or set fields ablaze.The security forces will also aid them by using crowd-dispersal weapons against Palestinian landowners, not the trespassers – who often walk into the very center of Palestinian villages. They also know that no one else will do anything to them. The chance that the complaint lodged by a Palestinian will lead to the conviction of an Israeli who commits an ideological crime is only 1.9 percent.

And they know something else too: that the government of Israel, forced to pretend to be shocked, absolutely shocked by their attacks, is not all that perturbed. Two days before the recent wave of violence erupted, the prosecution informed the High Court of Justice, in response to our petition, that not only does it have no intention of removing the outpost of Adei Ad, it actually intends to legalize it.

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/hillary-promises-netanyahu

She says nothing about occupation or denial of rights to Palestinians. They’re terrorists:

I wrote and co-sponsored bills that isolated terror groups, and pushed to crack down on incitement in Palestinian textbooks and schools.

She promises to invite Netanyahu, or whoever the PM is, to the White House inside of a month:

I will do everything I can to enhance our strategic partnership and strengthen America’s security commitment to Israel, ensuring that it always has the qualitative military edge to defend itself. That includes immediately dispatching a delegation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet with senior Israeli commanders. I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/americas/22086-israel-orders-aircraft-carrier-as-part-of-us-military-aid-package

Israel has provided the United States with a list of weapons that it would like to have available as part of the US aid package, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth revealed yesterday.

According to the newspaper the list included a modern aircraft carrier and a squadron of F-15 aircrafts as well as material assistance to support Israel’s anti-ballistic missile system, Arrow 3.

According to the newspaper Israeli officials have asked for these weapons during closed-door meetings with US officials attended by Defence Minister Moshe Ya'alon and US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter in Washington.

The list of arms exceeded the maximum assistance provided by the United States each year, amounting to nearly $3 billion, therefore it has been referred to US President Barack Obama before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House scheduled for next week, the paper reported.

NABLUS (Ma'an) -- At least 14 Palestinians were shot and injured with rubber-coated steel bullets in clashes that erupted in Qasra village in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus after settlers descended on the area in an attempt to attack residents, a local monitor said.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors settler activity in the northern occupied West Bank, said clashes broke out after Israeli forces responded to a dispute between Israel settlers and local Palestinians from the village.

The settlers had tried to attack the eastern area of the village, but were stopped by locals who forced them to retreat before Israeli forces arrived at the scene, Daghlas said.

Two of the 14 Palestinians shot and injured by rubber-coated steel bullets during the subsequent clashes had to be evacuated to Rafidia hospital, while over 20 others suffered from tear gas inhalation.

The State of Israel just validated the very concept of “price tag” violence, which Israel officials have often described — but never legally defined — as terrorism.

The state on Tuesday asked the High Court of Justice to delay the court ordered demolition of a West Bank synagogue built on stolen Palestinian land. The state’s main argument in asking for the extension, which the court begrudgingly granted, went as follows: “Police believe that demolishing the building is likely to lead to violent acts by extremist right-wing actors against Arabs and Muslim religious symbols.” (Hebrew)

In other words: we do not want to enforce the law because we are afraid the criminals will punish us for it. Or, in even clearer and scarier words: we have accepted that terrorists will make us pay a price for carrying out pre-declared, court-ordered, and government sanctioned duties.
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What happened in the settlement of Givat Ze’ev this morning? A group of people openly declared their readiness to use violence in order to resist the demolition of a building built on stolen land, and convinced the police and the government of the State of Israel to declare that they are too scared to enforce the law.

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by Yigal Amir at a 1995 rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo Accords. Israelis commemorated the anniversary last week because their calendar is different from ours.

The occasion had been seen by Israeli liberals as an opportunity for soul-searching; but they are a stark minority in Israeli public life, and the event has been marked by some rightwing outbursts: threats to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin for seeking a Palestinian state and a celebration of Amir at a soccer game.

Rivlin said at a rally honoring Rabin that hope in Israel is now “in the crosshairs.” That rally was organized by Peace Now and other left-of-center groups in Tel Aviv Saturday; more than 100,000 came. Two American presidents spoke, but not the Israeli head of government. Bill Clinton was there, Barack Obama appeared on video. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu did not show up.
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Tomorrow night the NY Public Library will be holding an event about the assassination featuring Dan Ephron, author of a new book on the assassination, Killing a King, along with Nancy Updike and Ira Glass. Ephron said recently that the Amir family are not outcasts in Israel– far from it. He also talked about his book with Americans for Peace Now. I have the impression that Ephron‘s book makes the argument that the assassination transformed Israel. The-settlers-won theory.

"After he started threatening me I asked, 'Why are you cursing? We are all Israelis and belong to one people and live in the State of Israel," continued Shaalan. "He replied and said: 'You're dirty Arabs, you need to be eliminated, killed and butchered.'

"I told him it was undignified to speak that way, but he started pushing and attacking me. At one point I grabbed him, I was afraid he had a knife and would stab me. I didn't want to stab him, so we wouldn't be charged in the end like in many cases."

Shaalan said he found it unfortunate that "these days, people are suspected of being terrorists, and they get shot and in the end it turns out that they are regular people. I am worried that the police will say that my case was not motivated by nationalism. It's easiest to say that and in the end we will pay the price."

"Just then a police car passed by. My friend called to them, but unfortunately they didn't do their job. They asked me to call for a police car. I told them to call for one through their radio, but they insisted that I was the one who needed to do it," he added.

On his twitter feed, co-author Glen Weyl, 30, an economist at Yale, said that he and co-author Steven Levitsky, a 47-year-old Government professor at Harvard, “spent 6 months agonizing over every word of this piece.”

As it turns out, the junior author has been on the path toward this decision for a long time– and Israel is his favorite place in the world even as it is dominated by a political culture he calls “fascistic.” Weyl is widely described as an economics prodigy, an emerging establishment figure who went from the University of Chicago to Yale this year and has a top research job at Microsoft, whose operations in Israel he opposes.

For all his mainstream success, Weyl is a sincere and open person. His Facebook posts in the last year or so tell a lot about his progress.

Weyl visited Israel before the Gaza onslaught of summer 2014. He had no comment on that war but the subsequent reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu last March staggered him, convincing him that Israeli society was on the wrong course.