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MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Pete Hegseth cracking under pressure during cross-examination at the House Armed Services Committee where he was asked about the unlawful war in Iran under oath. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! MeidasTouch relies on SnapStream to record, watch, monitor, and clip the news. Get a FREE TRIAL of SnapStream by clicking here: https://go.snapstream.com/affiliate/m... Support the MeidasTouch Network:   / meidastouch   Add the MeidasTouch Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Buy MeidasTouch Merch: https://store.meidastouch.com Follow MeidasTouch on Twitter:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on Facebook:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on Instagram:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on TikTok:   / meidastouch  

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US SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL WILL COME HOME TO ROOST! 

IT CAN'T CONTINUE! 

Israel’s Economy Nosedives Because of Gaza Onslaught

in Palestine

by Dr Marwan Asmar

12/06/2024

The Israeli economy is in the doldrums, going from bad to worse because of the country’s war on Gaza. The recent shock is the fact that the US technology giant Intel  has halted the construction of its new $25-billion factory in Israel as reported by Anadolu.

The Israeli genocide has reflected badly on its economy in the last eight months. The massive war on the Gaza Strip has basically created an economic slump and a recession. It would take years for Israel to recover from.

Economic growth has shrunk by 20 percent in all economic sectors with construction and tourism taking the lead part. Thousands of stores are closing with Israeli companies suffering hundreds of millions of dollars. The figures are likely to be higher still today in June.

Israeli products have become so ashamed with the genocide its carrying out in Gaza, that companies are reverting to hiding the Israel tagmark on their products so they can be sold in other countries.

Israel is suffering massive losses from its war on Gaza

to the tune of $750 billion dollars. Around 50 percent of Israeli companies experienced a significant drop in their revenues.

This is because 11 percent of their workforce were called up for military service. And because of this only 37 percent of the Israeli companies operated with fewer than five of their employees in the past two weeks. These figures were up to 4 November, 2023, about one month into the war on Gaza.

So one imagine the economic situation in the country with Israel starting its nine months of war and genocide on Gaza.

As the war started 764,000 workers in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza became unemployed because they were no longer allowed to work in Israel. Palestinian workers form 18 percent of the total workforce in Israel. About 90,000 of these were working in the construction sector that is now at a standstill.

The Houthi naval blockade through Bab El Mandeb registered huge economic losses for Israeli ports. The Eilat Port in south Israel has come to a complete standstill since December 2023 when the Houthis started to target ships carrying goods to Israel.

This immediately resulted in huge economic losses to the tune of $3 billion because it effectively put an to trade with Far East that included China, Japan, South Korea and India.

Eilat was seen as a critical trade port but ships carrying goods to Israel ceased operating to the port in fear that they would be targeted by Houthi missiles.

Quickly however the war on Gaza deepend Israel’s economic crisis. In a Bloomberg report in May, it was revealed economic losses amounted to $16 billion.

The war had created a 6.6 percent deficit in the financial budget which increased by 7 percent of the GDP while spending increased by 36 percent in the first four months of 2024. This was mainly due to the fact that defense expenditure accounted for a third of Israeli spending.

The Israeli Central Bank had estimated that the cost of the Gaza war would be about $64.4 billion but now the figures could well be revised because of the determination by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue with the conflict for the foreseeable future.

Finally, the Israeli economy is suffering billions of dollars from cyberattacks. The National Cyber Directorate revealed last May that Israel loses $3.3 billion annually because of cyber attacks.

Dr Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs 

COUNTER CURRENTS

RSN: FOCUS: Juan Cole | On Memorial Day: How the US Lost Its "Battle of Aqaba" to the Coronavirus

25 May 20

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FOCUS: Juan Cole | On Memorial Day: How the US Lost Its "Battle of Aqaba" to the Coronavirus

Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "On Memorial Day, we have nearly 100,000 dead in the coronavirus pandemic and 38 million abruptly unemployed, we have entire US industries hanging on by a thread."

SINGLE 

 

n July 6, 1917, Auda Abu Tayy led his Howeitat tribesmen in a successful attack on the Ottoman port of Aqaba in what is now Jordan but was then the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs of the Hejaz or Western Arabia and the Transjordan had allied with the British to revolt against their Ottoman government in return for a promise from London to support them in achieving an independent Arab state after the war.

Britain went to war with the Ottomans because the latter allied with Austria and Germany against Russia (Istanbul was way more afraid of the Russians than any other Power, especially after the Russian drive on Istanbul in 1877-78). 

Auda was advised by a British intelligence officer and former archeologist, T. E. Lawrence, who later rather exaggerated the importance of his own role in the Arab uprising. At Aqaba, Lawrence did not distinguish himself when he accidentally shot his own camel in the back of the head and was nearly killed.

So why did the 300-man-strong Ottoman garrison at Aqaba fall so easily to Auda’s irregulars?

The Ottomans had set their artillery in concrete pylons and pointed them out to the Gulf of Aqaba, from which they feared a naval assault. They therefore could not wheel the big guns around and fire at the attacking Bedouin. They just couldn’t imagine that a threat to the garrison and the port would come from inside Ottoman territory.

It is sort of the way the US invested bigtime in the “Global War on Terror.”

In the meantime, a thin strip of RNA was gunning for us and would establish itself to the rear of our military front lines. Had we spent trillions on coronavirus vaccines, on a single-payer health care system and on the network of country health departments across the country, we would not be in our present straits.

As of last year this time, 6,967 U.S. servicemen and women had died during Global War on Terror and Overseas Contingency Operation actions. The Congressional Research Service writes, “Some 52,802 had been wounded. Approximately 62% (36,885) of all war-related incidents that resulted in U.S. military casualties have occurred during operations in Iraq.”

The rest of 2019 and the first five months of 2020 added to the grim totals. In 2019, 17 US soldiers and Marines were killed in Afghanistan and 180 were wounded. This, in a war that began in 2001 and is still going on with no signs of a US victory. 

There are now less than 10,000 US service personnel in Afghanistan, with the number expected to decline to 8,600 by July. This is down from as many as 13,000 on January 1. And, the Trump administration is now pledged to be out entirely by next year this time. Such plans have been made before and been reversed at the last minute. No president wants to preside over the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul, with all the memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks that would evoke. And it just is not clear that the joint government of Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah could survive long with no US troops in theater. The Taliban control 10 percent of the country and have a presence in half the provinces. 

The Pushtun Taliban, however, did not carry out the 9/11 attacks; Arab al-Qaeda did, and it isn’t clear that Usama Bin Laden let his hosts know what he had planned. So an equation of the two would be a mistake. The Taliban, and many al-Qaeda, were furious with Bin Laden for bringing down on them the full wrath of the American superpower. Taliban rule would be horrible for the people of Afghanistan and especially the women and the Shiite Hazara (for the latter it might be close to genocidal). But Taliban rule would not necessarily equal a security threat to New York. The whole premise of the war in Afghanistan, America’s longest, that it was part of a Global War on Terror or absolutely necessary to US security was and is false. Afghanistan is weak country and one of the poorest in the world and does not pose a realistic threat to the US. 

Why did the US stay after overturning the Taliban in 2001-2002? Surely Bush wanted to extend the US sphere of influence into oil- and gas- rich Central Asia, and perhaps then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to encircle the Russian Federation to ensure it did not reemerge as a peer rival to the US. 

Those goals had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and were merely imperial overstretch. Bush even pledged to rebuild and modernize Afghanistan, adding on one realistic object to another.

As for Iraq, another US serviceman died in 2019 after the Congressional report and then 7 so far in 2020.

Two of those killed in Iraq this year died at the hands of Iraqis who were furious that Trump had killed prominent Iraqi general Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone strike on Baghdad on January 3, when he assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. The Iraqi parliament in 2018 recognized the paramilitary al-Muhandis led as part of a National Guard, so he was an officer of the Iraqi state. Trump’s notion that he could make war on part of the Iraqi military while using US troops to train and support another part is the craziest policy anyone could have come up with. It is directly responsible for two US troop deaths this spring.

Contemplating these nearly 7,000 military deaths, I feel profound sorrow. The majority of them did not need to die. They were not defending the United States. Iraq in 2003 was a poor ramshackle country with no Air Force and not the slightest ability to harm the US. Figures in the Bush administration, including the now-sainted Colin Powell, hinted broadly that then Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein had had a hand in 9/11. It was the Big Lie, worse than any of the 18,000 Donald J. Trump has told in office.

Worse of all, the United States committed all these trillions of dollars and thousands of servicemen’s lives (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans and others, including innocent noncombatants), to the wrong struggle. A small, lean, counter-terrorism operation could have dealt with the al-Qaeda threat. There would have been no ISIS had the US not waged an illegal war of aggression on Iraq.

On Memorial Day, we have nearly 100,000 dead in the coronavirus pandemic and 38 million abruptly unemployed, we have entire US industries hanging on by a thread. For the past 20 years Washington has been pointing its big guns out across the Atlantic toward the Middle East and Central Asia in the “Global War on Terror,” spending trillions of dollars and substantial blood countering a tiny network of seedy terrorists and glorying in the acquisition of new spheres of geopolitical interest. Those were our Aqaba artillery. The real threats lay inside the realm, threats of skyrocketing inequality, rising white supremacist extremism, and a Neoliberalism that dismantled public goods like health care for narrow private profit.

Ironically, some states, like Washington, are turning to their National Guard to do contact tracing and to urge individuals exposed to the virus to quarantine. This activity is not without risk. God bless them, and may they win this truly essential war.

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