Recently, George W. Bush committed some $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to Israel over 10 years, subject to congressional appropriations. This would be a significant increase in Israeli aid, along with a comparable increase in companion aid to Egypt and other Arab countries – by far our largest foreign aid outlays.

When we cannot meet our own health, education, infrastructure and energy challenges, how can Congress continue to justify giving billions annually to Israel and its Arab neighbors?

Despite our objections, this funding is used to demolish Palestinian homes, build settlements and a confiscation wall, and for military attacks on Palestinians and Lebanese. On March 31, Condoleezza Rice had barely left Israel after nudging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert toward a peace agreement before he announced 1,400 new settlement homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank – in violation of international law and Israel’s commitment at Annapolis to stop settlement construction. Other settlements are being enlarged. In Arab countries, our aid sustains repressive regimes. As a consequence, our international reputation is mud.

The explanation is invariably that Israel is our “special friend.” What does that mean when, from our perspective – and the world community’s – no good comes of it? To be precise, no good has come of it for 60 years except to assist Israel in becoming the bully of the block and giving us trouble.

Only President Truman’s support of the partition, giving the 30 percent Jewish minority governance of most of Palestine, accounted for the United Nations’ approval. Yet, when Israel launched its long-planned systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral homes and Truman demanded that they cease and allow refugees to return home, Israeli operatives assassinated a U.N. mediator and brushed off Truman – Israel needed more land for its security. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians violated U.N. charter articles.

Diversion of the Jordan River and the slaughter of 53 Palestinians in Kibya obliged President Eisenhower to suspend aid. Israeli agents then firebombed American cultural centers in Egypt.

In June, 1967, Israeli planes deliberately bombed, napalmed and torpedoed the USS Liberty, killing 34 crewmen and wounding 171, nearly sinking the lightly armed intelligence ship.

CIA director Richard Helms charged Israel with the 1965 theft of 206 pounds of weapons-grade uranium for its illicit nuclear bomb program. In 1985, Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard passed highly classified intelligence to Israel – afterward traded to Soviet military intelligence to allow emigration of Soviet Jews. A year later, 17 were arrested, including an Israeli general, for plotting to sell advanced U.S. weaponry to Iran. Eight Israelis were then caught trying to export cluster bomb technology illegally.

While Iran held Americans hostage, Israel sold Iran military supplies. In 1987, it sold apartheid South Africa hundreds of millions in arms and initiated the Iran-Contra scheme. In 1990, Israel supplied advanced military technology to China. It continued to sell missile components to South Africa and to provide China with billions in advanced military technology, arms and radar-detection systems.

In 1978, 1982 and 2006, Israel used U.S. cluster bombs, provided for defense use only, in attacks on Lebanese civilians. In 1982, Israel abetted the Lebanese militia massacres in Sabra and Shatila. In 1996, Israel killed 106 unarmed civilians in a U.N. compound in Qana.

In 1980, Israel announced annexation of East Jerusalem in violation of international law, U.N. resolutions and U.S. objections. Regularly thereafter, Israel sought billions in U.S. aid to settle immigrants, then used it to build settlements in the occupied territories despite our protests and U.N. dictates. Washington has repeatedly termed settlements and the land-grabbing major obstacles to peace.

Abroad, U.S. blind support of Israel is seen as central to our Middle East policy and as having inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized our security. In Washington, no one dares connect the USS Cole bombing and Sept. 11 with that special friendship – or dares observe that killing child, settlements, home demolitions, land and water grabs, roadblocks, arbitrary arrests, starvation and constant humiliations have nothing to do with Israel’s security but much to do with our increasing insecurity.

Bill Slavick of Portland is a member of Maine Peace and Justice in Israel-Palestine. He was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2006.