Obama's "Budget" includes $3 Billion in Military Aid to Israel!!

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama pledged to "go through the budget line by line to eliminate programs that we can't afford and don't work". One week later, he sent his FY2011 budget request to Congress, which includes a record-breaking $3 billion in military aid to Israel. This requested increase in US weapons to Israel - part of a ten-year $30 billion agreement signed between the two countries in 2007 - qualifies on both counts as a program that the United States can't afford, and that doesn't work in establishing a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Data published recently by the "US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation" shows that US military aid to Israel could be used instead to provide more than 364,000 low-income households with affordable housing vouchers, or to retain 498,000 workers for green jobs, or to provide early reading programs to 887,000 at-risk students, or to provide access to primary health care services for more than 24 million uninsured Americans, including the families of our veterans returning from Obama's wars. During the Bush Administration, Israel killed at least 3,107 innocent Palestinian civilians, according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. Israel also injured thousands more innocent Palestinians and destroyed billions of dollars of Palestinian civilian infrastructure, including homes, schools, factories, government buildings, and even Palestine's only airport. The severity and scale of this killing and destruction were made possible by hi-tech US weapons provided to Israel at taxpayer expense.