Reeling in Israel?

In a 27 December 2005 letter, HRW called on President Bush to cut diplomatic aid to Israel in proportion to the amount Israel is spending on its illegal settlement policy:

To avoid U.S. financial complicity in policies that the U.S. Government opposes and that international law prohibits, we therefore call on you and other key government officials, first, to state in unequivocal terms that the United States will not tolerate any further settlement expansion and, second, to announce that the administration will deduct from U.S. financial aid to Israel -- about $2.58 billion in fiscal year 2005 -- an amount equal to Israel's expenditures on the settlements and on the construction and maintenance of such portion of the wall that is inside the West Bank.

This is definitely an issue worth getting behind.

I'm under no delusions about how delusional the US discourse on Israel is -- see, for example, the Orwellian laments about Sharon's passing from Israeli politics as perhaps a fatal blow to the "peace process" -- or whether a call for "aid" reduction has a snowball's chance in hell of being heeded.

Still, no matter how unlikely it is to come to pass, HRW needs to be vociferously supported on this by people who actually give a damn about nostalgic stuff like, you know, "human rights" and "justice."