So Congress just appropriated 235.7 million dollars for the David's Sling and Arrow 3 missile defense systems, alongside investment for the development of a system to defend "Israel from outer space, against Iranian missiles" (serious). That is tossed into the pot atop $205 million to fund the Iron Dome missile batteries, and $3 billion in regular military aid, most of which gets re-routed to American industry.

Even 'David's Sling' is developed by Raytheon, an American company, and Rafael, an Israeli company. Israel is a mecca for high-technology production, which is what military investment is meant to augment. No shock that it occurs with and in Israel when 55 percent of Israel's exports are in high-technology, 71 Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ, and Intel has 6,000 jobs over there. Nice investment opportunities, clearly, which get subsidized by the US government, and brokered and lubricated by the lobby, which represents the 20 percent of American "warm Jews" - short-hand for the Jewish upper-class and the liberal opinion-makers and managerial class who know who butters their bread and gives them the illusion of power.

Now, here's when the labyrinthine conspiracies get interesting. The Ofer Brothers Group has allowed subsidiary companies to dock at Iranian ports and recently sold a tanker to Iran through one of its subsidiaries, which has prompted the US State Department to impose sanctions against the company. On the one hand, the Israeli government is attempting to get the US to remove the sanctions. On the other, a former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, thinks it's much ado about very little. And in any event, reports Haaretz, "a discussion by the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee on the Ofer Brothers' dealings with Iran was halted after 15 minutes because of warnings from the defense establishment that they might damage the State of Israel."

The same State of Israel which has been pushing the US, through its domestic lobbying tentacle, AIPAC, to attack Iran for reasons of national security? What is going on here? Same thing that's always going on. The rich are getting richer, even while they're preparing their escapes: 100,000 Israelis hold German passports, with 7,000 more procuring them every year. Gideon Levy comments, "The foreign passport has become an insurance policy against a rainy day. It turns out there are more and more Israelis who are thinking that day may eventually come," a day which they hasten every time they leave it to the radicals to join the non-violent protests in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that are one of the more promising routes to avoid regional disaster.

But then Levy oddly comments: "If we had a leadership worthy of the name, one that instead of sowing anxieties did something to reduce them, and instead of terrifying us instilled hopes in us, then the lines at the German Embassy would have become shorter long ago." Who does he think is voting for the governments that create a climate of fear so as to continue Israeli militarized accumulation? Who does he think are the constituencies of the "peace" parties that are miraculously never able to make peace? The same people sitting in the top 10 percent of Israeli society, the same ones procuring the passports to leave when the monster they've created sets off regional conflagration.