In his farewell oration in 1796, George Washington delivered his famous few words on “entangling alliances.”

“The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave,” warned the man who was first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen. “It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Globalists will not agree, of course, but average Americans who foot the bill for our most dangerous entangling alliance, that with Israel, would likely side with Mr. Washington if they knew what Israel cost them.

On Monday, the Christian Science Monitor whipped out the adding machine.

Not surprisingly, the paper reports, Israel is the largest recipient of American money.

Since 1973, it has collected $240 billion in direct aid, excluding other hidden costs, such as the $139 billion we shoveled to Egypt and Jordan, bribes to sign peace treaties.

Nor does aid to Israel include other veiled, collateral costs, such as those from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The Arab oil embargo alone cost the United States about $870 billion, a staggering sum that does not include maintaining a Strategic Petroleum Reserve at $134 billion.

Add up these and other costs and the bill since 1973 comes to $1.6 trillion, or about $5,700 per American.

In fiscal 2003 alone, the Monitor reports, Israel will collect nearly $3 billion from American taxpayers. Most of it, a little more than $2 billion, is military, while $720 million is “economic.”

And those figures may grow. Israel is angling for another $4 billion in military aid and $8 billion in loan guarantees, again, courtesy of the American taxpayer.

That average American taxpayer, and most likely the average elected official who represents him in River City, is clueless about the staggering cost of Israel.

Not that the average elected official would ever dare, in his wildest fantasy of political derring do, grappling with Israel’s powerful American lobby. Politically, death would be his end.

The big question is what the average American would do, inasmuch as he has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Sadly enough, zilch.

Whatever Americans think about the Middle East and Israel, they care as little about them as they do about anything else. They are, to put it nicely, asleep.

The federal government confiscates 40 percent of the average American’s income for redistribution to indolent freeloaders on welfare. Federal courts tell Americans their children cannot pray in schools or that Christian landlords must rent to homosexuals.

Federal environmental cops tell property owners they cannot disturb mud puddles, while worthless bugs and hoot owls stymie developers and lumberjacks. Federal bureaucrats give tax money to pornographers.

Meanwhile, Congress maintains a pension program that would make Enron executives blush, and runs the national budget with accounting schemes that would send corporate executives to jail.

And we, the people, pay our taxes in mute obedience.

Well, some final words from Washington: “Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”

Now, go back to sleep.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: kirkwood@shentel.net.

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