In a recent article, Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who brought attention to a series of documents from the National Security Agency one year ago, referenced newly released NSA documents in regards to the relationship between the United States and Israel.
“Top secret documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shed substantial new light on how the U.S. and its partners directly enable Israel’s military assaults – such as the one on Gaza,” wrote Greenwald.
While the fact that the U.S. supplies Israel with billions of dollars in aid is common knowledge, Greenwald maintained that the leaked NSA documents showed that the U.S. has also helped Israel by using NSA surveillance technology to collect data used to “monitor and target Palestinians.”
“The new documents underscore the indispensable, direct involvement of the U.S. government and its key allies in Israeli aggression against its neighbors,” Greenwald wrote. “That covert support is squarely at odds with the posture of helpless detachment typically adopted by Obama officials and their supporters.”
Greenwald added that although Obama recently said it was “heartbreaking” to see what was happening in Gaza, Brooklyn College Professor Corey Robin said, ”Obama talks about Gaza as if it were a natural disaster, an uncontrollable biological event.”
“The same process repeats itself in both U.S. media and government circles,” wrote Greenwald, who tied together three times Israeli has attacked Gaza, in 2008, 2012, and now in 2014. He wrote that first, the U.S. government “feeds Israel the weapons it uses and steadfastly defends its aggression both publicly and at the U.N.,” next the U.S. Congress “unanimously enacts one resolution after the next to support and enable Israel,” and lastly, American media figures “pretend that the Israeli attack has nothing to do with their country.”
Greenwald concluded that, in response to this, “all decent Americans helplessly throw up their hands as though they bear no responsibility.”
While last September, The Guardian exposed the fact that the NSA “routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens,” The Intercept recently published a new NSA document from April, 2013, which shows that the NSA “maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting.”
According to the newly disclosed NSA document, “This SIGINT relationship has increasingly been the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.” The document went on to say that, “a dedicated communications line between NSA and ISNU supports the exchange of raw material, as well as daily analytic and technical correspondence.”
Greenwald pointed out that while the relationship between the United States and Israel has grown incredibly close in the last decade, “the cooperation between the NSA and ISNU began decades ago,” with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
The document from the NSA also revealed that, “The Israeli side enjoys the benefits of expanded geographic access to world-class NSA cryptanalytic and SIGINT engineering expertise, and also gains controlled access to advanced U.S. technology and equipment via accommodation buys and foreign military sales.”
“The new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact,” wrote Greenwald. “Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government, which is anything but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks. And the relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand, and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of that enabling.”
