Show of hands: Who here feels the fate of Native Americans during the Western conquest of the New World wasn’t handled very well?

Duplicity. Targeted biological warfare. Slaughter. Theft of land. It’s one of the darkest chapters of American history.

It’s also present-day Israel.

The Israeli government announced this past Thursday it would continue to settle land that did not belong to them, forcing more Palestinians from their privately owned property. The 565 new homes join thousands already built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip regions, are in violation of standing United Nations treaties and work in opposition of all peace plans in negotiation by the United States.

At the same time, a massive “security fence” is under construction as a means for Israel to annex more land than was stolen during the 1967 Six Day War. Said fence is 10 feet high, lined with barbed wire, and essentially 160 feet wide when you consider the surveillance cameras, paved patrol roads, and ditches surrounding it. When completed, it will sever Palestinians from their agriculture, communities, and property. All in the name of Israeli security.

The current Israeli government treats its Palestinian neighbors with absolute contempt. It’s embarrassing that the Middle East’s only “democracy” engages in such despicable attempts at holocaust considering the origins of its formation. What’s even more embarrassing is that the United States condones it.

The United States gives billions of dollars in forgivable loans a year to Israel. This year the total will exceed $10 billion, and the loans will never have to be repaid thanks to congressional loopholes created by former senator Alan Cranston. Without the foreign aid it receives annually from the U.S., Israel’s economy would falter and collapse. What is given every year is basically an assurance of our ally’s survival.

If we wanted Israel to stop its practice of uprooting Palestinians and plopping down hundreds of state-of-the-art new housing developments, all the U.S. would have to do is threaten to withhold that money – money, by the way, that’s taken in through federal taxes from you, the citizen.

You’d think Washington would condemn a government that kills an American and then casts the blame on the victim. (To this date, the death of activist Rachel Corrie has gone uninvestigated.)

You’d think the United States would oppose racial apartheid. You’d think it would divest its relationship from a country that bombed the USS Liberty and tried to shift the blame to someone else.

You’d think a lot of things. Too bad they never come to pass.

The State Department decided that, despite all of the conflicts with American policy (conflicts that allow the U.S. to reduce or eliminate the loan guarantees), it would make no plans to lower the amount promised – despite requiring the money only be spent on territories held before the Six Day War. Never mind that State Department official William Burns cites the settlement growth as something that “could threaten the future of Israel as a Jewish democracy.”

So where will the money go?

Israel’s main mission is to colonize as much Palestinian land as possible before the world cries loud enough to make it stop. That means that much of the spending allocated by the U.S. government will likely go into areas that, by definition, not only aren’t part of the original territory, but aren’t even currently part of Israel.

The budget of that massive fence doesn’t emerge from thin air (unless you believe the United States operates a deus ex machina device). It has to come from somewhere. And something tells me it’ll be coming from the taxes we dole out and never see put into our communities.

We have an opportunity to stop this by simply blocking the influx of American cash into a country that openly defies our interests and spits on our diplomatic solutions to the bloodshed and violence in the Middle East. Instead of looking the other way while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon allows a Jewish settlement in Ariel to be surrounded by the wall, thus sealing off even more land, we can take out the proverbial rubber stamp and slap a big VOID on our next “payment.”

The United States, through its direct assistance and guidance of Israel’s development, has created a spoiled brat of a nation. Israel never has to worry about the numerous United Nations violations it commits (more than Iraq, by the way) because the U.S. will veto any resolution. Israel spends indiscriminately on outrageous military build-ups and a nuclear arsenal, and our government keeps handing out an allowance. We’ve created a situation where our “kid” is completely self-absorbed and ignorant of consequence.

Accountability needs to start now, even something as basic as stopping the funding of illegal land grabs or not stopping a U.N. resolution condemning the assassination of Yasser Arafat. Or laughing in the face of Zalman Shoval, the diplomat who considered the peace process stalled because “there is no action taken by the Palestinians to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure.” Or keeping heavily armed IDF soldiers from stealing Palestinian land, destroying their homes, and sealing them away from their families with a 160-foot-wide demarcation of segregation.

Please, any wake up call that tells our child he doesn’t get rewarded for bad behavior.

Two hundred years ago our forefathers cheated an indigenous people out of land and liberty. Let’s not see history repeat itself with the Palestinians. I’d like to think we’ve evolved a little.