If there is one thing that should be gleaned from the recent surge in strife and animosity along the Palestinian and Israeli border, it’s that there’s just some things the United States has no business being involved with.

If anything, our meddling in the region has brought us far more enemies than friends. And what have Americans received in return? A bill for approximately $3 billion, or about 25 percent of the annual foreign aid budget, the annual dollop of military and economic aid that the United States sends over to Israel, accounting for approximately 7 to 8 percent of the Israeli national budget, according to the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Cooperation.

About $1.8 billion of this accounts for direct military assistance while the rest accounts for civil aid (most of which goes to pay for interest on past military loans).

What’s strikingly odd about all of this is that unlike Central African nations or other places that U.S. foreign aid is sent to, Israel is a First World nation as far as living standards go. Why exactly does the U.S. taxpayer need to subsidize a nation whose living standards are effectively on par with its own?

The answer, as with any affair of Washington, is politics. Being one of the only U.S.-friendly nations in the Arab world, supporters of the current policy cite strategic concerns as a reason for Israel to receive such a large share of U.S. aid. Yet if the U.S. wasn’t meddling in the region to begin with, would any “strategic interest” exist at all?

Enter the “peacemakers.” The United States, being the biggest/strongest/richest/fattest nation on earth, has an obligation, a moral imperative to impose peace around the world – even if we have to cram it down their throats!

And cram it down their throats we do – dragging both Israel and Palestinians kicking and screaming to the negotiating table erstwhile attempting “confidence-building” measures that have a better place at a “leadership seminar” than in international diplomacy.

A natural question that should be coming to mind right now is why the taxpayer should be forced into funding both an ongoing conflict which bears little vested interest to national security and then the resulting “settlements” to be imposed on parties with little apparent interest in them.

For the U.S. to negotiate cease-fire demands at the behest of the two nations is one thing – to impose them unilaterally is an entirely different one.

Our allies in the European Union have a penchant to frequently scold the United States about its “obligations” to bring about peace in the region, yet one is forced to wonder, “What’s stopping them from doing it themselves?” Indeed, why should the United States actively earn the scorn of nations around the world when things don’t go their way at the negotiating table?

Such entanglements are actively reflecting themselves in the so-called “Bush Doctrine” as well. For instance, listen to Ariel Sharon’s recent speeches and they’ll sound like cut-and-pastes of Bush’s “with-us-or-against-us” rhetoric, right down to the extermination of regimes that “harbor terrorists.”

And what is Bush to do? Tell Sharon “take a deep breath” while he escalates the “War on Terror” into every dark corner of the globe? Inherently, Bush is given little room to navigate under the current circumstances – either he’s a hypocrite or inciting more conflict, neither of which is a desirable end.

The solution should be obvious: Foreign aid should be a matter for private citizens to dispense, not for the government. In a world where foreign entanglements serve to earn the U.S. animosity and scorn at a time when it needs it least, the last thing it should do is to heap more trouble upon itself.

If members of the Anti-Defamation League wish to give funds to the Israeli government, who should stop them? If members of the Arab Action League wish to support the PLO or various refugee relief efforts, why should they be prohibited from doing so? (For reference, U.S. law places strict limits on the type of private aid citizens can send abroad – with harsh criminal penalties). Instead of binding the United States into commitments it cannot afford strategically, and in our time of deficit spending, economically as well, why should the burden of foreign aid fall upon the taxpayer when it represents the interests of a select few?

If the proponents of the status quo believe that our current dollop of foreign aid to “strategic nations” truly represents the “will of the people,” then they stand nothing to lose from changing over to a system of private aid. Hence what are they so afraid of – that they’ll be proven wrong?

Steve Skutnik is a senior in physics from Palm Harbor, Fla.