Saturday, October 25, 2014

Germany subsidises Israeli Navy

Meko A class Corvette,ThyssenKrupp Marine Services, Kiel.


GERMANY TO SUBSIDISE
ISRAELI NAVAL CORVETTES:

The German Federal Government will subsidise up to €300m of an Israeli naval purchase of two corvettes from ThyssenKrupp Marine Services (TKMS) of Kiel in a contract worth €1bn. 


Israel is to streamline the two major warships in its navy. The corvettes, an enlarged 2,200 tons version of TKMS's Meko A class, 1,650 tons vessel can be fitted with anti-aircraft defences and are, according to Israeli information, to protect the gas deposits in the Mediterranean, from attacks via helicopter, aircraft, missiles or long range naval attack.The irony is that Israel has no legal claim to any marine gas desposits anywhere since the State has no territorial waters since its foundation in 1948.

When Ben Gurion and the Zionists declared the independence of the "State of Israel" in 1948 following the rejection of the United Nations partition plan by the Palestine Arab population, they also declared that they were not the lawful successors of the Palestine Mandate, held by Britain since 1922, in order to avoid paying anything of the Mandate debt incurred by Britain during its administration of the territory. Thus, the "State of Israel" was a land-based entity of the areas controlled by the Zionist militias at the time and had no entitlement to Mandate territorial waters and the Mandate was relinquished by Britain back to the UN following its withdrawal from Palestine.

However, considering the recent Gaza conflict, it is clear that the Israeli warships could also be used for taking targets in the Gaza Strip under fire, as they did in the recent onslaught on the Strip which killed up to 2,000 civilians, men, women and many children.The subsidised delivery of warships by Germany would mean a support for future attacks on the Palestinian territory.



The wailing defence industry in Germany is also pleased about it. Israeli media reported that Germany and Israel had agreed after years of negotiations on the delivery of  the two corvettes in the value of one billion euros . For Israel, however, it only needs to pay 700 million euros. The remaining 300 million euros will be forked out by the German taxpayer.

Israel is also considering building the corvettes themselves in the future, under licence, with US supplied funding to purchase the ships engines from Germany. They have previously imported steel and other materials and equipment from the US to build their own "Merkava" main battle tank using the same funding source; US Foreign Military Funding(FMF).

TKMS is the same company which delivered two German "Dolphin" class, nuclear capable submarines to Israel over a year ago.




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