Gaza is about the gas

On 9th July 2014, via his Earth Insight blog at The Guardian’s environment website, Dr Nafeez Ahmed revealed the role of Palestinian resources, specifically Gaza’s off-shore natural gas reserves, in partly motivating Israel’s invasion of Gaza aka ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ Among the sources I referred to was a policy paper written by incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon one year before Operation Cast Lead, underscoring that the Palestinians could never be allowed to develop their own energy resources. Israel has seen control of Gaza’s gas as a major strategic priority over the last decade for three main reasons. Firstly, Israel faces a near-term gas crisis — largely due to the long lead time needed to bring Israel’s considerable domestic gas resources into production; secondly, Netanyahu’s administration cannot stomach any scenario in which a Hamas-run Palestinian administration accesses and develops their own resources; thirdly, Israel wants to use Palestinian gas as a strategic bridge to cement deals with Arab dictatorships whose domestic populations oppose signing deals with Israel. Never mind the 'war on terror' rhetoric, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The purpose of Israel's escalating assault on Gaza is to control the Territory's 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas - and so keep Palestine poor and weak, gain massive export revenues, and avert its own domestic energy crisis.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not only about resources. Israel's offensive against the Gaza Strip is by no means solely an energy war.  But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war. Resource competition is, nevertheless, at the heart of the Gaza conflict. Israel is not just concerned about Hamas - but concerned that if Palestinians develop their own gas resources, the resulting economic transformation could in turn fundamentally increase Palestinian clout. According to Anais Antreasyan in the University of California's Journal of Palestine Studies, the most respected English language journal devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel's stranglehold over Gaza has been designed to make "Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells impossible."

Israel's long-term goal "besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations." This is part of a wider strategy of "separating the Palestinians from their land and natural resources in order to exploit them, and, as a consequence, blocking Palestinian economic development. "Despite all formal agreements to the contrary, Israel continues to manage all the natural resources nominally under the jurisdiction of the PA, from land and water to maritime and hydrocarbon resources."

Israel has made successive discoveries in recent years - such as the Leviathan field estimated to hold 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - which could transform the country from energy importer into aspiring energy exporter with ambitions to supply Europe, Jordan and Egypt. The chief obstacle is that much of the 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.6 billion barrels of oil in the Levant Basin Province lies in territorial waters where borders are hotly disputed between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Cyprus. Israel's new discoveries do not, as yet, offer an immediate solution. It could take until 2020 for much of these domestic resources to be mobilised. Worse, in  2012 two Israeli government chief scientists warned that Israel still had insufficient gas resources to sustain exports despite all the stupendous discoveries. The letter, according to Ha'aretz, stated: "We believe Israel should increase its use of natural gas by 2020 and should not export gas. The Natural Gas Authority's estimates are lacking. There's a gap of 100 to 150 billion cubic meters between the demand projections that were presented to the committee and the most recent projections. The gas reserves are likely to last even less than 40 years!"

Dr Gary Luft - an advisor to US Energy Security Council - wrote in the Journal of Energy Security, "with the depletion of Israel's domestic gas supplies accelerating, and without an imminent rise in Egyptian gas imports, Israel could face a power crisis in the next few years ...If Israel is to continue to pursue its natural gas plans it must diversify its supply sources."

Israel desperately covets Gaza's gas as a 'cheap stop-gap' yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, according to Nafeez Ahmed. The UK's British Gas and the US's Noble Energy are lined up to do the dirty work - but first Hamas must be 'uprooted' from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia's Gazprom. According to email correspondence between the British Foreign Office's Near East Group and the British Consulate General in Jerusalem in November 2009, Israel had refused to pay market price for Gaza's gas. One Foreign Office official said: "Israel won't (i) pay the full whack [for the gas] (ii) guarantee to give a certain cut direct to the PA. So BG aren't getting the gas out of the sea-bed. They are content to exploit other reserves and come back to this one when the price is right."

Taken from here