The Blockade of Gaza: It’s All About the Natural Gas
Photo Credit: (The Times of Israel / Google Images)
Written by: Bruce Katz
Legislative elections were held in the Palestinian territories on the Jan. 25, 2006, in order to elect the second Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The result was a victory for Hamas, contesting the election under the list name of ‘Change and Reform,’ which received 44.45 per cent of the vote and won 74 of the 132 seats, while the ruling Fatah party received 41.43 per cent of the vote and won just 45 seats.
The European Union Election Observation Mission for the West Bank and Gaza during the 2006 PLC election stated the following:
The Jan. 25 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) have so far marked another important milestone in the building of democratic institutions. These elections saw impressive voter participation in an open and fairly-contested electoral process that was efficiently administered by a professional and independent Palestinian Central Elections Commission (CEC).
As with the 2005 presidential election, the Palestinian people have demonstrated an overwhelming commitment to determine their political future via democratic means, in spite of the uncertain conditions in which the elections took place: a background of delay, unacceptable levels of pre-campaign violence and an occupation that placed restrictions on the exercise of fundamental freedoms related to elections. (1)
Despite the democratic nature of the election which saw Hamas returned to power in Gaza, in 2007, Israel began its blockade of Gaza. This was tacitly supported by Egypt under the rule of former president Hosni Mubarak, and more actively supported by the current government of Al Sisi - citing the need for security, subsequent to Hamas taking power. The required security was a pretext for Israel’s wish to exploit a huge natural gas reservoir, that had been discovered in Palestinian territorial waters about 30 miles off the coast of Gaza. The reservoir contains an enormous quantity of natural gas worth billions of dollars. (2)
In 1999, Yasser Arafat gave a permit to a British consortium to extract the natural gas. This would have given 10 per cent of the proceeds for the sale of the gas to the Palestinian Authority. This would have been used to develop the Palestinian economy and government programs. Israel blocked the proceedings.
Thanks to Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister of the UK at the time, a new deal was prepared with Israel, which eliminated three-quarters of future royalties owed to the Palestinians, shifting their reduced share to an international account controlled by Washington and London. However, after having won the 2006 election in Gaza, Hamas refused to accept this new Israel-UK-US deal. The Hamas government denounced it as thievery and demanded that it be renegotiated. (3) That was the cue for Israel to attack Gaza.
In 2007, then Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Ya’alon stated that “Gas cannot be extracted without a military operation that eradicates control of Hamas in Gaza."(4) Accordingly, in 2007 Israel initiated its illegal blockade of Gaza stating the need for “national security.” In 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinians, and destroying a great deal of infrastructure including homes, hospitals and schools.
As stated forthrightly by Global Research: The purpose of Operation Cast Led was to confiscate Palestine’s maritime natural gas reserves. In the wake of the invasion, Palestinian gas fields were de facto confiscated by Israel in derogation of international law.
A year following “Operation Cast Lead”, Tel Aviv announced the discovery of the Leviathan natural gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean “off the coast of Israel.” (5)
In 2013, also in Global Research, Felicity Arbuthnot wrote:
At the time the gas field was: “…the most prominent field ever found in the sub-explored area of the Levantine Basin, which covers about 83,000 square kilometres of the eastern Mediterranean region.”
Coupled with Tamar field, in the same location, discovered in 2009, the prospects are for an energy bonanza for Israel, for Houston, Texas based Noble Energy and partners Delek Drilling, Avner Oil Exploration and Ratio Oil Exploration.
Also involved is Perth, Australia-based Woodside Petroleum, which has signed a memorandum of understanding for a thirty percent stake in the project, in negotiations which have been described as “up and down.” There is currently speculation that Woodside might pull out of the deal: “…since the original plans to refrigerate the gas for export were pursued when relations between Israel and Turkey were strained. That has changed, more recently, which has opened the door for gas to be piped to Turkey.” (6)
In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Levant Basin Province contains “a mean of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a mean of 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas”. (7) The northern end of the Levant Basin lies near the Syrian port of Tartus, runs down the coastlines of Lebanon, Israel, and the Gaza Strip (part of the occupied Palestinian territory), and west towards Cyprus. This means that the Eastern Mediterranean will be one of the most important areas in the world for the production of natural gas over the decades to come, which is why Israel chose to attack and seal off Gaza in order to steal, extract and sell natural gas which belongs to the Palestinians.
A look at the map of the Levant Basin (8) also explains why Israel refers to a part of Lebanon’s territorial waters as ‘disputed waters,’ as in the term ‘disputed territories‘ to describe the illegally expropriated and occupied Palestinian territories. In 2017, the Lebanese government published a tender to explore gas and oil reserves that lie in the Levant Basin of the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Lebanon. (9) The government of Israel – eager to lay claim to more natural resources that do not belong to Israel – made the claim that the gas and oil reserves to which Lebanon lays claim, are in Israeli waters and therefore under Israeli sovereignty. In response to the Israeli claim, the Speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, Nabih Berri said that Israel’s claim was a "new attack on Lebanon's sovereignty." (10) The government of Lebanon issued a statement saying it would not yield its Maritime territory to Israel.
Only just recently, the government of Israel announced its intention to begin drilling in the so-called ‘Block 72’ area located in the disputed territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean. This is in the vicinity of Lebanon's own ‘Block 9’ where it is due to start exploring for gas in the coming months. (11) On June 29, Lebanese president Michel Aoun stated, "Israel’s oil and gas exploration, in the disputed area with Lebanon, is a very serious matter. We will not allow encroachment on our internally recognised internal waters." (12)
Israel has chosen to announce its plan to drill in what it calls ‘disputed waters’, at a time when the Lebanese government has been rendered fragile by a serious economic crisis which shows no sign of lessening. Israel’s announcement is meant to heighten tensions between the two countries. In effect, the only thing preventing Israel from launching an attack on Lebanon as it did in Gaza in 2008 and again in 2014, is the presence of Lebanon’s Hezbollah which acts as a deterrent to Israeli expansionism.
Israel intends to ‘annex’ that area of disputed territorial waters off the coast of Lebanon. It has done this with the gas reserves in Palestinian waters off the coast of Gaza, as well as the Palestinian West Bank and Jordan Valley. Israel is a colonial predator which, like every other Western colonial predator which has preceded it, is bent on stealing the natural resources belonging to other countries and their peoples. It is a state which, for all intent and purpose, also carries on like an international crime syndicate.
Prior to Israel’s seizure of Palestinian gas fields, both Israel and Jordan relied to a great degree on importing gas from Egypt. Subsequent to the fall of Hosni Mubarak‘s regime in Egypt, that source became less reliable. Within a few years, Israel was able to move from being an importer of natural gas to being a major exporter of natural gas. Jordan and Egypt are two major markets for the exportation of gas from Israel. There are also plans for gas from Israel to reach Europe. (13)
Israel is developing of gas and oil resources by way of expropriating those very same resources that actually belong to the Palestinians. This prevents the latter from developing their own resource industries. Thus, Israel keeps Palestinian society under its thumb, thereby reinforcing its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Al Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network, states the case in clear terms:
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory does not only exist above ground. Since 1967, Israel has systematically colonized Palestinian natural resources and, in the field of hydrocarbons, has prevented Palestinians from accessing their own oil and gas reserves. Such restrictions have ensured the continued dependence of Palestinians on Israel for their energy needs. The Palestinians’ own efforts to develop their energy sector fail to challenge Israel’s overarching hegemony over Palestinian resources. Rather, they pursue growth and state building within the reality of the occupation, further reinforcing – even if inadvertently – the asymmetric balance between occupied and occupier. (14)
The Human Costs of the Blockade of Gaza
Under the Oslo accords of 1993, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were defined as two territories of a single unit, between which Palestinians would be allowed to move freely and trade goods without restrictions. Israel, however, has been limiting travel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank since the first Intifada in the beginning of the 1990s. (15) Israel had been using the pretext of the ‘need for security’ as the justification for preventing the free movement of people and goods between Gaza and the West Bank. This was a strategic plan to create two separate Palestinian entities, the means of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian unity government and a unified Palestinian state. Palestinian factionalism helps Israel in this respect. (15)
The blockade of Gaza, now approaching its fourteenth year, has had a devastating effect on Gaza’s economy and the living conditions of its population. In effect, Israel has instituted a ‘near-starvation’ subsistence strategy, meant to keep the Palestinians in Gaza malnourished without killing them altogether. Always meticulous in how they torment and subjugate the Palestinians, Israel formulated a list for ‘monitoring and assessing inventories in the Gaza Strip’. (16) This is done with a mathematical precision meant to ensure that the Gazans would remain in a state of absolute dependency without the advent of mass starvation.
In other words,
“The quantities of goods allowed in were calculated using mathematical formulas that determined the level of daily consumption of each of the basic products, based on data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, multiplied by the population of the Gaza Strip.” (17)
Israel launched murderous attacks on the Gaza Strip – an enclave where two million people are packed into an area similar in size to the island of Montreal – in 2008 and 2014, bombing houses, schools, hospitals and administrative buildings. Beyond the near-starvation policy imposed on Gaza’s population, Israel targets medical infrastructure and prevents the necessary material and medication needed to maintain the health system which serves Gaza’s population. During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel has demolished several medical facilities in Gaza and the West Bank and has arrested some Palestinian medical specialists.
Israel’s continuous attacks on the Gaza Strip have resulted in the destruction of medical facilities and hospitals, in addition to the killing and injuring of civilians.
Since the Great March of Return protests in March 2018, there have been approximately 37,000 injuries reported in Gaza. This hugely burdens the few hospitals in the city and it will be difficult to admit more COVID-19 cases if such assaults persist. The intentional and continuous electricity cuts by Israel will further impair hospitals’ abilities to respond to this pandemic.
The health system in the West Bank and Gaza is overstretched and suffers from shortages in medical staff, medications, medical equipment, testing kits and disinfectants. Such shortages would weaken any health system’s ability to effectively combat coronavirus. In Gaza, it will be difficult to replenish these needs due to Israel’s blanket and arbitrary border closures. (18)
The Washington-Tel Aviv strategy to try to force the Palestinians to accept life in a Bantustan state and permanent apartheid under the so-called Deal of the Century. This is done by cutting funds to UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) which plays a crucial role in providing assistance to the beleaguered Palestinian population has only added to the misery the Palestinians face on a daily basis, especially in Gaza.
Throughout the years of the blockade, Israel has acted with absolute impunity, condoned and even supported by the so-called Western democracies and vassal Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It has killed thousands of men, women and children in Gaza, even bombing United Nations agencies with no fear of reprisal. (19)
La Via Campesina sums it up this way:
This blockade has resulted in a poverty rate of over 65 per cent. It has led to alarming levels of food insecurity (72 per cent) and created a dizzying rise in unemployment, which now stands at 43 per cent. The dispossession and alienation of a population do not end there. There is a 40 per cent shortage of medications. Four in every five factories have shut down. This brutal blockade has destroyed nearly 70 per cent of houses and over 80 per cent of farmland and crops.
In this context, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees has documented hundreds of acts of aggression targeting farmers, fisherpeople and threatening the viability of agriculture in Gaza. The Israeli army has opened fire on peasants, poisoned crops with chemicals, drowned fields by opening dams, destroyed boats and confiscated the equipment of fisherpeople. (20)
It is to be remembered that all of this killing, all of this devastation of which Gaza has been a victim for nearly 14 years, has as its source Israel’s desire to seize all of the area’s gas and oil reserves on the pretext of the need for security in regard to the Hamas ‘terrorists.’
The irony here is that a rogue state which enacts state-sponsored terrorism in order to establish its hegemony in the region, uses the label of terrorism to expropriate the natural resources of a subjugated neighboring people. This being done with the compliance and full knowledge of certain complicit Western and Arab governments and the corporate media. Hamlet states, ‘There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.’ The rot is also prevalent in those states that make themselves friends to apartheid, along with aiders and abettors of Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Bruce Katz is a founding member and co-president of PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity), a Montreal-based pro-Palestinian solidarity organization.
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