Natural gas: Peace and Prosperity?

I am sitting here at The Kapiot Café in Haifa drinking a Southern Comfort while enjoying the beautiful view of the Namal (port) at my favorite pub. The port is laden with shipping both commercial and pleasure including passenger ships bound for Turkey, commercial freighters, and yachts of various dimensions. The manager of the café, Avi comes from a maritime family. His dad was one of the port managers and he spends much of his retirement boating and diving. Both the crew of the Kapiot and guests often discuss the search for peace in our region and the incredible economic growth of Eretz Israel in the past sixty five years. The answer to even greater prosperity and stronger ties with our neighbors may well lie under the Mediterranean waters just off the Haifa coast.
 

Capiot Cafe, Haifa

Two potentially huge natural gas discoveries occurred in this region in 2009 and 2010. The Tamar gas field is located in Israel's exclusive economic zone, roughly 80 kilometers (50 mi) west of Haifa in waters 1,700 meters (5,600 ft) deep. While there have been small oil and gas discoveries in Israel over the decades, it was the first large one in the country. Tamar alone, it is estimated, could provide 50% to 80% of Israel’s natural-gas needs for a decade.

The Leviathan gas field is a second large natural gas field located in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel, 47 kilometers (29 mi) south-west of the Tamar gas field. The gas field is located roughly 130 kilometers (81 mi) west of Haifa in waters 1,500 meters (4,900 ft) deep in the Levantine basin, a rich hydrocarbon area in one of the world's largest offshore gas finds of the past decade. These two discoveries alone offer Israel the potential to serve its own energy needs and be an energy exporter within the next several years producing substantial economic benefits.

The gas finds also have the potential to change Israel's foreign relations towards a closer collaboration with Cyprus, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and our Palestinian neighbors.

The possible enhancement of ties between Turkey and Israel receives a lot of press attention and is a one possible example.

Nearly four years ago, an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship MV Mavi Marmara bound for Gaza unhinged the relatively close relationship between the two countries.

Israel and Turkey have made efforts to mend diplomatic ties in recent months to resolve this damage and improve ties. The two nations have grown closer and have signed a draft agreement to compensate Turkey for the deaths of protesters aboard the ship; once finalized, the agreement restores full diplomatic ties. The two nations continue to trade and promote mutual tourism, which should expand with the easing of diplomatic tensions.

The port of Haifa

One of the benefits to the nations could be an export route for Israeli natural gas. A leading option for Israel to get its natural-gas riches to the market is an undersea pipeline linking Israel and Turkey. The Turkish market for natural gas is the only growing one (in the region), and the drive to diversify away from Russia will justify Israeli gas to join Azeri, Iranian and Kurdish gas.

In recent months Israel has already signed energy deals with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Israel and Jordan signed $500 million natural gas deal.
The accord may grow into $30-billion partnership for Israel to become Jordan’s main supplier.

If all goes well, the latest developments could see first pipelines being laid between Israel and Turkey as soon as 2015, and gas cooperation between Israel and Egypt would allow export access to Asia's major markets.

I am writing this story while energy negotiation involving Israel and Egypt have been reported. Egypt and Israel have had only limited economic cooperation since signing a landmark peace accord in 1979. Political turmoil in Egypt in recent years has further limited cooperation between the neighboring countries.

Israeli gas could help ease domestic shortages, bolster the Egyptian economy, alleviate internal political unrest, and bolster trade and tourism between the two nations.

We in Israel and Jews throughout the world have just completed celebrating the holiday of Passover, which commemorates our flight to freedom out of Egypt three thousand years ago. The Jewish people spent the last two thousand years without our ancestral homeland, Eretz Israel. Sixty five years ago it was returned to us to build both a safe haven for Jews throughout the world, but many feel this also fulfills Biblical prophecy. Jews, Muslims, and Christians live together in a fairly democratic and economically robust society. Perhaps, indeed “a land flowing with milk and honey" is a reference in the Hebrew Bible to the agricultural abundance of the Land of Israel. The phrase is used in the Book of Exodus during Moses' vision of the burning bush.[3:1–22] Could milk and honey in today's world be oil and natural gas? Who knows! In either case, I and my friends at The Kapiot Café offer our readers a hearty Shalom or peace from Haifa, “the City of Peaceful Coexistence”.

Hamas- But Yet Hope for Israelis and Palestinians?

This current round of battling in our South has been depressing in the fact that it had to happen. There has not been any political way of getting the Hamas terrorists to stop firing explosives at our civilians. This tragically has been the history of life in Israel since the Jewish people returned to our ancestral homeland in 1948. Many of my friends and neighbors have fought in several wars. Many of them spent their early childhoods sleeping in bomb shelters. Our only real crime is that we have returned to our homeland that began in the days of Abraham and Sarah.

Hopefully by the time it ends there will be some important changes in the "rules of the game" here, so that the people who have been enduring such rocket fire will be able to live normal lives. The missile attacks have spread from the south to much of Israel including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Jerusalem is holy to both Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

If a ground invasion of Gaza could be avoided that would seem much cleaner and less distasteful. However, no one knows which way this engagement will turn, and we are bracing ourselves for the worst yet still hoping for the best.  We are all saddened by the deaths and injuries of everyone on both sides of this battle. It is a shame that the assassination of the Gaza Chief of Military staff became necessary.  He had the blood of Israeli men, women, and children on his hands. He believed in terrorism and mass murder. He called for the destruction of our nation.

Defeat in this region is not an option for us Jews, even though clear-cut winning/victory is also often not an option. The greatest  hope is for a political settlement. Peace treaties will surely involve compromise. Settling the feuds will feel like a victory of sorts for all sides, and peace will allow our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren to live without fear of being bombed. They will attend their schools safely, without the need for air raid sirens and bomb shelters.

Until that day, We in Israel do not despair of the situation, and make the best of what has been, until now, a satisfying and fulfilling life within the shadow and pain of the constant state of military engagement with many enemies on many fronts.

The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a resolution adopted on 29 November 1947 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Its title was United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) Future Government of Palestine. The resolution was passed while the British still controlled Palestine. It was neither a Jewish homeland nor a Palestinian state at the time. The British Mandate for Palestine, or simply the Mandate for Palestine, was a legal commission for the administration of the territory that had formerly constituted part of the Ottoman Empire. The draft of the Mandate was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922. The mandate ended at midnight on 14 May 1948.



The resolution recommended the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the partition of the territory into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area being under special international protection, administered by the United Nations. 

However, war broke out and the partition plan was never implemented by the Security Council. The UN blamed the Arabs for the violence. The UN Palestine Commission was never permitted by the Arabs or British to go to Palestine to implement the resolution. On February 16, 1948, the Commission reported to the Security Council:

"Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."

The Arabs were blunt in taking responsibility for starting the war. Jamal Husseini told the Security Council on April 16, 1948:

"The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight."

The proposed plan was accepted by the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine and many local Christians, Muslims, and Druze. However, the plan was rejected by leaders of the Arab community (the Palestine Arab Higher Committee etc.) who were supported in their rejection by the states of the Arab League. In a communication to the United Nations Palestine Commission dated 19 January 1948, the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine stated that it was "determined [to] persist in rejection [to the] partition and in refusal [to] recognize UN resolution [with] this respect and anything deriving. The Jews accepted partition into a gerrymandered crazy quilt and even accepted the internationalization of Jerusalem. This diminished and indefensible territory was to be the dreamed-of Jewish homeland and the haven for the pitiful remnants of Nazi Holocaust survivors.

The Arab League attacked the new Jewish and Palestinian homelands in 1948 prompting thousands of Jews, Christians, and Muslims to flee their homes. The invading Arab nations captured and confiscated the Palestinian homeland until the 1967 war. The city of Jerusalem was controlled by Jordan. Access of Jews to all holy sites was refused in spite of United Nations resolutions to the contrary.

Today, sixty four years later, Jordan and Egypt are our only neighbors that recognize our right to exist.  Israel, still respects the right of the Palestinians to their own homeland. They now control much of the territory granted to them by The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. Twenty per cent of the citizens of pre-1967 Israel are Muslims and Christians who live in the only true democracy in this region. Many if not most Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims on both sides of our borders hope to live in peace and with dignity. 

I am convinced as are many Israelis that Hamas does not represent the true nature of our Palestinian friends and neighbors. Many Israelis and Palestinians hope for the day that the fighting will end and that we can be an example to the rest of the world that nations can live together in peace.