A plan looking for a pretext.
Netanyahu presented his plan two weeks before the Hamas attack.
‘Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, showing a map of “The New Middle East” without Palestine during his recent speech at the UN.’
The Great Gazan Gas Robbery
JUNE 18, 2009BY ANDY ROWELLBLOG POST
As Iran continues to grab the headlines coming out of the Middle East, the Obama Administration is said to be quietly pushing Israel to soften its stance on Gaza to relax its vice-like grip on the border crossings, in order to ease the growing humanitarian crisis.
Any diplomatic initiative by Obama that lessens the suffering of the Gazan people has to be welcomed with a degree of urgency, especially in relation to the blockade of food and medicines.
Some 96 percent of Gaza’s population is dependent on humanitarian aid. According to Save the Children one in three families cannot afford a balanced diet.
Just as food and medicines shortages are deemed critical, so is the supply of energy, with much of the Gazan infrastructure said to be at breaking point, leading to routine power blackouts.
In order to help rectify this, earlier this month, an Israeli construction team finished work on a new pipeline for the transfer of fuel and natural gas from Israel to the Gaza strip. This is a crazy situation because it should be the Gazans who are exporting gas to the Israelis and not the other way around.
An estimated 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline actually belong to Palestine. Currently, British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) hold the oil and gas exploration rights to the whole of the offshore Gazan marine area, the rights to which were signed in a 25-year agreement in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet.
Back in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority”. The proposed contract was for $4 billion, of which one billion was to go the Palestinians.
However, the Israelis have been out to scupper this deal and take the gas reserves for their own.
Writing in Alternet recently Noam Chomsky noted how new attacks by Israeli naval vessels against Gazan fishermen “began shortly after the discovery by the British Gas group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza’s territorial waters. Industry journals report that Israel is already appropriating these Gazan resources for its own use, part of its commitment to shift its economy to natural gas.”
Chomsky quotes Platt’s Commodity News, from February this year saying that “Israel’s finance ministry has given the Israel Electric Corp. approval to purchase larger quantities of natural gas from BG than originally agreed upon, according to Israeli government sources [which] said the state-owned utility would be able to negotiate for as much as 1.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the Marine field located off the Mediterranean coast of the Palestinian controlled Gaza Strip.”
Chomsky adds that “The pillage of what could become a major source of income for Palestine is surely known to US authorities” and could be one of the reasons behind the recent Israeli invasion into Gaza.
Chomsky is not the only academic who believes this. Michel Chossudovsky is a Canadian economist and professor of economics at the University of Ottawa. Writing earlier this year he argued that “the military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves. This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.”
He continues: “the issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine … however, the death of Yasser Arafat, the election of the Hamas government and the ruin of the Palestinian Authority have enabled Israel to establish de facto control over Gaza’s offshore gas reserves.”
Chossudovsky argues that the decision to speed up negotiations with British Gas (BG Group) by the Israelis coincided, chronologically, with the planning of the invasion of Gaza initiated back in June 2008.
He argues that “the military occupation of Gaza is intent upon transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel in violation of international law.”
If Obama is serious about building peace in the Middle East he has to make sure this does not happen.
Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East
Irene L. Gendzier presents incontrovertible evidence that oil politics played a significant role in the founding of Israel, the policy then adopted by the United States toward Palestinians, and subsequent U.S. involvement in the region. Consulting declassified U.S. government sources, as well as papers in the H.S. Truman Library, she uncovers little-known features of U.S. involvement in the region, including significant exchanges in the winter and spring of 1948 between the director of the Oil and Gas Division of the Interior Department and the representative of the Jewish Agency in the United States, months before Israel's independence and recognition by President Truman.
Gendzier also shows that U.S. consuls and representatives abroad informed State Department officials, including the Secretary of State and the President, of the deleterious consequences of partition in Palestine. Yet the attempt to reconsider partition and replace it with a UN trusteeship for Palestine failed, jettisoned by Israel's declaration of independence. The results altered the regional balance of power and Washington's calculations of policy toward the new state. Prior to that, Gendzier reveals the U.S. endorsed the repatriation of Palestinian refugees in accord with UNGA Res 194 of Dec. 11, 1948, in addition to the resolution of territorial claims, the definition of boundaries, and the internationalization of Jerusalem. But U.S. interests in the Middle East, notably the protection of American oil interests, led U.S. officials to rethink Israel's military potential as a strategic ally. Washington then deferred to Israel with respect to the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, the question of boundaries, and the fate of Jerusalem—issues that U.S. officials have come to realize are central to the 1948 conflict and its aftermath.
About the Author and Scholar
Irene L. Gendzier, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 1964; M.A., Columbia; B.A., Barnard College), is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, an Affiliate in Research at Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a research affiliate of the MIT Center for International Studies.
You'll understand easily why the US admin is complicit or even pushing for the Genocide in Gaza.
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