Natural Gas Worth $453 Billion &
Oil/Petrol worth $71 Billion
The Real Reason Behind
Zionist Occupation
of Palestine
But Nobody Talks
About It
(M. Javed Naseem)
Under a systematic genocide plan, the apartheid Zionist terrorist state of Israel, showing no respect for international laws, human rights and Geneva Convention articles, continues to kill thousands of innocent Palestinians (including children and women) every year ; continues to destroy crops and properties of the Palestinian nationals every year ; and continues to annex more and more land to exert more control. For practical purposes, there exists NO Palestine, only Israel. It’s Israeli territory with Israeli currency, administration, judiciary and civic laws.
Recently the Zionist occupation forces slaughtered hundreds of people, including 66 innocent children. About 2,000 people were injured, about 75,000 people were displaced, about 17,000 housing units were destroyed, thousands beyond repair/fixing. In addition to that, over 50 schools and educational institutions, six hospitals and a dozen primary healthcare centers were also destroyed. Nobody talked about sanctions or disciplinary action against the apartheid state which is financially, militarily and morally supported by the Evil Empire (US-UK-EU).
Nothing will change in favor of
the Palestinians! I am afraid, it will get worse till the apartheid
state of Israel achieves ‘total’ success in Palestine by
eliminating all Palestinians. Google has already changed the name of
the territory from Palestine to Israel on its maps. The Zionists are constantly working on expansion plans and will annex lands from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and even Saudi Arabia. They have planned to construct an alternate canal to Suez Canal, eventually blocking, destroying or capturing the Suez Canal.
A U.N. study report by its body UNCTAD, entitled: “The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential”, declares:
“Geologists and natural resources economists have confirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip. However, occupation continues to prevent Palestinians from developing their energy fields so as to exploit and benefit from such assets. As such, the Palestinian people have been denied the benefits of using this natural resource to finance socioeconomic development and meet their need for energy. The accumulated losses are estimated in the billions of dollars. The longer Israel prevents Palestinians from exploiting their own oil and natural gas reserves, the greater the opportunity costs and the greater the total costs of the occupation borne by Palestinians become.”
This study identifies and assesses existing and potential Palestinian oil and natural gas reserves that could be exploited for the benefit of the Palestinian people, which Israel is either preventing them from exploiting or is exploiting without due regard for international law.
The new discoveries of oil and natural gas in the Levant Basin, amounting to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas at a net value of $453 billion (in 2017 prices) and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at a net value of about $71 billion, offer an opportunity to distribute and share a total of about $524 billion among the different parties, in addition to the many intangible but substantive advantages of energy security and cooperation among long-time belligerents. They can also potentially be a source of additional conflict and violence if individual parties exploit these resources without due regard for the fair share of others. What could be a source of wealth and opportunities could prove disastrous if this common resource is exploited individually and exclusively, without due regard for international law and norms.
Israel has forced a naval closure of the Gaza Strip as part of its energy security policy. The El-Arish pipeline and Mari-B gas platform are key Israeli strategic assets for its entire gas distribution network requiring stringent security measures. The Mari-B platform is located only 13 nautical miles from Gaza’s coast and the El-Arish pipeline runs across the entire Palestinian coast at 13 nautical miles connecting Ashkelon in Israel to El-Arish in Egypt. Since 2000, the year that Mari-B was first discovered, Israel has forced the closure of the Gaza Maritime Zone preventing Palestinian fishing and recreational use beyond distances of 6 nautical miles.
Occupation, Natural Resource Exploitation by Israel Hindering Social, Economic Gains in Palestinian Lands, Syrian Golan, Delegates Tell Second Committee
Israeli occupation and natural resource exploitation continued to hamper social and economic development in the occupied State of Palestine and the Syrian Golan, speakers told the Second Committee (Economic and Financial) as it discussed those territories today.
Israel had carried out military decisions and discriminatory laws which impacted Palestinian natural resources and economic development, said the representative of the State of Palestine. By taking over his State’s resources, Israel had imposed full control on Palestinian trade and guaranteed that its economy would be almost completely subservient to Israel. Israel had also deprived Palestine World Trade Organization (WTO) benefits of 14.5 per cent for transport, transit and shipping fees of low- income States.
Although the United Nations had adopted resolutions that determined Israel as the occupying Power of Palestinian territory, but Power gave no credence to those resolutions, acting as though it was above the law. Thus, an international boycott of Israeli settlements and companies was a procedure in line with those resolutions and that the international community must end its dealings with Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land.
The recent reports attested to a systematic and escalating pattern of human rights and international law violations because of Israel’s illegal, oppressive and destructive policies.
Despite calls by the international community to halt those activities, Israel continued its colonial settlement enterprise in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Israel must be compelled to respect international law, and the Palestinian people could not remain the exception to the responsibility to protect civilians from atrocities.
Everyone is wrong about Israel-Palestine – here’s how the pursuit of huge gas reserves and money is fuelling the conflict:
(By: Darius Shahtahmasebi)
There are trillions of tonnes of recoverable gas lying underneath the disputed waters off Gaza, Israel, Syria and Lebanon. And the Israelis want to make sure they alone control and profit from it.
Few topics rile people up on both sides of the political aisle more than the Israel-Palestine question. It is without doubt one of the most – if not the most – explosively divisive issues on the planet.
In 2000, UK oil company BG Group discovered an estimated 1.6 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas in the Gaza Marine. As noted by Anais Antreasyan in the University of California’s Journal of Palestine Studies, Israel’s continued desire to control Gaza is due to its aim of making “Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-1 gas wells impossible”, with the added goal of not only “preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources” but to “integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations.”
According to Antreasyan, this is part and parcel of a broader 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 barely has enough energy resources of its own to maintain its current exports. Following the discovery of the $4 billion worth of natural gas in Gaza in 2000, there were also later other monumental discoveries of gas in Syria and Lebanon, two known adversaries of the Israeli government. Israel has for some time now shown a keen eagerness to intervene in both countries (for completely unrelated reasons, I’m guessing).
Earlier this year, fresh rounds of talks had begun between Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), Qatar and the EU in respect of Israel’s goal of exporting Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe. The problem has been, at least as far as the US and Israel are concerned, that Hamas has continued to present itself as a thorn in the side of these negotiations, denouncing their legitimacy entirely.
While many on both the left and right, including former US president Donald Trump, are quick to argue that the only reason the US has ventured into the Middle East was for oil and natural resources, very few seem capable of acknowledging the very same issues are also at the heart of the Middle East’s most explosive conflict.
This is despite a UN report, and a US Army study which was commissioned under the Obama Administration which indicated that the recent decision to proceed with a $735 million arms sale to Israel is due to Israel’s aspired domination of the East Mediterranean’s energy resources, and US tacit support for this eventuation. In fact, the 2019 UN report which until recently was unreported, concluded that “occupation has impoverished the Palestinian people, undermined their capacity to access and utilise their resources and denied them the right to move freely within their homelands.”
Taking a much tougher line on Israel is the ONLY way America will ever be able to escape the Middle East
(By: Tom Fowdy)As conflict rages in Gaza, it’s clear President Biden would much rather focus elsewhere. But the uncomfortable truth is the Middle East will always be a problem for the US until it completely rethinks its strategy on Israel.
Can the Israel issue truly just fade away and become irrelevant? Even after this specific conflict ends, the answer is clearly no. Israel – and by extension, the Middle East – will continue to be a major problem and distraction for the US until the issue is permanently resolved. And that is an impossibility as long as there is unconditional American support for Israel.
This continues to be the wedge issue for the Middle East as a whole – the longstanding grievance that has been a catalyst for radicalization and Anti-American sentiment for decades. And attempting to ignore it will mean it will never go away.
America simply unconditionally rewarded Israel for its behavior and didn’t push for concessions to deliver peace. There was also the strategic blunder of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital and the failure to challenge Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
If Biden wants out of the Middle East forever, then the only way is for America to completely bin its current policy. This is asking a lot, but there is no other way. He first needs to sacrifice looking for short-term gains against China in the pursuit of long-term credible peace in the Middle East, which must consist of ending one-sided US favoritism in favor of Israel and demanding a two-state solution. This would permanently render the Arab-Israeli conflict to the history books and nullify the core of radical, revisionist ideology within the region – and, by extension, terrorism and conflict.
If there is no change, then it’s simply a case of waiting for the next crisis to happen.
(Courtesy: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/524231-biden-israel-middle-east-us/)
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