Israel, Gaza, and the Struggle for Oil

BY CHARLOTTE DENNETT

 

It was the sign that got to me. I was standing with protesters outside the Burlington (VT) City Hall at a rally organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. To my left I spotted a man, grim-faced and silent, holding aloft a piece of cardboard with these words scratched in black:

“Jews against Genocide.”

“So, it has finally come to this,” I said to myself.

Why, I wondered, would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Biden administration risk their standing in the world and ignore calls for a ceasefire? Did they have an unspoken agenda?

As  a chronicler of the endless post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, I concluded that the end game was likely connected to oil and natural gas, discovered off the coast of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon in 2000 and 2010 and estimated to be worth $500 billion. The discovery promised to fuel massive development schemes involving the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Also at stake was the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean into a heavily militarized energy corridor that could supply Europe with its energy needs as the war in Ukraine dragged on.

Here was the tinderbox waiting to explode that I had predicted in 2022. Now it was exploding before our very eyes. And at what cost in human lives?

Reflections on the Israeli War on Gaza

The year 1975 was my last in beautiful, cosmopolitan Beirut, Lebanon, before it descended into 15 years of brutal civil war, killing 100,000 people.

As a journalist for the Beirut Daily Star, I began reporting on the escalating tensions among the ruling Maronite Christians, Shiite Muslims — located primarily in southern Lebanon not far from the border with Israel — and the Palestinians caught in between. The presence of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon was not appreciated by Lebanon’s Maronite Christian ruling elite.

The PLO had been forced out of Jordan by King Hussein during what became known as Black September (1970). In that conflict Arafat’s forces fought to prevent Jordanians from regaining control of the once-Jordanian-controlled West Bank, after Israeli forces had pulled out following the Six Day War of 1967. Defeated by King Hussein’s forces, Palestinian refugees poured into Lebanon. In their desperation to be heard by the international community, Palestinian militants began hijacking planes in 1968 to express their grievances against Israeli occupation.

Those three years of reporting in the Middle East gave me a rare lesson in how oil was turning desert sheikhdoms into modern city states, and Beirut into a refuge for the rich — but also a refuge for displaced Palestinians, which ultimately would not be tolerated.

From the rooftop of my apartment, I witnessed French Mirage jets supplied to the Maronites roaring overhead to drop bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. Days later, I spent an afternoon on my belly, hiding under a desk as bullets flew around a Christian school where I had taken refuge during a sudden outbreak of fighting…

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (counterpunch.org)

 

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