Rumors of war could become the reality as Israel vies with the other nations of the Levant for control of the huge riches beneath the sea.
When
Israel looks at the greatest threat to its long-term hopes for the
future, these days it’s looking out to sea. The old issues are on the
table, of course: Iran’s nukes, the Palestinians, the Syrian
slaughterhouse next door and growing regional instability. But if
there’s a place where a sudden, out-of-control war is likely to erupt,
it’s probably not going to be called the Sinai, the Golan, the West Bank
(or Judea and Samaria). It’s going to be called Leviathan, Dalit or
Karish—the vast fields of natural gas and oil discovered in the deep
waters between Israel and Cyprus over the last five years.
Who
controls that wealth is likely to dominate the economic future of the
region for generations to come. The Israelis know it. So do their
allies, their rivals and their enemies. And tensions are mounting by the
day.
“All the elements of danger are there,” says Pierre Terzian, editor of the oil industry
weekly Petrostrategies: there is competition for huge resources, there
are disputed borders, and, not to put too fine a point on it, “this is a
region where resorting to violent action is not something unusual.”
The United States government
is watching warily, trying to broker diplomatic settlements and, so
far, failing. No longer inclined to be the region’s policeman on land or
in the air, much less at sea, Washington is scaling back its presence
in the Middle East while just about everyone else is increasing theirs.
Israel is rushing to create “the most technologically advanced fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean,” according to a report in Tablet Magazine. Turkey is flexing its maritime muscles with plans to spend as much as a billion dollars on a multi-purpose amphibious assault ship that
will give its fleet blue water capabilities like never before. The
Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, meanwhile, is known to have
naval missiles, and has used them in the past, sinking a cargo vessel
and holing an Israeli warship during the Lebanon war of 2006. Russia isexpanding both
its naval and commercial presence in Syrian waters, despite the Syrian
civil war. It inked a $90 million, 25-year exploration deal with
Damascus last Christmas Day.
The
area in question was roughly defined in 2010 by the U.S. Geological
Survey. It estimated that in an area of the Eastern Mediterranean dubbed
the Levant Basin Province (PDF) there are some 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
and 1.6 billion barrels of oil—and possibly twice that much. The basin
runs from near the Syrian port of Tartus (which is also where the
Russians have their naval base), down the entire coast of Lebanon,
Israel and Gaza, and out toward Cyprus.
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