Tomgram: Michael Schwartz: "Israel, Gaza, and Energy War:The Great Game in the Holy Land"

[KoKo]

INTRODUCTION from TOM ENGLEHARDT:

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Israel, Gaza, and Energy Wars in the Middle East
Posted by Michael Schwartz at 8:03AM, February 26, 2015.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Talk of an oil glut and a potential further price drop seems to be growing. The cost of a barrel of crude now sits at just under $60, only a little more than half what it was at its most recent peak in June 2014. Meanwhile, under a barrel of woes, economies like China's have slowed and in the process demand for oil has sagged globally. And yet, despite the cancellation of some future plans for exploration and drilling for extreme (and so extremely expensive) forms of fossil fuels, startling numbers of barrels of crude are still pouring onto troubled waters.

For this, a thanks should go to the prodigious efforts of "Saudi America" (all that energetic hydraulic fracking, among other things), while the actual Saudis, the original ones, are still pumping away. We could, in other words, have arrived not at "peak oil" but at "peak oil demand" for at least a significant period of time to come. At Bloomberg View, columnist A. Gary Shilling has even suggested that the price of crude could ultimately simply collapse under the weight of all that production and a global economic slowdown, settling in at $10-$20 a barrel (a level last seen in the 1990s).
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Among them is one that has gotten remarkably little attention even as it has grown more intense and swept up ever more countries. This is the quarter-century-old struggle over natural gas deposits off the coast of Gaza as well as elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. That never-ending conflict provides a remarkable and grim lens through which to view so many recent aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and long-time TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz offers a panoramic look at it here for the first time.

Tom

http://www.tomdispatch.com/

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The Great Game in the Holy Land
How Gazan Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of An International Power Struggle
By Michael Schwartz

Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.

Amid the many fossil-fueled conflicts in the region, one of them, packed with threats, large and small, has been largely overlooked, and Israel is at its epicenter. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when Israeli and Palestinian leaders began sparring over rumored natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. In the ensuing decades, it has grown into a many-fronted conflict involving several armies and three navies. In the process, it has already inflicted mindboggling misery on tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it threatens to add future layers of misery to the lives of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. Eventually, it might even immiserate Israelis.

Resource wars are, of course, nothing new. Virtually the entire history of Western colonialism and post-World War II globalization has been animated by the effort to find and market the raw materials needed to build or maintain industrial capitalism. This includes Israel's expansion into, and appropriation of, Palestinian lands. But fossil fuels only moved to center stage in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the 1990s, and that initially circumscribed conflict only spread to include Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, and Russia after 2010.

CONTINUED AT:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175961/tomgram%3A_michael_schwartz%2C_israel%2C_gaza%2C_and_energy_wars_in_the_middle_east/#more

[guillaumeb]

1. yet another resource to steal from the Palestinians

and another reason to keep up the pressure on the Palestinians so the Israeli government can reach the goal of an ethnically cleansed, religiously pure homeland.

[bemildred]

2. Yep.

Nobody admits it yet, they are all building democracy or something, but we are already neck deep in resource wars.

[KoKo]

3. "Egypt Court Declares Hamas a 'Terrorist' Organisation"

Last edited Mon Mar 2, 2015, 11:57 AM - Edit history (1)

(Putting things in place, I guess)

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#EgyptTurmoil

An Egyptian court on Saturday declared Hamas a "terrorist" organisation, a judicial source said, weeks after the Palestinian resistance movement's armed wing was given the same designation.

The Cairo Court for Urgent Matters made the designation after two private lawsuits were submitted by lawyers Samir Sabry and Ashraf Said against the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas said the ruling was “shocking and dangerous,” according to a statement released by the group.

“The Egyptian court’s decision to list the Hamas movement as a terror organisation is shocking and is dangerous, and it targets the Palestinian people and its factions of resistance,” the statement said.

A spokesperson for the group told Anadolu Agency Egypt was "serving the Israeli enemy" with its decision.

"With this politicized verdict, Egypt is serving the Israeli enemy and is no longer an impartial sponsor to any Palestinian issue," said Fawzi Barhoum. "Unfortunately, the situation has been turned upside down: Israel the enemy has become a friend of Egypt while Hamas – which is an integral part of the Palestinian people – has become a terrorist."

A spokesperson for the Egyptian government declined to say what actions the government would take to enforce the ruling.


"When a final judgment is issued, we will discuss this," Hossam al-Qawish said, according to Reuters.

Egyptian authorities in March 2014 barred Hamas from carrying out any activities on its soil and froze the group’s assets. Last month the Court for Urgent Matters designated Hamas’ armed wing – the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades – a “terrorist” group.

In its ruling the court said the brigades had been involved in “several terrorist operations, the latest of which was an attack on a security checkpoint in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on the border with the Gaza Strip in October, in which 31 soldiers were killed.”


- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypt-court-declares-hamas-terrorist-organisation-2043944479#sthash.JM4smR2h.dpuf

[bemildred]

4. Al Sisi needs the distraction pretty bad, but Hamas is not who he needs to be afraid of.

Have you ever noiticed that ISIS spelled backwards is Sisi?
Hmmmmm.