According to Anais Antreasyan in the University of Californias Journal of Palestine Studies, the most respected English language journal devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israels stranglehold over Gaza has been designed to make Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells impossible. Israels long-term goal besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations. This is part of a wider 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. For the Israeli government, Hamas continues to be the main obstacle to the finalisation of the gas deal. In the incumbent defence ministers words: Israels experience during the Oslo years indicates Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel. The threat is not limited to Hamas… It is impossible to prevent at least some of the gas proceeds from reaching Palestinian terror groups. The only option, therefore, is yet another military operation to uproot Hamas. Unfortunately, for the IDF uprooting Hamas means destroying the groups perceived civilian support base – which is why Palestinian civilian casualties massively outweigh that of Israelis. Both are obviously reprehensible, but Israels capacity to inflict destruction is simply far greater. In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, the Jerusalem-based Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (Pcati) found that the IDF had adopted a more aggressive combat doctrine based on two principles – zero casualties for IDF soldiers at the cost of deploying increasingly indiscriminate firepower in densely populated areas, and the dahiya doctrine promoting targeting of civilian infrastructure to create widespread suffering amongst the population with a view to foment opposition to Israels opponents. This was confirmed in practice by the UN fact-finding mission in Gaza which concluded that the IDF had pursued a deliberate policy of disproportionate force, aimed at the supporting infrastructure of the enemy - this appears to have meant the civilian population, said the UN report. The Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not all about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war. Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:03:40 +0000
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