Pressure Rising

Inside Out

The recent discoveries of massive gas fields off the coast of northern Israel, close to the Lebanese coastal waters, has led to an intense rhetorical war between the two warring neighbours to the extent that maritime sovereignty has now become the latest source of conflict between Beirut and Tel Aviv.

A young girl holding a Hezbollah flag is lifted in the crowd gathered to hear Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah delivering a televised speech on July 26, 2011 on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the July-August 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel

In a televised speech marking the fifth anniversary of the Second Lebanon War on Tuesday, Hassan Nasrallah, in line with his secretary comments a week earlier, warned Israel against “stealing Lebanon’s resources out of its territorial waters”. “I tell the friends and the foes that Lebanon will rely on all the elements of strength in order to regain its natural resources, and the most important element is the army-people-Resistance formula”, Nasrallah added.

For their part, Israeli officials have been quick to state that any assault on Israel’s offshore facilities will be responded to decisively. Back in January, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described offshore gas fields as “strategic objectives” and vowed that “Israel will defend its resources”. Already, the Israeli navy has presented to the government a maritime-security plan costing between $40 and $70 million in order to enhance its capabilities to defend the gas fields.

This latest episode of conflict began in 2009 when a US-Israeli consortium discovered the Tamar gas field 55 miles off the coast of northern Israel, which contains an estimated 8.4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. This was then followed by the discovery of a new field called Leviathan around the same area in 2010 with an initial estimate of 16 trillion cubic feet of gas. However, the good news did not stop there; there are likely more untapped fields according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Last March, USGS estimated that the Levantine Basin, which includes the territorial waters of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Cyprus, could hold as much as 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

Maritime border between Israel and Lebanon has never been delineated because the two states are still technically at war. Since the announcement of the Leviathan find, Lebanese diplomats have called on the United Nations to prevent Israel from drilling claiming the gas field extends into their country’s waters. The problem is that there is little that the UN can do. Although the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea offers specific guidelines for maritime borders, Israel is not a signatory to the convention and that it can reject any UN ruling that it considers disadvantageous. And in the absence of a mutual agreement on the border and division of resources, Israel could, like Qatar in the case of the South Pars/North Dome field, follow the “right of capture” rule which allows a nation to “extract oil or gas from its side of the border even if the reserves stretch into another country’s territory”.

Thus, stakes are enormous especially that both Lebanon and Israel are currently dependent on neighboring countries for importing fuel and power. Israel presently relies on Egypt for most of its gas, but the durability of that arrangement is no longer certain following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In fact, the Egyptian pipeline supplying gas to Israel and Jordan was blown up in January and only began operation only a couple of weeks ago. As for the Lebanese side, the prospect of oil and gas beneath Lebanon’s coastal waters could have immense benefits for a country encumbered with one of the highest debt rates in the world at around $52 billion or 147% of GDP.

And it is in this context that the Lebanese government’s recent approval of a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran to help Beirut pursue oil and gas exploration becomes troublesome. Given that Iran itself lacks exploration technology, it is highly plausible that this MoU is to help Tehran to cover up and/or justify its naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea so it can come to the aid of Hezbollah should the need for it arises. This is all the more likely since Iran’s new naval doctrine, according to Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayari, is to expand and maintain its naval presence in “the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean”. Added to this is the fact that a flare-up in the Mediterranean Sea will not only be beneficial to Tehran helping it to divert attention from its nuclear program, but also to Assad’s regime providing it with more space to crush the opposition forces.

Meanwhile, Israel has entered an agreement with Cyprus to construct a natural gas pipeline which, once in place, could potentially terminate the Nabucco pipeline project. Needless to say, this agreement has disturbed Ankara which fears that natural gas may bring Israel, Cyprus, and by extension Greece into an alliance thereby endangering Turkey’s, and indeed the Northern Republic of Cyprus’s, strategic interests in the Mediterranean.

All in all, another regional war may very well be underway, and hence it is fair to suggest that the potential oil and gas fields off the Lebanese and Israeli coasts are more likely to be a source of conflict before becoming a potential long-term source of wealth for the parties involved.

Nima Khorrami Assl

Beijing-based writer and researcher specializing in policy and analysis on geo-economics and security development in the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Mr. Assl has carried out a number of projects for both governmental and private clients in the Middle East and has published op-eds in “The Guardian,” Open Democracy, and Defence IQ.