Chevronʼs Purchase Could Unlock Israelʼs Natural Gas Bonanza

 Video Of The Week - Lebanese Journalist - Peace with Israel Is Coming -https://tinyurl.com/y6o58zjo

By Stanley Reed, 9-10-2020 NY Times - https://nyti.ms/2Fk0q36

 Chevron, the American oil giant, wrapped up the acquisition on Monday of a relatively small Houston-based company called Noble Energy, paying about $4 billion.

Until recently, the deal would have been unlikely, if not unthinkable — because what distinguishes Noble is the large natural gas business it has built in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, especially in Israel, an area that major oil companies had until now avoided.Chevron’s move is the latest milestone in a remarkable shift in perceptions about a relatively newregion for the petroleum industry in the eastern Mediterranean. Once a dead sea for the oilindustry, this area, reaching from the Nile Delta in Egypt up to Israel and Lebanon and around Cyprus, has come alive with exploration vessels, drilling rigs and production platforms in recentyears thanks to a series of large natural gas discoveries.

Those finds are drawing major oil companies into the area, attracted not only by the prospect of further undiscovered resources but by improving relations between Israel and its former foes Egypt and Jordan.

International oil giants previously steered clear of Israel, partly,  to avoid alienating large Arab oil producers like Saudi Arabia. The move by Chevron, which this week edged ahead of Exxon Mobil to become America’s largest oil company by market value, indicates that thedays when Persian Gulf states bristle about business with Israel may be over. Recently, the UnitedArab Emirates and Bahrain established relations with Israel with apparent Saudi blessing.

“It is opening up the Israeli market to the world,” Nati Birenboim, a former Israeli energy official said of Chevron’s arrival. “Everyone knows when they bought Noble, they bought Israel.”More than 20 years ago, Noble came to Israel to hunt for petroleum. It has produced major natural gas finds that  turned Israelcinto an exporter with long-term contracts worth an estimated $25 billion.

“I think what Chevron sees is the opportunity” to buy into “massive natural gas resources located in the center of a region with a lot of demand”

Along with the drilling sites off the coast of Israel, a major discovery called the Zohr gas field, found by the Italian energy company Eni in Egyptian waters in 2015, has drawn development in the area.Total, the French oil firm, and Eni have even extended the hunt into the sea off strife-torn Lebanon “It is a very attractive region,” said Wayne Ackerman, a former adviser on gas to Saudi Aramco, who has studied the area’s geology. “I am convinced there will be more discoveries there.”

More than 20 years ago, Noble helped put the region on the energy industry’s map. Delek Drilling, an Israeli firm, brought the company to Israel to hunt for petroleum. The partnership, which began in 1999, has produced major natural gas finds that not only reduced Israel’s dependence on imported coal and oil but turned Israel — with some helpful nudging from American diplomats — into an exporter with long-term contracts worth an estimated $25 billion to help power the neighboring economies of Jordan and Egypt.

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More Questions And Answers

 Q.  Why do you say there is no peace partner?

    A.

•    Can you identify even one Arab country or political movement that hasn’t wanted to destroy Israel, and has recognized Israel’s right to exist, other than Morocco? Egypt and Jordan have signed peace agreements with Israel?

•     State the truth about Islamic responses to peace negotiations; the resolution since 1967 being “No Peace with Israel, No Negotiations with Israel, No recognition of Israel.” Several countries have sought peace and several emirates are now considering it, but that is not the case with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.

•     Israel will join peace in the Middle East when there is peace in the Middle East. Reference to “the Middle East Conflict” rarely references all the wars in which Arabs are killing Arabs, but focuses on the conflict between Israel and residents of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, but that is minor in comparison. The conflicts in the Arab Muslim world have been that way for centuries!

•     Consider this—there is no peace among the Arab tribes that currently reside in Judea and Samaria—here is a solution for peace: http://www.palestinianemirates.com

•     End the Palestinian Authority and deal with 8 tribal groups as a solution to the conflict.

Q.  I disagree with Israel’s policies, so don’t I have the right to boycott Israel?

       A.

•     Would you give up your cellphone, medicines or other products invented or produced by Israel? See the hypocrisy if you won’t.

•     Do you agree with all Canadian government policies?

•     Do you boycott other countries which ignore human rights such as China, Cuba, Russia, Uganda (where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ), to name a few?

•     There is no apartheid in Israel and there is equality for women, minorities and LGBTQ folks in Israel so rather than support the annual Anti-Israel Apartheid Week which perpetuates lies, isn’t it time to create Arab Apartheid Month at universities?

•     To combat the profs who support BDS and spread lies and anti-Semitism, organize seniors to register and audit classes, then publish names of profs and courses that do spread lies.

•     What about the jobs created by Israeli companies that employ Arabs and do you realize that boycotts kill Arab jobs?

 Q.  How can you claim Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism when Israel has policies we don’t support

  A.

•     Does Canada have policies we don’t support? Does Canada have the right to exist? (Or any other country?)

•     Israelis have many disputes with the government so isn’t the matter their national concern and not ours?

•     To say Jews can’t defend themselves is anti-Semitism.

•     There is a Double standard, one should compare Israel to other democracies, and note it often fares better.

•     One should also hold the Arabs accountable, rather than having such low expectations of Muslim countries.

•     Neo/New anti-Semitism is anti-Zionist, blaming the only Jewish state for matters outside of its control, hate-mongering, character assassinating, demonizing and stereotyping.

•     Let’s “Take back Zionism” which is the positive view of Jewish nationalism in the Jewish homeland.

•     Read The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray.

•     Multiculturalism should not be cultural relativism as not all cultures are equal.

•     Political Correctness = danger, read Israel: Reclaiming the Narrative by Barry Shaw and Eurabia by Bat Ye'or.

Q.  Isn’t Israel a racist – apartheid state given the Nation State Law?

      A.

•     No, the Nation State Law does not infringe on the civil and human rights of minorities.

•     Define apartheid which existed under state legislation in South Africa, denying rights to a majority of the citizens, whereas in Israel all residents are equal before the law and share in human rights under the law.

•     Name an Arab or Muslim state in which there is equality for all of its citizens?

•     The Nation State Law is not the only Basic Law; other Basic Laws protect the rights of all people in Israel.

Q.  Why is Israel attacking civilians in Gaza?

      A.

•     How many missiles would you allow on your city or town before reacting? Would any Country choose not to defend its own citizens when attacked? Are you aware that Hamas pays people to participate in their rallies and attacks and punishes those who don’t?

     Q.  How can Israel deny the Right of Return to Arabs who fled in 1948?

     A.

•     I support the right of Arabs to return to the Arab countries from which they came in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Jews began to settle in Palestine and created more opportunity and improved standard of living. Most came from neighboring lands that were designated countries after Partition, just as Israel was.

•     If the Palestinian Arabs deserved a state, why didn’t Jordan give them one during its 19 years of occupation of Judea and Samaria, which they renamed the West Bank. The Jordanians did not recognize the Arab inhabitants as a separate people during its 7000 days of occupation.

•     Jerusalem was never the capital of any state but the Jewish state, and it was never important to the Arabs until after the 1967 war, at which time the concept of a “Palestinian people” emerged.

•     According to the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), one can only be a refugee for a maximum of 10 years, but under UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) there is no end to the time an Arab can claim refugee status and it’s an inherited status, thus after 70 years, even Arab Palestinians settled abroad are consider refugees.

•     Why have Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt denied citizenship, permanent residency status and access to jobs, education and services to Arabs who fled Israel 70+ years ago?

•     Why have over 889,000 Jews who were forcibly expelled from 8 Arab countries never been recognized as refugees or received any funds from the UN or its agencies?

     Questions from either the Left or Right are often intended to undermine Israel’s right to exist or to defend herself, and they are often couched in bias, in ignorance or in oft repeated lies. We encourage people to read and practice responding. You will no longer feel impotent in defending Israel, the only Nation State of the Jewish People.

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The Protests Hamas don’t Want you to See

Video Of The Week - Hamas' March of Return in numbers!! - http://tinyurl.com/y4wxely9

From the Times Of Israel by Joshua Bloch

Gazans have spent 12 years under a tyrannical regime that spends its vast sums on arms rather than food for its people

Those who follow events in the Middle East are no stranger to the weekly riots on the Gaza-Israeli border, but there are other protests going on you probably haven’t heard much about. Why? Because Hamas doesn’t want you to know.

While the so-called “March of Return” riots have taken place with much public fanfare every Friday for nearly a year since March 30, 2018, Hamas has used violence and intimidation to stifle any internal dissent within the coastal enclave.

The ongoing civil rights protests – held under the banner “We Want to Live!” – are the biggest demonstrations yet against Hamas’s 12-year rule. The brutal crackdown saw activists beaten and crowds dispersed with live ammunition. Dozens of journalists have been arrested and prevented from photographing the events. In an act of ultimate despair, a 32-year-old demonstrator set himself on fire.

“Our sons and daughters have lost 12 years of their lives. For what? Each son of a Hamas official owns an apartment, a car, a jeep, a building…While our sons have nothing at all,” an enraged Palestinian woman said in a video posted to social media last week.

In 2007, twelve years ago, Hamas launched a brutal coup against Fatah, the main Palestinian faction in the West Bank. Since consolidating power in Gaza, the terror group has imposed its draconian rule on the population, built a formidable weapons arsenal, dug and equipped several dozens of attack tunnels, and launched three wars against Israel.

Unfortunately for ordinary Gazans seeking basic rights, their protests have yet to draw the same media attention as the weekly Hamas-orchestrated riots.

When Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, it was viewed as an opportunity for the Palestinians to create a thriving enclave free of occupation. International donors paid millions to preserve the greenhouses that Israeli residents of Gaza had built to sustain an agricultural industry. But as Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the Atlantic, “The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.”

Unemployment in Gaza is now over 50 percent, which rises to 60 percent for its youth. And Gaza’s $1,800 per capita annual income ranks among the lowest in the world.

The reason for that is not the lawful Israeli blockade to impede the terror organization’s ability to acquire all the arms it needs to threaten the Jewish state. Rather, it is a direct consequence of Hamas sacrificing desperately needed civilian resources on the altar of its military aims.

The costs of building a military infrastructure to threaten Israel are significant. Each Hamas tunnel reportedly cost $1 million and takes years to build, eating up tons of concrete desperately needed for civilian housing. To make matters worse, as the irate woman in the video said, the leaders of Hamas may not provide for their constituents, but they have been taking very good care of their own families.

While the majority of people in Gaza live close to or below the poverty line, Forbes ranked Hamas in 2018 as the world’s third wealthiest terror organization with an estimated annual income of $700 million. The group is so absurdly rich that only two organizations outrank them, Hezbollah and the Taliban. In the meantime, the average Gazan is left with little of his or her own.

Twelve years have been lost to Hamas tyranny in Gaza. They have been lost to the terror group’s voracious desire to destroy Israel and equally strong desire to enrich themselves at the cost of the life and health of the local population. Regrettably, much of the world has nevertheless found it easier to blame Israel for the chaos. For Gaza to thrive, Hamas must be defeated and removed from power.

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Israelis Use Barn Owls Instead of Chemicals for Pest Control

Video Of The Week -  Israeli Barn Owls in pest control  https://tinyurl.com/ydal7sfp

by ISRAEL21c 12-2-2018

The path to peace in the Middle East might be navigated not via a dove carrying an olive branch but by a lowly barn owl.

Barn owls have been used in Israel since 1982 as an alternative to toxic chemicals for killing voles, which at the time plagued Israeli agricultural fields. The preferred chemical against rodents – known as compound 1080 – had been banned a decade earlier in the United States, although not in Israel.

Ornithologist Yossi Leshem thought that owls might be able to control the rodents more naturally.

Leshem set up an experiment at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in 1983. Three decades later, the barn owl approach has spread throughout the Palestinian territories and into Jordan as well.

“Birds have the power to bring people together, because they know no boundaries,” says Leshem, who teaches at Tel Aviv University.

That’s in part how 22 participants from 10 governments (including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Cyprus, Greece, France and Switzerland in addition to Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan) came together in January to share research from their barn owl vs. rodent experiences.

The group met at the Crowne Plaza resort hotel on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea where they discussed scientific findings and hatch plans. Field trips were organized to visit barn owl nesting boxes in the Jordan Valley, as well as to Amman and Petra. A follow-up in March will see some of the Middle Eastern researchers visit California State University in Sacramento, where they will be hosted by conservation biologist Sara Kross.

While the topic was formally owls, regional peace was never far from discussion.

“Scientists should continue their cooperation for the benefit and peace of people in the area,” emphasized Mansour Abu Rashid, who works with Leshem and directs the Amman Center for Peace and Development.

The program could have been limited to just Israel farms. But the owls didn’t stop at the border and the Palestinians and Jordanians hadn’t switched from rodenticides to owls. In 2002, Leshem and Abu Rashid began to collaborate.

There was some resistance at first – the barn owls, which are a striking white in color, are considered a bad omen in some parts of the Middle East. Violence in the past decade also set back the conservation efforts at times, but eventually US and European funds were secured to launch a cross-border project. And most farmers were convinced after seeing the results.

A pair of barn owls can consume between 2,000 and 6,000 small animals per year and fly up to 7 kilometers away from their nesting boxes each night in search of prey. Today, there are thousands of nesting boxes for barn owls in Israel and hundreds elsewhere in the region.

Compound 1080 is still used in some Israeli fields, although it’s down almost 60 percent since the program began.

But it’s the prospect of “owls for peace” that ignites the imagination of non-farmers.

“In a conflict area, a project like this or any project in common can help,” Leshem says. “I know I’m not going to solve the problems of the Middle East, but I can do my small part.”

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Storm clouds gathering over the region

Video Of The Week –Holocaust Survivors - https://tinyurl.com/y9gbsvbt   

JPost, By Isi Lebler 28-11-2017

For the full article go to https://tinyurl.com/y9sed39r

 The volatility of political activity in the Middle East region is dizzying.

The Syrian civil war is almost at an end. President Basher Assad remains in power and Iran and its surrogate Hezbollah have emerged as the clear victors.

Disconcertingly, both the Americans and the Russians have apparently reached an agreement over Syria that would enable Hezbollah and Iranian ground forces to remain – effectively threatening Israel’s northern borders. In providing legitimacy for the Iranians to remain in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave assurances that Israel’s security would not be threatened. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly stated that this is unacceptable and that, if necessary, Israel would take military steps to keep the Iranians at bay. This will require a balancing act because Netanyahu does not wish to jeopardize his good relationship with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who hitherto ignored Israel’s security concerns to forestall Hezbollah in southern Syria.

The tension is further compounded by Iran’s repeated threats to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. This was exacerbated by the upheavals in Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon with Prime Minister Saad Hariri announcing his resignation while in Saudi Arabia, alleging that he was fearful of being assassinated – and a week later retracting it on his return to Lebanon. At the same time, President Michel Aoun alerted the Lebanese army to an imminent attack by Israel.

Alongside this, Israel is developing a common front with the Saudis where newly entrenched Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman describes Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the new Hitler. IDF Chief-of-Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot stated in an interview with a Saudinewspaper that Israel is willing to share intelligence about Iran with Saudi Arabia. In turn, two Saudi former senior ministers visited a Paris synagogue – an unprecedented occurrence and an important signal.

Yet without detracting from the benefits, this essentially covert alliance between the moderate Sunnis and Israel is based on expediency and cannot necessarily be regarded as a long-term situation.

The Saudis remain on record insisting that they have no relationship with the Israelis. While downplaying the Israeli issue, they are still exerting a major influence on U.S. President Donald Trump in relation to Jerusalem and the settlements and urging him to revisit their original plan which would not meet Israel’s security requirements. But it is impossible to distinguish between fact and fantasy in conflicting media reports.

Relations with Egypt based on collaborating against ISIS forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the personal relationship with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi are excellent but the media and the mosques continue their traditional anti-Semitic incitement.

As to the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah-Hamas unity government has not lessened Hamas’ obsession with obliterating Israel and their determination to retain military control of Gaza.

The duplicitous ailing President Mahmoud Abbas continues his anti-Israel incitement but maintains military coordination with Israel, which effectively protects him from a Hamas takeover. He has shown no sign of willingness to make any concessions and brazenly continues paying huge stipends to terrorist prisoners – now including Hamas members – and their families, despite being warned by the Americans to desist from this barbarous practice of encouraging murder.

On the international scene, the European Union is now in the process of orchestrating a boycott of Israeli goods produced over the Green Line – an unprecedented step reflecting the bias and double standards continuously applied to Israel.

However, the determining factor in relation to international diplomacy undoubtedly rests with the Americans. Public opinion and Congress are pro-Israel and, paradoxically, Christian evangelicals are more supportive of Israel than most Jews.

But there are so many contradictory signals concerning Trump’s intentions and given his penchant for unpredictability, one can only very tentatively guess what they are.

He failed to fulfill his promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and has taken no real punitive action in response to the defiance of Abbas to his demands that he cease paying lucrative state pensions to terrorists and their kin. In a sense, Trump has extended President Barack Obama’s policy of talking to both parties and ignoring Palestinian intransigency. The U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem continues to act as though its role was to represent the interests of the Palestinians over the Green Line.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that he would close the PLO office in Washington if Abbas initiated war crimes proceedings against Israel at the International Criminal Court and refused to enter serious negotiations with the Israelis. The Palestinians rejected these proposals and threatened to break off relations with the Americans if this was implemented. In response, the U.S. almost immediately backtracked.

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INCONVENIENT-GENOCIDE

By Caroline Glick 7-04-2016

For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/jkxe53x

The Christian communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon are well on the way to joining their Jewish cousins. The Jewish communities of these states predated Islam by a millennium, and were vibrant until the 20th century. But the Arab world’s war on the Jewish state, and more generally on Jews, wiped out the Jewish populations several decades ago.

And now the Christian communities, which like the Jews, predate Islam, are being targeted for eradication.

The ongoing genocide of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Sunni jihadists is a moral outrage. Does it also affect Israeli national interests? What do we learn from the indifference of Western governments – led by the Obama administration – to their annihilation? True, after years of deliberately playing down the issue and denying the problem, the Obama administration is finally admitting it exists.

Embarrassed by the US House of Representatives’ unanimous adoption of a resolution last month recognizing that Middle Eastern Christians are being targeted for genocide, the State Department finally acknowledged the obvious on March 25, when Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Islamic State is conducting a “genocide of Christians, Yazidis and Shi’ites.”

Kerry’s belated move, which State Department lawyers were quick to insist has no operational significance, raises two questions.

First, what took the Obama administration so long? Persecution of Christians in Iraq began immediately after the US-led coalition brought down Saddam Hussein in 2003. With the rise of Islamic State in 2012, the process of destroying the Christian community went into high gear. And now these ancient communities are on the brink of extinction.

In Iraq, Christians comprised 8 percent of the population in 2003. Today less than 1% of Iraqis are Christians. In Syria, the Christian community has lost between half and two-thirds of its members in the past five years.

Although precise data is hard to come by, it is clear that thousands of Christians have been slaughtered. Thousands of Christian women and girls have been sold as sex slaves in ISIS slave markets, subjected to continuous, violent rape and beatings. Nuns and priests have been enslaved, crucified, mutilated, kidnapped and held for ransom, as have lay members of Christian communities. Christians have been burned alive.

For years, the administration said that the persecution doesn’t amount to genocide because according to ISIS’s propaganda, Christians are allowed to remain in their homes if they agree to live as dhimmis – that is, without any human rights, and subjected to confiscatory taxation.

And as Larry Franklin from the Gatestone Institute noted in a recent article, the exodus of Christians from the Palestinian Authority is the direct consequence of deliberate persecution of Christians by the PA.

Given the prevalence of Christian persecution, why is the West – which is overwhelmingly Christian – so reticent about mentioning it? And why are Western leaders loathe to do anything to stop it? There are two ways to end genocide. First, you can defeat those conducting it on the battlefield.

If you destroy the forces conducting the genocide, then the genocide ends.

In other words, Middle Eastern Christians, whose communities predate Islam, are targeted because they are perceived as Western implants.

And the West ignores their suffering, because the Left in the West perceives them as Western implants.

In both cases, prejudices, rooted on the one hand in jihadist Islam, and on the other hand in Western self-hatred and post-colonialism, reach the same bigoted conclusion: the only “authentic” people in the Middle East are Muslims.

Everybody else is a colonial implant. And as such, they deserve what they get.

This then brings us back to Israel, and the Jews.

The same ideological prejudice that refuses to recognize that the Islamic State is Islamic, refuses to recognize that jihad is unique to Islam, refuses to recognize that Christians as religious minorities are being targeted for annihilation, and refuses to recognize that the Christians of the Middle East are ancient peoples who have lived in their communities since the dawn of Christianity, also refuse to recognize the rights of the Jewish people as the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

This is the reason that Western governments, led by the Obama administration, are unwilling to defeat ISIS. This is why they are giving preference to Muslim asylum-seekers, who they are incapable of screening, over Christians, who it is unnecessary to screen.

This is the reason that the same governments are far more willing to attack Jews for living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria – the cradle of Jewish civilization and the heartland of the land of Israel, than they are willing to end their support for the PA which sponsors and celebrates terrorism. This is why the same governments eagerly embrace every allegation of Israeli racism, real or imagined, while they ignore, or even fund racist Palestinian efforts to deny Jewish history, a history which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

Video of the week: Powerful words from Israeli Arab, http://tinyurl.com/h5a7bqh

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