Who Is Stealing Syria’s Oil?
Ariel Sharon once said: Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put Israel on trial.
The former Israeli PM couldn’t be more accurate than these days: We now know for sure that Israel has begun drilling crude oil from the occupied Golan Heights and the United Nations is not doing anything about it.
Under a deal signed with Tel Aviv, Afek Oil and Gas, a subsidiary of Genie Israel, has begun “exploratory drilling” (another canny term for extracting and stealing crude oil) in the Golan Heights. Syria’s oil-rich region was occupied by Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967.
But here is the catch: Genie Israel is run by retired Israeli General Effi Eitam, who once declared Palestinians “creatures who came out of the depths of darkness,” and that Israel would eventually have to kill them all. The company also has a strategic advisory board that includes (here is another catch) American media mogul Rupert Murdoch and several well-connected international individuals, including former US Vice President Dick Cheney!
That says why they don’t care if under UN Security Council Resolution 242 the Golan Heights is still an occupied territory that belongs to Syria. Afek got around this by claiming they are only drilling for exploration, but in reality they are moving fast toward commercial production. In fact, Israel is simply doing what it has been doing for years in cooperation with US companies in places like occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq:
1. Israel amended the path of its apartheid Separation Wall in the West Bank village of Rantis to include an area that has oil. The drilling is taking place on the Palestinian side of the “Green” 1949 armistice line. Israel is stealing oil and gas, which, by right, belongs to the Palestinians. The Meged-5 Oil Well in Rantis falls within the governorate of Ramallah.
2. Israel has been dipping into Lebanon’s offshore oil and gas reserves for years. Israel started drilling for oil more than seven years ago. It has been violating 860 square kilometers of Lebanon’s exclusive economic zone, and the violation has yet to receive any reaction from the UN.
3. In Iraq, with a helping hand from Israel and Turkey, the terrorist group of ISIL has been selling stolen crude oil at knockdown prices to European countries worth millions of dollars a day. Again, the UN remains silent – even though the terrorist goons appropriate the oil money to arm and feed the rank and file.
Needless to say, the importance of oil revenue hasn’t been lost on the Israeli war machine either. They are in this together with Turkey and ISIL, and perhaps that explains why ISIL never attacks Israel!
Soon Israel, though, will be pumping oil in Syria’s Golan Heights; never mind there is no legal framework to do so. If history is right, the Golan oil project is one more thing we need to add to the long list of Israeli evils:
Oil is helping pay for Israel’s destructive occupations and wars. The new crime the US and Israel are committing in the Golan heights as 2015 opens does not fit easily into any standard category, except for the category of familiarity – particularly at the UN where no trial awaits Tel Aviv.
Source: FNA
