{"id":133186,"date":"2014-07-24T22:02:03","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T22:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=133186"},"modified":"2014-07-24T22:02:03","modified_gmt":"2014-07-24T22:02:03","slug":"israels-operation-protective-edge-really-natural-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/israels-operation-protective-edge-really-natural-gas\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Israel\u2019s Operation Protective Edge Really About Natural Gas?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Tascha Shahriari-Parsa<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">While many articles have debunked the myth that Israel is acting out of \u201cself-defense,\u201d very few have attempted to establish why Israel\u00a0<i>is\u00a0<\/i>continuing its assault on Palestine through\u00a0<i>Operation Protective Edge<\/i>, aside from the supposition that Zionists have a fanatic penchant for drawing Palestinian blood. Behind the operation, behind the mass Israeli and U.S. propaganda attempting to justify the massacre, and behind the death of every child in Gaza is a conflict rarely discussed, an imperialist conflict and a contradiction that rests on\u00a0<i>Israel\u2019s ambitions to appropriate and profit from Gaza\u2019s natural gas resources.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">To provide some background, the natural gas issue arose in the year 2000 when British Gas (BG) discovered what they claimed to be $4 billion worth of natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza. The Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) and British Gas (BG) both invested in the project, with BG holding 60% of the rights. Since then, more gas has been found in the region.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, has estimated that the amount of gas in Palestine is so grand that it could make Palestine as rich as Kuwait. In due reaction, since 2000, Israel has strengthened its maritime blockade on Gaza, denying Palestine basic rights over its territorial waters, driving away Palestinian fishing boats, and contaminating the waters so heavily from its naval attacks that the fishing industry essentially collapsed.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201cOn its coastal littoral,\u201d reported Peter Beaumont from Gaza several years ago, \u201cGaza\u2019s limitations are marked by a different fence where the bars are Israeli gunboats with their huge wakes, scurrying beyond the Palestinian fishing boats and preventing them from going outside a zone imposed by the warships.\u201d It is discernible that this is directly due to Israel\u2019s appetite for Palestinian gas.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">In recent years, Israel\u2019s energy crisis has deepened,<a style=\"color: #cf1028;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/business\/israel-s-gas-reserves-insufficient-for-exports-1.451838\">\u00a0as marked by a letter by two Israeli scientists<\/a>. \u201cWe believe Israel should increase its [domestic] use of natural gas by 2020 and should not export gas,\u201d the letter reads.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2014\/07\/18\/is-israels-operation-protective-edge-really-about-natural-gas\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tascha Shahriari-Parsa While many articles have debunked the myth that Israel is acting out of \u201cself-defense,\u201d very few have attempted to establish why Israel\u00a0is\u00a0continuing its assault on Palestine through\u00a0Operation Protective Edge, aside from the supposition that Zionists have a fanatic penchant for drawing Palestinian blood. Behind the operation, behind the mass Israeli and U.S. propaganda [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":132660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-133186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}