GAS: A CASUS BELLI WITH LEBANON?
Since the last Lebanon war ended in 2006, the most serious threats exchanged between Israel and its northern neighbor have probably been over gas. Not surprisingly, such threats did not emerge until Israel’s major gas finds in 2010. Responding to claims and accusations launched by members of the Lebanese government at the time, the Israeli government said it would defend its gas reserves with military force if necessary.57
The dispute between the two states actually boils down to a disagreement over their common border, the so-called ‘‘blue line’’ traced by the United Nations after Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. Only a quarter of this line has been accepted by the parties,58 and since maritime borders begin where land ones end, disagreement over one inevitably leads to disagreement over the other.
Moreover, at the time of the gas discoveries the exclusive economic zones (EEZs)59 of Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, which overlap, had not been demarcated.
Maps provided by Noble Energy, Israel’s U.S. partner in the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields, show that both these fields are contained within the line drawn on the map to demarcate Israel’s EEZ from Lebanon’s, but the problem is that to date no such line has been legally established between the two states.60
In the best of circumstances, the demarcation of maritime boundaries requires lengthy negotiations, and clear-cut legal precedents are lacking. In cases like this, where the parties are divided by conflict and officially still at war, negotiations are virtually out of the question, especially if the resources are exploitable in the short term. Instead, a ‘‘media war’’ over the gas issue was launched by Lebanese parliamentarians and political figures. Nabih Birri, the speaker of parliament, accused Israel in June 2010 of ‘‘racing to make the case a fait accompli’’ and presenting itself ‘‘as an oil emirate, ignoring the fact that, according to the maps, the deposit extends into Lebanese waters.’’61 The country’s energy minister accused Israel of ‘‘aggressive intentions towards our resources,’’62 and the head of Hizballah’s executive council, asserting that the deposits were under Lebanon’s seabed, warned Israel against ‘‘looting’’ the country’s wealth.63
Political maneuvers followed. In July 2010, Lebanon’s permanent representative to the UN announced his country’s intention to ask the UN to delimit the maritime borders between the two countries, as it had for the blue line.64 In January 2011, the Foreign Ministry asked the UN to bar Israel from drilling in the shared waters between Israel and Lebanon.65 Shortly thereafter, a UN official announced that his organization was prepared to assist Lebanon in the process of drawing its maritime borders with Israel.
Meanwhile, on 17 August 2010, the Lebanese parliament passed a law (which had been on hold for years) authorizing the exploration of offshore gas by foreign companies. With the way now open for drilling, Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri traveled to Cyprus the following month to sign an agreement delimiting the two countries’ shared EEZ.66
On the Israeli side, in June 2010 the infrastructure ministry, backed by its partners in the gas venture, reaffirmed that the fields lay within Israel’s maritime space and declared Israel’s readiness to use force to defend its offshore infrastructure.67 A Knesset delegation comprising members of its Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee soon visited an extraction site to evaluate its defendability. The head of the committee declared that ‘‘the more Israel succeeds in decreasing its dependence on external gas sources,’’ the more it should be prepared for terrorist attacks on its strategic energy infrastructure,68 but in fact preparations had not been neglected. The Israeli navy, responsible for protecting the Tamar and Leviathan fields, had already come up with a comprehensive plan covering drill ships, platforms, and pipelines, now estimated to cost some $760 million annually.69 In summer 2012 Israel’s Defense Ministry approved an expanded plan to protect the fields.70 The ‘‘Iron Dome’’ anti-missile system introduced in March 2011 can also be deployed to defend the gas exploitation facilities.
Meanwhile, the Russian energy giant Gazprom has reportedly proposed its services to Lebanon, and China is a potential buyer.71 According to one commentator, ‘‘For now, any dispute between the two countries is confined to media sound bites and parliament chambers. But if exploration and development does get underway, it’s not hard to imagine things going badly if the countries’ tenuous ceasefire—following the 2006 hostilities between them—were to fall apart.’’72
