Prime Minister Yair Lapid has given away the farm, or more precisely, Israel’s maritime territory, and what did the country receive in return? A slap in the face as Lebanon took everything that was gifted to them and moved the goalposts by disagreeing to prior agreed Israeli security and compensation requirements.
In response, Defense Minister Benny Ganz, who had also agreed to the terms of a bad deal, put the Israeli Defense Forces on high alert. Now Israeli decision-makers are preparing various potential military scenarios, over renewed tensions with Lebanon, with both defensive and offensive operations.
One of the altered Lebanese clauses demands that Total Energy – the French energy conglomerate that holds the license for both Israel’s Karish rig and Lebanon’s future drilling rig – buy a portion of the reservoir in the waters that Israel was about to surrender to Lebanon.
This is a Lebanese admission that the disputed waters are indeed, at least partly, Israeli sovereign maritime territory which Lapid and Ganz are about to gift to them in return for a low percentage of royalties if, or when, Lebanon is capable of drilling from a future rig.
Israel has informed the United States, acting as liaison negotiators in a deal, and whom many see as favoring Lebanon over Israel, that it opposes the Lebanese changes in what is considered by many in the country as an already bad deal.
United States officials, and perhaps people at the top of Israel’s echelon, seem not to comprehend or are ignoring who are the decision-makers in Lebanon. They primarily include the leader of the Lebanese Parliament and the religious Iranian proxy Hezbollah who are Lebanese twins, joined at the hip by their Shiite connections.
To suggest that Hezbollah is a separate part of Lebanon’s cultural and political life is to misunderstand Lebanon. To suggest that Israel, through a US proxy, is negotiating with the Lebanese government, and not with Hassan Nasrallah, is a fatal mistake.
To say that Hezbollah will not be a recipient of future natural gas revenue is delusional. I repeat, they are joined at the hip with Amal, and Amal and Hezbollah control what happens in Lebanon.
An unconsidered result of Israel’s surrender of its legitimate maritime rights to Lebanon is what will happen if the quantity or quality of the gas is not substantially profitable, and no drilling takes place. This means that Israel will have gifted Lebanon its maritime territory for nothing because there will be no compensation based on energy production to be paid to Israel.
This deal will not be a water for peace deal and the Israeli Karish rig will be even more exposed to Hezbollah aggression on maritime waters gifted freely to Lebanon much closer to the Israeli rig than before. And to think that, when the terms of this deal were being finalized, Ganz said that “this deal harms Iran’s interests.”
