02/27/15 – Michael Schwartz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest up today is Michael Schwartz.
Regular at TomDispatch.com.
He teaches sociology at Stony Brook University.
And he's the author of Radical Protest and Social Structure and the Power Structure of American Business.
And then he also wrote the book War Without End, focused on oil and Iraq.
And here he is at Tom Dispatch.
Israel, Gaza, and energy wars in the Middle East.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Good.
Really terrific.
Glad to be here.
Good to have you back on the show.
Apologies if you can hear chainsaws and men talking in the background.
There's a construction site going on next door.
And that might just be a part of this interview.
But that's OK by me.
But just letting you know so you're not taken by surprise.
So very important piece here.
The Great Game in the Holy Land.
You know, everybody, I don't mean to confuse you, but there's always two essays and two titles for everything at TomDispatch.com.
The Great Game in the Holy Land.
How Gazan natural gas became the epicenter of an international power struggle.
So go ahead and take it from the beginning.
Who discovered natural gas offshore Gaza and when and what's the deal?
Well, there were rumors about it.
I don't know how far back it went into the 1980s, but you know, the natural gas wasn't the resource that it is now.
You know, it's become sort of the primo new resource.
And so it wasn't really looked upon as some kind of great, a great resource that people ought to compete over the way they already were over oil and been fighting for 70 or 80 years over oil and especially in the Middle East.
So when the Oslo Accords were signed, the gas offshore from Gaza was just allocated the possible gas at that point was just allocated to the to the new Palestinian Authority as sort of one of the concessions that Israel was making right at the time, you know, as part of their projected withdrawal of their occupation of all Palestinian lands.
But then, you know, took about eight years or so for the Palestinians to get together and they they brought in British gas, which is the British natural gas equivalent of BP.
It's a very large international gas company with all of the facilities of that and they just they actually ascertain that there really was gas there and they signed a contract that was going to have British gas extracted and and market it and hand over 10% or thereabouts 10% of the of the profits from this natural gas to the Palestinian Authority.
Well, right at about that time and now we've gotten up to 2000 the Israelis were starting to have a real energy problem.
You know, they don't have very good relations with most of the places in the world that have oil.
They don't have any of their own and a tiny bit of natural gas and they're looking at this and they're of course occupying Gaza.
So they said, oh, wait a minute here, you know, we've got to get our We got to get our share of this and this set off something that's been going on now for 15 years, which is the Israelis demanding that basically they get that gas.
I mean they they had all different iterations of what they were demanding.
But basically what they were saying is is that the gas that's extracted by first British gas, right would be delivered to Israel and that whatever share the Palestinians were going to get of the revenues would also be delivered to Israel and that Israel would dole it out to the to the Palestinians and now what year are we talking about again here Michael?
Well at this point in the story, but well the first the first deal was going to come down in 2000 and the Israelis, you know, we're patrolling the waters that were going to be drilled right and they said, well, we're not going to allow this to happen because you're going to just take this gas.
You're going to ship it over to Egypt.
The Palestinians are going to get some of it.
The Palestinians are going to get about a billion dollars over the next few years out of it and we don't want them to have any of that.
The reasons they gave were that first of all, they needed the gas and so they wanted the gas to be delivered to them and secondly that they couldn't let the Palestinians have anything because of the money because they would just use it to attack Israel.
But of course what they were really saying is is that this is a resource that we've conquered and we want to we want to control it and and so we've gone sort of forward from them.
There's been iterations of negotiations and basically what the Israelis were willing to give the Palestinians was a claim on a certain proportion of the revenues a claim on a certain proportion of the actual gas but that Israel should be in control of both of these things and dole them out according to what they thought the Palestinians deserved and the Palestinian Authority, which was established under the Oslo Awards back in the 90s.
Right would never agree to that because they already are experiencing what the occupation looked like and that meant that the Israelis would starve them of all these things.
So they would always refuse this and then the Israelis would say, okay now nothing's going to happen.
Well, you know the most important moment was in about 2007 when by now Tony Blair is the organizer and the negotiator on behalf of British gas and on behalf of Europe actually he's he's saying, okay, what we'll do is we'll take the revenues that are ultimately going to be delivered to the Palestinian Authority and we'll send them to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank in New York will dole out the money to the Palestinian Authority and make sure that it's not used for any kind of weaponry or anything that's going to hurt Israel and Israel should be satisfied with this but Israel said absolutely not we won't accept that we think that you know, they'll bamboozle the Federal Reserve of New York Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
And so that collapsed and it was at that point that the Israeli government decided look, we're just going to unilaterally develop this gas if we can but they had a big problem with that, which is that these gas facilities are incredibly vulnerable and you know by that point Hamas was involved in this right and Hamas had those rockets that you know, the famous rockets that Israel says is threatening their existential existence, but those rockets while they can't really threaten Israel in any serious way, they are capable of taking out any oil facility.
And so they said, okay, we're going to have to get rid of the get rid of the Hamas rockets before we just go ahead and exploit this oil, this gas, oil gas, it's natural gas offshore.
So that was when they instituted boycott and the end of the the blockade of Gaza and put Gaza on what they called a diet, right?
This is why Sharon pulled the settlers out and ended the occupation of Gaza was so that he can put it under this blockade and it was all about the gas.
Yeah, right.
The idea was look with we can't we can't blockade our settlers.
So we have to let them out and so they're out and now we now we start the blockade and as you say and we're going to and they were pretty they were pretty open about it.
You can find plenty of quotes saying the idea is we're going to have we're going to have this, you know, Hamas driven out by the people, you know, this sort of collective punishment theory that's been used over and over again by big powers, right?
So we will collectively punish everybody and they will simply expel the bad guys that we don't like and then they'll just allow themselves to be subservient to whatever we want to do.
But of course the the blockade hasn't worked and after the blockade didn't work for a while.
They moved forward to a military solution to the problem, which was to excise Hamas from Gaza, but also to excise the rockets, which were the real power, the real threat and that didn't work with Operation Cast Lead.
The only thing that Operation Cast Lead involved was to inflict incredible collective punishment on the Gazans even worse than the than the blockade, which was bad enough right now.
Hold it right there when we get back y'all.
We'll have more with Michael Schwartz author of this great one for Tom dispatch.com.
You can also find an anti-war.com under Tom's name Israel Gaza and Energy Wars.
Hey y'all Scott Horton here for Liberty.me the social network and community based publishing platform for the Liberty minded Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes discussions guides events publishing podcasts and so much more and Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me eye on the Empire.
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All right, you guys welcome back to the show.
Talking about the Israelis stealing the Palestinians natural gas with Michael Schwartz author of war without end boy, you're pretty safe with that title.
I think I'll call it war without end.
Yeah, go ahead and bet on that.
All right.
So the natural gas is offshore and here's the very important point that I want to get to as you write it.
This is what killed the Oslo Accords, which was the deal back at the beginning of the 1990s that yes, we are going to move toward eventual Palestinian Independence here.
Once the Israelis found out that there's enough natural gas out there to steal that to be worth stealing that was when they decided.
Oh, you know what terrorism is preventing us from giving up a Palestinian state.
It turns out we're just going to have to keep the people of Gaza under siege and take their gas by force.
Not that their military solution as you call that.
I think with ironic quotes there has achieved their goal of routing out Hamas that they I was going to ask you.
Did they deliberately put Hamas in power in 06?
I guess that was an accident.
I don't know but yeah, a couple of things on that one is that you know, as soon as as soon as it became clear that there were important resources in what would become the Palestinian state that Israel wanted to capture for themselves.
It wasn't just natural gas, of course, because there's all the land that they're taking on the West Bank and the water and the water that they've been taken from everybody.
Not just just the Palestinians, right?
But as soon as as soon as that became imperative, then the the Oslo Accords were doomed because what they had to say was that you can't have any sovereignty over your natural resources.
We want the sovereignty over your natural resources.
So the what was I think the moment the moment that Gaza moment when the when they ding the deal for the Gaza natural gas was them overtly expressing what had already become a policy.
I think we see the visibility of that policy at that moment, but I think it really preceded it because they were they were aware of other resources.
This was the this was the first gas resource.
But now of course, it's become much more magnified because it turns out that that Gaza national natural gas is just the southern most tip of this Levantine Basin natural gas, which goes all the way up to Cyprus and Syria and and and relatively small amount is in the Gaza waters.
There's a huge amount in the eastern Mediterranean there.
And of course Israel has designed for the moment.
It was discovered in 2010 or there were rumors about there were rumors about that for many years.
Also, but the USGS the US Geological Survey affirmed the existence of this Levantine Basin gas in 2009 actually, but the news came out in 2010 Israel immediately said we have sovereignty over all of it and that instantly put them in conflict with four other countries, you know, Palestine Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus and that brewing war has really taken on a huge sort of a huge place in this because the the Turks have become involved through their Cyprus interest and they're making claims.
They've they've signed contracts with the Turkish Cyprus Cypriots to basically develop what looks like about 60% of that gas that they're claiming the Russians have signed contracts with Syria and are negotiating another contract with Lebanon that would give them the right to develop the natural gas offshore from those two countries, which also constitutes about 60% of it and both of them are building up their navies.
They're both Turkey and Russia are building up their navies there.
Israel has been building up their Navy since 2010 when they discovered this stuff because they feel like they need the Navy in order to get the gas and so and so what you're really developing is the kind of World War one situation, which is this tremendous military build-up all around the territorial claims of these various now much larger powers, right?
You know before it was Israel and a bunch of little guys that they could beat up on now, it's Israel Turkey and and Russia all involved and each with their ally inside the the area of Israel, of course, is their set.
They are inside the area and and the the Palestinians have just signed a an exploration contract with Gazprom the Russian gas company for the to take that natural gas and now take it unilaterally themselves, but that the latest of the Gazan Wars, right seems to have at least deterred Gazprom from beginning that exploration because just as the Palestinians have always been able to maintain just enough of a military deterrent.
So that Israel can't.
Now Israel has a military deterrent to stop a Gazprom from mining the gas on behalf of the Palestinians.
So it's all staying in the ground.
I mean this kind of, you know, every cloud has a silver lining because as I say in the article if they actually extracted a hundred and thirty trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the eastern Mediterranean and pumped it into the atmosphere that would be just the right amount to make sure that we never could reverse the climate change.
I'm not worried about that man.
I want to see the people of Gaza paid in their society rebuilt after Israel smash it over and over and over again.
How about that?
How about we'll ban the Israelis from burning all fossil fuels from now on if you want to worry about that crap.
But the people of Gaza deserve reparations for what they've suffered here.
Yeah, sure.
I agree with you there, but I think the reparation should come from Israel and rather than come from the natural gas, you know, but still I mean, I understand your point, but you know, it seems important that as you say that the policy of keeping these the Gazans specifically under siege here and and scotching the whole deal toward a Palestinian state is all about stealing this gas.
And then so that includes the siege as you say in the article to the deliberate stated policy of keeping the people of Gaza, which is a majority under 18 a majority minors to keep them on a diet not not starving but hungry and then bombing the crap out of them every couple of years.
This is all just about grand theft ch4.
You know, there's another element to this that I think is in some ways is even more ominous than this is that back in 2004 Mubarak said that he might be willing to donate a piece of the Sinai desert to the to the Palestinians and then the Israelis could just drive them out of Gaza and various places on the West Bank and send them over there that guy died right away because the world said you can't really be serious about this, but there's been a flurry in Israel in the last year of exactly that same that same proposal either news reports saying that that the new Egyptian government has renewed the offer or just parliamentarians and other highly visible leaders in Israel saying this is what we have to do.
We have to just drive the Gazans right out of the Gaza Strip and just annex it to Israel and you know that kind of ethnic cleansing which of course is so should be so familiar to us because it is precisely what the Europeans in North America did to the indigenous peoples right just constantly relocating them as soon as there was some resource they wanted this is now becoming a kind of current in the public debates around Israel as a way of quote solving their problem right which is to say to engage in you know, a kind of systematic ethnic cleansing that would actually remove all the Gazans from the Gaza Strip and move them into some arid place in the middle of the desert where they could die off, you know, quietly, of course, they won't die off quietly.
They'll fight but you know, so the Israelis are now bringing into the public debate and even more drastic and even more brutal and even more genocidal policy as a talking point.
Yeah, they haven't started to do it normalizing the idea.
Yeah, and people look at a map Sinai.
That's just no man's land out there were Bedouins starve, you know, there's nothing going on there.
That's that's a fate worse than death for the people of Gaza at this point who 80% of them are refugees from the rest of your now called Israel, which is their home as far as the Indian thing.
I'm glad you brought up the thing about the Native Americans because I hear Zionists using that as an excuse.
But in fact in this society, it's kind of a super majority.
Sorry about that kind of a thing now that it's too late where Americans have decided that, you know, jeez, if we had a do-over maybe we wouldn't have murdered them all and of course a lot of it was just disease, but still the policies of the sectarian cleansing the ethnic cleansing of as they call it of the American Indians is, you know, right there with slavery as the giant shame of our society if people even knew that Indian still existed.
We'd probably be better to them about it because of the way people feel about it and yet when it comes to Israel's policy, we're supposed to support what we all now agree is wrong when it's in as you say, it's almost an exact copy of the policy.
It's just it's just a horrifying.
Analogy because you once you see the analogy you say, oh my god.
Oh, it's exactly the same, you know, it's just it's just unbelievable and it takes this whole situation in Israel and it removes it from the you know, this sort of high-profile guide.
These people hate each other on both sides and they all want to kill each other all the time.
And so it's sort of fair that Israel just kills them right and puts it into this very mundane almost banal easy evilness of you're just trying to you know, steal people's land property resources and you're using various kinds of reasons calling them barbarians as the excuse for slaughtering them in order to get their stuff, you know simple as that and you know, it's just another instance in the history of the world of this kind of, you know, genocidal activity.
And that then makes it even more sickening, you know that it's not even exotic.
It's just banal, you know, right?
Yeah.
No, and I think it's important.
I appreciate you putting it that way because it does bring the argument right back down to Earth and now all of a sudden it's much easier to say.
Well, wait a minute if this was Argentina and Chile or whatever other just, you know uninvolved third-party countries or whatever and we changed the circumstances.
What if it was the Palestinians who'd won the last few wars and they had all the Jews rounded up in a giant concentration camp in the Gaza Strip.
How might that look or whatever, you know, these kind of questions become easier when you when you bring the the policy the questions back to economics and politics here on Earth and take all the Holy War out of it for a minute, you know, yeah, right, right.
I think that's right.
Take I like that phrase take the Holy War out of it and just look at the mundane really ugly.
Ugly underbelly reasons, you know, all right.
Well, listen already kept you over because I'm just horrible at abiding by these hard breaks Michael, but I appreciate it very much.
Okay.
It's great talking to you Scott as always.
Yeah.
All right.
So that's Michael Schwartz.
He's at Tom dispatch.com and you can find him under Tom Englehart's name at anti-war.com as well.
It's Israel Gaza and the energy Wars in the Middle East.
The book is war without end.
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