The New--And Growing--Source Of Conflict Between Israel And Lebanon Is Not On Land

Is Lebanon looking to add to its world records with the largest natural-gas find in the world in 2009?

The recent discoveries of massive gas fields off the coast of northern Israel, tantalizingly close to Lebanese coastal waters, has stirred cash-strapped Lebanon to accelerate efforts to begin its own oil and gas exploration.


But the prospect of previously undiscovered fossil fuel riches off the coasts of Lebanon and Israel risks becoming a new source of conflict as well as an economic windfall for the two warring neighbors.

“This is something big and potentially landscape-changing economically, financially, and politically,” says Nassib Ghobril, head of economic research and analysis at Byblos Bank in Beirut.

Last year, a US-Israeli consortium discovered the Tamar gas field 55 miles off the coast of northern Israel, which contains an estimated 8.4 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas – the largest natural-gas find in the world in 2009. Earlier this year, a field called Leviathan was discovered in the same area with an initial estimate of 16 trillion cubic feet of gas.


But there are likely more untapped fields; the US Geological Survey (USGS) said in March that the Levantine Basin, which includes the territorial waters of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Cyprus, could hold as much as 122 trillion cubic feet of gas – and 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

According to the article, Lebanon is strapped for cash and heavily in debt--and would love to have access to these reserves, not to mention others that may be just waiting to be discovered. More to the point, it is not yet known whether the gas field extends into Lebanon's territorial waters.

However, that question is complicated by the fact that since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Lebanon and Israel have officially been at war and so the two countries have never sat down to establish agreed upon maritime borders.

As a result, Israel might claim the “right of capture”, according to which a country can extract oil or gas from its side of the border, even if those reserves extend into the territory of another country’s territory. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does offer guidelines for establishing maritime borders, but Israel is not a signatory to the convention. In any case, again--this would require both sides to sit down and talk.

So we are left with Lebanese officials accusing Israel of stealing Lebanese resources, while Hezbollah threatens to use its weapons to defend them.

As for the UN, how much help can they be? The "Blue Line" the UN established in 2000 was not supposed to be a legal border, but just a way to measure the pullout of Israeli troops. It has become a 'border' only because the two sides cannot agree on the land border either.

For now, the potential for more tension and conflict is theoretical--but the issue will become more pragmatic very quickly.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Lebanon and Leviathan and Dalit.