Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1973 war, once lamented about Moses: “He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.” Now her successor Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have found the spot that Moses had missed, and claimed it for Israel.
Within hours of the rebels storming into Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fleeing, Netanyahu ordered his forces to go and grab the little stretch of Golan Heights that hadn’t been under Israel’s control. Bravo! But what has that got to do with Meir’s lament about Moses and oil?
The story has to start with Exodus. After he led God’s chosen people out of Egyptian captivity across a cinematically (watch The Ten Commandments) parted Red Sea, Moses had to herd them through the desert for 40 years till he spotted the ‘promised land’. Sadly, the messiah missed walking in there with his people; that honour went to his disciple Joshua, much like in the case of Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano who sailed around the globe for the first time.
The Hebrews lived and prospered in ‘the land of milk and honey’, fighting the Philistines, resisting the Romans, and crucifying the Christians. But after their second temple was burnt down, and after many more misfortunes brought about by Roman invasions, they dispersed across Eurasia and North Africa in a diaspora.
Two millennia later, there appeared David Balfour, Britain’s secretary of state, invoking the power of his empire and promising the Jews their promised land again. Balfour could make good his promise—an army of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh troops from India, marching under a Christian commander, had just secured the land from seven centuries of Muslim rule.
Jews from all over the world started pouring in by the 1930s, and in a decade and half they formed a republic on the sands where they invested their blood, toil and tears to draw out milk, honey and more, but no oil. Strangely, all around them were the Arabs, hostile and ruled mostly by amirs, sheikhs, kings, generals and a few life-long presidents, wallowing in oil and making petro-dollars in billions. This quirky ‘ethnic geology’ prompted Meir’s lament.
Since Meir’s days and even earlier, Israel has been digging for oil, and fighting the Arabs. The wars they won, capturing a lot of their neighbours’ lands and giving back very little of it on the truce table. One such stretch has been the Golan Heights, won from Syria in 1967, since used as a good gun position for firing at the Hezbollah camps in Syria.
Yet, for all their toil, they found no oil. None of the oil streams of neighbouring Arabia would leak into the dry little land. Then came an abracadabra moment. Like in an Arabian Nights tale, there appeared a genie in 2015 showing them oil under the Golan Heights. No joke. Genie Energy, a US company, drilled in Golan and declared that the plateau was swimming on an ocean of oil. Even as the world protested, the UN condemned, the Arabs cursed, and the Syrians seethed, Israel started digging there. In 2019, Donald Trump-led America declared Golan as sovereign property of Israel, but none followed suit.
Now what has Netanyahu done? Hardly had Assad fallen and Syria collapsed into chaos, when he asked his troops to walk into the buffer between Golan and the Syrian line, and claim it as a "temporary defensive position”.
Israel now commands the whole of Golan and all its soil and oil. No one knows when Syria would get back its strength to even raise a claim.
prasannan@theweek.in