In the maritime border dispute between Lebanon and Israel, it all started (and continues) with much rhetoric and threats on both sides. As the timeline outlined below shows, while the years and decades were passing by, Lebanon - reeling under Iranian and Syrian occupation - continued to wallow in the macho rejectionist posture of "always say no" to anything involving Israel, while the latter was laying the technical and legal infrastructure to begin pumping gas and oil. Now that Israel has reached the point of beginning to actually exploit its reserves, the Lebanese find that all their own BS about resisting "Israel's greed" was hogwash and they are caught with their pants down and ten years behind Israel in exploiting their much needed resources. Why? Because Hezbollah (and Iran and Syria behind it) does NOT want Israel to exploit any gas and oil. None. And it is justifying its posture as the eternal victim of Israeli "aggression and greed" by declaring that it will not allow Israel to extract gas and oil unless Lebanon is also extracting oil and gas. Given that Israel is ready and Lebanon is not, Hezbollah now has the "casus belli" it itself manufactured to maintain its hostility vis-a-vis Israel and by extension its blackmail of the Lebanese people and the justification for its existence as an illegal armed militia operating outside the legitimacy of the Lebanese state. All that Hezbollah wants is the threat of WAR (not necessarily war itself) and it is constantly looking for the next Israeli "provocation". War is Hezbollah's raison d'etre. Peace means the end of pretexts for war, and therefore the death of Hezbollah.
The legal background:
According to the American Society for International Law, ASIL (Volume 15, Issue 31, dated December 05, 2011 and published on: https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/15/issue/31/israel-lebanon-offshore-oil-gas-dispute-%E2%80%93-rules-international-maritime), the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) says that a coastal State has sovereign rights to explore, exploit, conserve and manage the natural resources in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Under UNCLOS Article 57, the EEZ extends a maximum of 200 nautical miles from the baseline. Article 74 provides that States with opposite or adjacent coasts must delimit their EEZs by applying international law to achieve an equitable solution. Finally, States must deposit charts and lists of geographical coordinates of the EEZ to the UN Secretary-General. Lebanon ratified UNCLOS in January 1995; and although Israel is not a party to UNCLOS, these rules are nonetheless generally considered binding on both states as customary international law.
Sequence of events:
1- In 2007, Lebanon and Cyprus agreed on delimiting their maritime borders. This agreement was signed by both countries, but only Cyprus ratified it because the Lebanese Parliament refused to ratify the agreement. In this agreement, Point 1, which defines Line 1 on the map, was set as a shared dividing point between Lebanon and Cyprus.
2- In July and October 2010, Lebanon deposited with the UN coordinates of its southern boundary with Israel and its southwestern boundary with Cyprus. However, these unilaterally declared maritime boundaries differed from those in the 2007 agreement with Cyprus in that Lebanon now changed its claim from Line 1 to Point 23 (defining Line 23), which is 17 Km southwest of Point 1 and overlaps the area claimed by Israel, and argued that the coordinates for Line 1 in the Cyprus-Lebanon 2007 agreement were only an interim solution, pending a solution between Lebanon and Israel.
3- In December 2010, Israel and Cyprus reached an agreement on their maritime boundaries using the same coordinates as in the Lebanon-Cyprus 2007 agreement.
4- In June 2011, Lebanon protested against the Israel-Cyprus Maritime Agreement at the UN, complaining that the zone defined in the Israel-Cyprus 2010 agreement overlaps parts of Lebanon's EEZ. Lebanon again asserted that Point 1 does not represent the boundary between the Lebanon and Cyprus and explained that Point 1 should only be viewed as a shared point, but not as a starting point between Cyprus and any other country.
5- In July 2011, Israel approved a map of its proposed maritime boundaries based on the 2010 Israel-Cyprus agreement and submitted it to the United Nations. Since Lebanon was not committing to the boundary it agreed to with friendly Cyprus, how could it commit to one with the 'enemy' Israel?
6- Fast forward to the 2018-2019 time frame, after years of indirect (at Lebanon's insistence, since merely talking to the Israelis amounts to recognizing Israel, which is sacrilegious to a Lebanese government enslaved by Syria-Iran-Hezbollah) and unproductive negotiations, the American mediator Frederic Hof proposed a compromise line, the Hof Line, giving Lebanon 60% and Israel 40% of the median area between Line 1 and Line 23. Lebanon rejected the compromise.
7- Instead, Lebanon further modified its claims in 2021: It said that it has documents and maps showing that the real boundary is Line 29, still further south of Line 23 and giving Lebanon another 1,460 Km2 of exploitable surface. Yet, Lebanese President Michel Aoun refused for almost a year now to send the dossier to the UN to register its claim. Apparently, Aoun was holding this card as leverage with the Americans: Though Lebanon claims Line 29, it will relinquish this claim if the US lifts its sanctions off Gebran Bassil, Aoun's son-in-law whom the US accuses of corruption, and allows Bassil to become President in the Fall 2022 presidential elections.
8- Finally, and as the Energean offshore platform made its way to the Israeli waters last month to begin extracting gas and oil from the Israeli Karish field straddling Line 29, the Lebanese suddenly got serious and anxious that Israel will be extracting gas by the Fall of 2022. The plan now in place consists to pipe Israeli gas to Egypt which will process it and send it to Europe in dire need of gas to replace Russian gas. US mediator Amos Hockstein, who is ironically a dual Israeli-American citizen who served in the Israeli army, on his recent visit (May 2022) to Lebanon received the following offer from the Lebanese side:
- Lebanon gives up claims to Line 29.
- Lebanon will accept Line 23, which gives Israel the entirety of the Karish field.
- But Lebanon demands that the Cana Field, which straddles Line 23 and is therefore geographically shared by both countries, be granted exclusively to Lebanon by looping Line 23 around the Cana field. All past suggestions and proposals to co-exploit Cana by both countries and share the profits have been obviously rejected by the Hezbollah government of Michel Aoun.
Just this past week, Israel replied to the Lebanese demand for exclusivity over the Cana field (via Hockstein and the US Ambassador in Beirut, Dorothy Shea) with a NO, as this looped Line 23 would encroach on the Israeli Block 72 (as the map shows).
Naturally, the Lebanese-Hezbollah side loves to appear as resisting what it calls Israeli ambitions and designs over Lebanon, a traditional populist harangue against the perennial enemy, the "Zionist entity". The fact though is that Israel is about to start making money from the Karish field while the Lebanese are ten years behind, busy as they were with macho obstructionist hot air whose real objective is to void any potential agreement because reaching an agreement means "normalizing" and therefore recognizing the existence of Israel. The timeline shows that while Israel and Cyprus never changed their original approval of Point 1/Line 1, Lebanon kept moving the goal post further south for two interconnected reasons: 1. to never reach an agreement, and 2. to find a casus belli pretext for a military confrontation (which is Hezbollah and Iran's raison d'etre). The whole point of the existence of Hezbollah is to prevent any possible accommodation with Israel, at least on the surface (because on the substance, Hezbollah has numerous times in its history sought, negotiated, and found agreements with Israel (on prisoner exchanges, on rules of engagement, and in fact on the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 (see my post: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/05/hezbollah-israel-collusion-big-lie-of.html). That has been the modus operandi of Hezbollah ever since its inception in 1982.
One must keep in mind the differences between the Karish field and the Cana field. Cana is as of yet merely "suspected" of having large reserves of gas, but it remains to be seen if this gas can be extracted. Cana requires ten years to begin producing if it proves extractable, so Israel is not likely to worry if the Lebanese start producingoil and gas from Cana in ten years if all goes well. Karish on the other hand is ready to pump beginning in the Fall of 2022. Hezbollah, consistent with its "always obstruct" policy, has threatened to militarily prevent Israel from extracting gas from Karish if Lebanon is not also extracting gas from Cana, an insuperable demand because Karish is ready, Cana is not, and one doubts that Israel will wait ten years for Lebanon to catch up. In fact, this past week, Hezbollah dispatched 3 unarmed drones over the Karish field which were promptly destroyed by Israel, an incident that did not raise the alarm of the oil company working on Karish. So, although it seems that the odds of a military confrontation are FOR NOW minimal, the potential for a later conflagration certainly remain high.
In any case, if both sides agree on Line 23 but disagree on what to do with the Cana field (exclusivity for Lebanon? Shared exploitation? etc.), an impasse leading to war looms on the horizon. The irony is that the geography of proximity and human greed may have outmaneuvered diplomacy and will force either an understanding where none existed since the 1949 Truce Agreement between Lebanon and Israel, or an inevitable war. Lebanon is on its knees economically and politically. Will the prospect of making money override the "ignore the existence of Israel" mantra of the rejectionists of Hezbollah, Iran and Syria?
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