Golda Meir, apartheid Israel’s fourth and only female prime minister, was known for a lot of negative things when she lived. From her deep-rooted zionism, shown in her rabid hatred of Palestinians, to her dislike for the truth or anything resembling it.
What was little known about her was her irreverential attitude towards Jewish religious figures, including no less a personage than Prophet Moses (Musa AS).
While trying to vent her anger over lack of crude oil reserves in historic Palestine, the cantankerous four-time cabinet minister declared, “Let me tell you something we Israelis have against 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.”
From Ms Meir’s disrespectful criticism of Prophet Moses, during whose lifetime oil was not an issue anywhere in the world, we can glean the depth of frustration and anger of modern-day Israelis, over their dependence on others for much-needed oil supplies.
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Then suddenly Gaza found oil. Yes, you heard right, there is now proven gas and oil reserves in a part of Gaza Strip and Israel desperately wants it.
When news broke that Hamas had embarked on that deadly raid on October 7 and successfully killed, as well as took Israelis hostage, I had doubted the smoothness with which the so-called “unprovoked attack” took place, without any hindrance from the Israeli Defence Force.
And I did say so in my first piece on the present war on Gaza, published here on October 11, titled ‘Once again Israel will lose’.
I’ve since then learnt that many people have wondered the same thing. In videos and opinion pieces I read later, experts on the Israeli way of doing things have all agreed that the October 7 Hamas-led offensive, was either aided or facilitated by Israeli officials, who chose to look the other way because they had their eyes on the big picture.
While the big picture was always thought to be more land-grab, through incursions, killings and dispossession of Palestinians, this time around it seems the price was Gaza’s newly-found oil wealth.
No wonder the strange new directive from Tel Aviv for Gazans was to move northwards, if they wished to escape the day and night shelling from Israeli airforce. Apparently, the idea is to get them as far away as possible from where their criminal murderers want to begin their oil drilling venture.
But can you believe this level of heartlessness? How can the day and night killing of men, women and children, sometimes whole families together, be justified by the Israeli hunger and thirst for oil?
Even more worrying is how the rest of the world feigns helplessness, in the face of an obvious genocide, just so Israel could have her wish granted.
Somehow, the more I think about it, the more it seems likely that there was no intelligence failure at all on October 7. Israel deliberately allowed the attacks to go on and possibly even participated in increasing the number of casualties, just to whip up enough anti-Palestinian sentiments to enable it to have a field day in massacring whom they wished, with just a whimper of protest from the international community.
If the idea that the Netanyahu evil administration can kill their own people in order to pave the way for a genocide in Palestine seems too far-fetched, remember that they did it with the earliest suicide bombers, and the Americans did it on September 11, 2001.
Two decades later, it is now abundantly clear that the United States attacked itself on September 11, sacrificed a number of American and non-American lives, then blamed 19 Arab Muslims all in order to freely access oil and gas, in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.
Afghanistan had been attracting foreign powers for over a century now, all of them coming after its proven reserves of oil and gas. According to experts, Afghanistan sits on the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas.
The British empire was the first to reach out for what lies below the Caspian Sea but its entanglement with Afghan natural resources ended what was known as the British empire, early last century.
The Soviet Union also tried in the latter days of the 20th century, from 1979. But a decade later, after fighting the mujahideen and their helpers, it neither conquered the oil-rich den nor remained a Union. It broke into tiny little countries soon afterwards. Only Russia remained to tell the story of an empire-like Union of soviet socialist republics, USSR.
No wonder Afghanistan came to be known as the graveyard of empires.
But the American hunger for Afghan oil seemed to be greater than their sense of history. They reached out and actually tried to romance the Taliban administration, in order to build pipelines that will deliver Afghan oil right from the Caspian Sea to the United States.
In his book ‘Taliban’, Ahmad Rashid, a former BBC and CNN correspondent in Afghanistan called a whole chapter “Romancing the Taliban”. In it he talked about how the Clinton administration actually transported Taliban representatives, complete in their turban and above ankle trousers, to New York hotels in order to discuss the pipeline deals.
The deals couldn’t be completed before Bill Clinton left office. By the time his dim-witted and half-literate successor George Bush junior came to office, all that was needed was a false flag operation like 9/11 to take them into Afghanistan forcefully.
But Afghanistan retained its reputation of invincibility to foreign powers. After 20 years of brutal occupation and mayhem, Americans had to leave the country, tail between their legs.
They couldn’t get their pipelines, nor could they comfortably colonise Afghanistan and it remains to be seen if the US will remain the superpower it claims to be for much longer.
I went down memory lane to show how desperately the Western world and Israel go after oil, wherever it is, and how many atrocities they are willing to commit in that pursuit.
Today, it is the reason innocent little souls are being wiped out along with their families in Gaza. The hounds of hell from Tel Aviv have smelt the scent of oil in the Strip.
Nothing can stop their aggression until they grab what they aim for or die in the process.
And this is the very reason I keep saying only fellow Arabs, rulers of oil-rich Arab nations are in a position to stop the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank.
They should stop oil sales for at least a month, till the US, Israel and their allies are brought to their knees. They must stop all businesses with the evil apartheid state and send all Netanyahu’s ambassadors back home.
But if they continue to look on helplessly, The Almighty will really render them helpless, just as He is the one who will grant final victory to the Palestinians by His grace.
This article was earlier published on November 15, 2023
