The joke used to be…why did the Almighty give the Jews a Land flowing with milk and honey? Why not gas and oil?
To the astonishment of nearly everyone over a period of some 2,000 years, turns out He did! Let there be gas, He said, and there was gas.
But not so fast. First, people had to believe that this Good Earth could deliver petroleum. There was no history of this for a Land thought to be fuel dry since Creation.
Some decades ago the best of the good ol’ boys from Texas teamed up with their Israeli counterparts in order to go forth and drill, baby, drill.
The “roughnecks,” as they are called, built rigs along Israel’s territorial waters to explore whatever the sea might give, and after years of sweat, trial and error, in 1999, it gave.
Google has this to say: “Israeli waters are swimming in gas, and what we have discovered is only the beginning. Noble Energy, a Houston-based company that made its first discovery of gas in Israel in 1999, has found more than 30 trillion cubic feet of gas off the country's coast over the last decade.”
Do you believe in miracles?
First came energy independence. Today, Israel is an energy powerhouse, and now, nearly everybody wants a share of that blessed energy.
Certainly, the Europeans.
Remember them? That’s the crowd, under the auspices of the EU, the European Union, that, until a few weeks ago, were severely critical of the Jewish State.
Directly or through the UN, they took sides, nearly always favorable to the Palestinian Arabs. Israel was denounced for never doing enough to satisfy those people.
Then, something happened.
Supplies of fuel from Russian pipelines began drying up; this, due to Putin’s war on Ukraine, causing a distraction and a shortage.
Russia itself was running low, and the Europeans were running on near empty. Where to go when the need is desperate?
Naturally, to the land flowing with gas and oil.
First, a word about Donald Trump. The former president warned the Germans to desist from hooking up Europe through a Russian gas pipeline.
You never know about Russia, he said…anything might happen.
Sure enough, it did…and now the Europeans find themselves at Israel’s mercy. Please, they say, forget the past. We didn’t really mean all those nasty comments against the Jewish State.
We’re pals, right?
We were mistaken and from now on we’ll behave differently. Long live Israel, our dear friend.
Those aren’t the exact words spoken by European chief Ursula van der Leyen when she met with Israel’s prime minister Bennett a few days ago…but it is the gist all right,
She praised the Israelis up, down, and sideways and even Bennett seemed confused and embarrassed from such unexpected declarations of love.
She even condemned the recent spate of Arab attacks against Israeli civilians.
Quite a switch.
Oh, meanwhile the same EU is handing out millions to the same terrorists.
Is Bennett imposing conditions as the price for Israel’s generosity?
He should. He certainly should.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com