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Israel Plans Britzkrieg to Capture Arab Oil Fields Operation Shekhinah, Part Two Copyright Joe Vialls, 12 February 2002 In order to get a true feel for the importance of oil to Israel, it is necessary to take a stroll back through history, to a time when the sky was continually lit by the flashes of heavy artillery shells and exploding bombs, as nations around the globe struggled with World War Two. But as the two sides struggled with the other, an entirely separate third battle was being fought behind the scenes. While the Americans, the British and their allies fought savagely and died in their thousands for secular democracy, others were fighting a covert quasi-religious war. Zionists worldwide were actively plotting to overthrow Palestine in order to provide a “haven” for poor dispossessed Jews from around the globe, especially those who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Germany. Naturally the Zionists insisted that they had no territorial ambitions, confirmed by Ben Gurion, who stated the easternmost Israeli border would be “the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan.” So no real problem. Just relocate a few thousand Palestinians to make way for the Jews, and everyone would be happy. As historical documents show, and modern Zionists freely admit, this was propaganda intended only for the gullible masses. The true intent of the Zionist elite was a smash and grab raid of staggering proportions, securing territory from the Mediterranean coast and the River Nile in the west, to the River Euphrates in the east, together forming the new Greater Israel. By the end of the Second World War, the “new” Israel was shaping up as the biggest and most exciting game in town. Control of this vast block of territory would allow its new owners to completely dominate the crossroads of traditional world trading routes, regulate world oil shipping routes including the Suez Canal, and [effectively] control the Persian Gulf. In common with all 20th Century engagements, the battle for Greater Israel would require vast quantities of oil to drive the machines of war: Oil which the British and Iraqis had already piped into the port city of Haifa to serve the British naval and military bases in the Eastern Mediterranean. By 1946 two pipelines fed the refineries and loading terminals at Haifa: the first a ten-inch line running direct from Iraq to Palestine, and the second a sixteen-inch line running from Iraq to Palestine via Jordan. Also on the drawing board that year was a new mammoth thirty-inch line from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to Palestine, nicknamed the “Tapline”. Thus if the Zionists planned their attacks swiftly and efficiently, they would be able to sweep through Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, using the existing refineries and pipelines to meet the needs of their war machine. Once the territory had been conquered, the newly created Greater Israel could and would charge the Saudi’s and Bahraini’s vast Tapline royalties, and massive fees for the use of “its” refineries in Haifa. It was heady stuff, but by the time the Jews had finished slashing and burning their way though western Palestine in 1948, unwisely killing British as well as Palestinian citizens on the way, someone somewhere had already blown the whistle on their overall strategic ambitions. As if by magic, the ten-inch and sixteen-inch lines oil were cut at source, and the Arabs started to fight back. Because the Jews were not exactly the darlings of the western world in 1948, and were strapped for both cash and oil, they had to call a temporary halt in what was to become Israel up until the next aggressive expansionist attempt during 1967. But significantly, in 1948 the Zionists had established a firm “beachhead” for Greater Israel. The need to sever the pipelines had dealt a severe blow to the Arabs, who were now faced with transporting most of their oil out through the Persian Gulf, a extra distance of more than 5,000 nautical miles on the way to market. True a small pipeline still ran from Iraq through Syria to the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, but it carried only a tiny fraction of the oil. So in the end the thirty-inch Trans Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) was built, though not without significant difficulty. Syrian parliamentary objections necessitated the CIA-aided 1949 coup in Damascus to secure "right of way" over the Golan Heights. Two CIA agents, one of them Miles Copeland, simply installed a Syrian Government prepared to sign the new right of way agreement, and Tapline was re-routed around the northern tip of Israel to the southern Lebanese port of Sidon. The psychological impact of Tapline on the Israelis from its opening during 1950, should not be underestimated. Robbed of what they believed to be their historical birthright, by a lack of oil to drive their war machine on to a Greater Israel, they were now forced to watch impotently as that very oil flowed by, tantalizingly close to their border on the Golan Heights. On any single day, when the wind was not blowing and the air was still, they could hear the muted hum and swishing as nearly 500,000 barrels of sweet black crude oil flowed straight past, on its way to Sidon and the export markets. Then in 1967 the Israelis launched their “Pearl Harbor” surprise attack on the Arab nations, blitzing the latter’s air forces on the ground, and expanding their own territory to include the Sinai in the south, and the extended Golan Heights in the north. The Israeli’s would have taken more if they thought they could get away with it, but once again international public opinion and limited pressure from America forced a halt. What went almost unnoticed was that for the first time since its opening back in 1950, the Tapline now ran through the Israeli-occupied part of the Golan Heights, rather than through Syria. This incredibly important new strategic reality seemed to escape the attention of everyone, including the premier American Military Academy at West Point. Nowadays the maps in the West Point Reference Library show lots of interesting tidbits about Israeli advances, roads and other mundane geographical features in and around the Golan, but not a glimpse of Tapline. Clearly where American military strategy is concerned, a pair of cleverly-sited Israeli machine gun nests on a hill in the Golan facing Syria, are more important that an oil pipeline large enough to fuel Israel’s entire army on its journey to the River Euphrates in Iraq. Due to the failed Syrian attempt to take back the Golan Heights in 1973, and a host of other destabilizing factors including Israeli pipeline sabotage and problems in the Lebanon, all oil transportation in the western [Syrian and Lebanese] portions of the line ceased in 1976. That portion of the line was evacuated of all crude oil and the installations in Lebanon were handed over to the Lebanese government in 1983, after the Israeli invasion of that country. The western section of the Tapline was not destroyed, and currently sits idle, still capable of transporting up to 500,000 barrels of oil per day. Until 1991 the eastern section of the Tapline was used to supply Jordan, but Saudi Arabia terminated this arrangement to display displeasure with Jordanian support for Iraq during the Gulf War. Tapline was and remains a central feature of Israel’s strategic plans to take Greater Israel by force, despite western objections, and despite threatened western sanctions designed to moderate its behavior. Much of the detailed current planning for Operation Shekhinah will be covered in Part Three of this report, because we first need to look at new geopolitical alliances in the area. After all, logic dictates that if the Israelis reasoned they could use Tapline back in 1967, why did they not do so then? The simple answer is that on top of the lethal problem of Iraq, they would have faced fierce resistance from just about every Arab nation in the Middle East, and from Iran. A spectacular defeat would have been inevitable. But then along came the very convenient Gulf War and everything changed. Though the demonization of Saddam Hussein is known to every western television viewer, the more subtle aspects of Middle East politics are not. Because they felt threatened, three Arab states in particular were forced embrace America and American troops. Kuwait was obviously the first because its territory was occupied by Iraq, but was followed swiftly by Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, who rapidly found themselves overwhelmed by thousands of disrespectful British and American soldiers dropping empty Coco Cola cans and other assorted trash all over the sacred religious routes to Mecca. The soldiers were supposed to go home after the Gulf War of course, but as we all know, the Americans and Brits like to “hang out” in their colonies for a little while after hostilities cease, normally for about fifty years. This quaint Anglo Saxon tradition swiftly led to tensions in the area so great, that by the mid 1990s the two smaller partners, Kuwait and Bahrain, were seriously worried about being left out in the cold. If, as seemed likely, the Saudi’s were eventually obliged to remove the American soldiers from their sovereign territory, Kuwait and Bahrain might be forced to do the same under sustained pressure from their local populations. Huge problem: If you send the Americans and Brits home, then who will protect you from big bad Saddam Hussein? Certainly not Saudi Arabia, which has barely enough weapons to protect itself. On hearing about this delicate problem, Israel held a series of secret talks with senior officials from Kuwait and Bahrain during late 1997, aimed at finding a mutually agreeable solution. It was agreed that both Emirates would be prepared to pump oil to Israel, provided the Israelis provided a defensive barrier between them and Iraq. Discreetly of course, because neither Emirate could possibly allow Israelis on its own territory. Limited tactical requirements were discussed, including the expensive relocation of Shi’ite Muslims out of northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, a process which as we already know continued to accelerate until a few days before the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. A year after the secret tripartite meetings, in what seemed at first to be an unconnected incident, the Jordanian Government found to its horror that a corrupt official had quietly dug up and sold more than fifty kilometers of disused sixteen-inch oil pipeline, originally used to pump oil between Iraq and Palestine. It transpired that this pipe was in perfect order, and carefully inspected as such by the mystery cash buyer. When interrogated, the official admitted his guilt but had no idea who the end user might be. Checks established the buyer was not Syrian, Saudi, Egyptian or Palestinian. So who? Now this is a difficult one. Let me see… The buyer was secretive, meaning he did not wish to attract attention or arouse suspicion on the open market. In order to arouse suspicion on the open market in the first place, the buyer must have come from a country with no oil reserves of its own. Somebody jog my memory here: How far is it from the Golan Heights down to the refinery at Haifa? |
