Israel’s economic interests and the threat of annexation
By Roberto Cetera
杏MAP导航 Francis has repeated it many times with clarity: the root of war is always economic interest. It has taken 21 months of conflict and 57,000 lives lost for this truth to surface publicly. On Wednesday, 2 July, in Ashkelon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “There will be no more Hamas. It is over. We will free all the hostages and eliminate Hamas from its foundations.” He then made a surprising addition: “The expected profit from gas over the next 10 years will be 300 billion shekels (approximately 89 billion U.S. dollars).”
What gas is Netanyahu referring to? The gas extracted from the offshore field known as Gaza Marine, discovered 25 years ago by British engineers, is located 36 kilometres off the coast of the Gaza Strip. Legally, the rights to this field belong to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah — even if Israel were to complete its occupation of Gaza and establish new settlements there.
Supporting Netanyahu’s vision, several Likud ministers and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called on Wednesday evening for an urgent session of the Israeli parliament before the summer recess on July 27. The proposal on the table: the formal annexation of the West Bank to the State of Israel. Such a move would mark the end of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, the end of the PA’s governance structure, and the definitive abandonment of the two-state solution. In that scenario, Israel would also claim sovereignty over the offshore gas fields.
What remains unclear in the proponents’ plans is the legal status of the nearly five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. It is difficult to imagine that Israeli citizenship would be extended to them, as would logically follow from annexation, raising significant questions about rights, representation, and justice.
The petition supporting annexation also points to a perceived alignment with the U.S. administration. In recent days, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman stated that he does “not believe” the two-state solution remains part of Washington’s vision. President Donald Trump, however, has not yet spoken directly on the matter, a topic expected to be central to next week’s meeting in Washington between the U.S. president and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
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