For 17 times in the Bible Israel is called "a land flowing with milk and honey". With a remarkable auto-ironic attitude, Israelis use to tell a joke about Moses on the mountain, looking out over the Promised Land, frustrated that he will only see it but not cross into it. In his conversation with God, the old Patriarch said: "God, how wonderful! A land flowing with milk and honey -- wonderful!". After a pause, Moses addes timidly: "But God, how about some oil?". In fact, for a long time the only oil associated with Israel was the olive oil.
The milk and honey narrative goes deep inside Israel’s weltanschauung. They are considered symbols of a comprehensive anthropological vision of what means a good life. Milk resonates with motherhood, nourishment, and love, as well as protection and empowerment. Honey symbolizes sweetness, joy and celebration.
However, on a more prosaic note, the milk and honey/gas and oil cleavage has been for decades an additional fault line between Israel and the Arab countries. Some analysts saw exactly in that gap the source of a political-economic resented attitude: the "resource envy", even though Israel had discovered, in 2009, a natural gas deposit - the Tamar field - in the Mediterranean Sea, located roughly 50 miles west of Haifa.
Until recently. At the beginning of this year, the discovery of a very large natural gas field on the maritime borders between Israel, Lebanon, the Gaza strip, Cyprus and Northern Cyprus created many expectations. The area – called “Levant Basin province” – contains a section which is believed to possible hide, alongside natural gas, 4.2 barrels of oil.
The really new factor does not consist in the availability of energy sources for internal consumption. This may be a very important and even strategic objective, but what represents a game changer is the perspective of Israel becoming an energy exporter country. The impact on the regional market and on the international economic and political system would be huge. In fact, whereas Israel’s Tamar gas field is capable of supplying the country’s domestic natural gas field for the next twenty years, in principle the Leviathan field gas deposit (estimate twice the volume as Tamar) could go for export.
All that is pure speculation. The name chosen for new discovery is not among the most reassuring concepts: the “Leviathan field”; but it could prove appropriate. The gigantic natural gas field is located in between countries and political entities with endless amount of mutual distrust. That’s why the delight in Israel about the deposit news was immediately tempered by the awareness that it could provide the spark to ignite a new confrontation in an already troubled region. The Tamar field is already disputed by Lebanon. The discovery of “Leviathan” is likely to follow the same pattern, adding new fuel to an offshore territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel.
The biblical image of the Leviathan – a marine monster, who appears to be invincible in the Book of Job - was borrowed by Thomas Hobbes to found the legitimacy of the modern State in the need to overcome the state of nature, characterized by fear and war. In our post-modern times, freedom from fear may consist instead in looking beyond the Leviathan. In Europe, for many decades across the XIX e XX centuries coal and steel fed the monster. Let’s starve the beast.
