[During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Arab oil producers cut off
exports to Israel’s allies. Faced with today’s Israeli war on
Gaza, Gulf states dismiss the idea of using the “oil weapon” —
an index of how much they have abandoned the Palestinian cause.]
[[link removed]]

WHY ARAB STATES AREN’T USING OIL AS A WEAPON AGAINST ISRAEL  
[[link removed]]


 

Hafawa Rebhi
December 10, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Arab oil producers cut off
exports to Israel’s allies. Faced with today’s Israeli war on
Gaza, Gulf states dismiss the idea of using the “oil weapon” —
an index of how much they have abandoned the Palestinian cause. _

Saudi Arabian minister Khalid Al-Falih sits front and center at an
OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria, on November 30, 2017. , Omar Marques
/ Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

 

On November 8, Saudi investment minister Khalid Al-Falih appeared
[[link removed]] at
Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in Singapore. The network’s senior
economics editor Stephanie Flanders quizzed him about how Saudi
authorities might respond to the war in the Middle East:

Q: Would you consider economic tools, the oil price for example, to
achieve a ceasefire in Gaza?

A: [_Laughs, hesitates_] First of all, that is not my mandate today .
. .

Q: Just between us.

A: I can tell you that is not on the table today. Saudi Arabia is
trying to find peace through peaceful discussion.

By the time this exchange took place, Israel, supported by the United
States and major European countries, had already been indiscriminately
bombing Gaza’s civilian population for a full month, in response to
the October 7 Hamas-led attack. Flanders’s question surely made
sense in the context of a war that has captivated global media
attention — with some ten thousand civilian Palestinian deaths
already by the time of this discussion. It also made sense given the
historical precedent of the oil supply being used as a political
weapon. So, why was her question cause for laughter?

Arab Oil as a Weapon

The episode cited by the British journalist dates back exactly fifty
years. By 1973, thirteen years after its foundation, the Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) owned and controlled most
international oil production and trade. Most of its power to determine
output and price rested in the hands of its Arab members, as the Gulf
states were then the mother lode of oil and gas extraction.

On October 6 of that year, amid the Cold War, Anwar el-Sadat’s Egypt
and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria launched an offensive
[[link removed]] to
recover some of their territories that Israel had occupied during the
June 1967 war, namely Sinai and the Golan Heights.

In retaliation for President Richard Nixon’s decision to support
Israel during its war against the Palestinians and the Arabs, the Arab
OPEC states, including King Faisal’s Saudi Arabia, imposed an
embargo on exports of crude oil to the United States and its allies.

In a meeting in Kuwait, on October 17, 1973, Arab OPEC members decided
to block exports to Western states and reduce oil production by 5
percent a month until the Israelis withdrew from the occupied Arab
territories. The price of a barrel of oil quadrupled. It was the first
oil shock which led to heavy losses in Western economies.

In the United States, the increase in oil import prices had
devastating effects on the overall economy. GNP fell by some $10 to
$20 billion and half a million people lost their jobs in just six
months, according to the American Treasury Department. The same
department also noted that the OPEC embargo led to the swelling of the
total US oil bill and hence significantly eroded the US balance of
payments. In France, while in 1970 10 percent of export revenues were
enough to pay the oil bill, by 1974 this had risen to 24 percent. Even
though the OPEC embargo was lifted in March 1974, it left lasting
economic damage in the United States and around the world.

Even though the OPEC embargo was lifted in March 1974, it left lasting
economic damage in the United States and around the world.

Evidently, the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973 is different from the
2023 Gaza War. While the first pitted two regular armies against an
occupying army, with strong allies supporting each side, this recent
war is extremely asymmetrical, setting one of the most powerful and
best-equipped armies in the world against the arms that Hamas’s
resistance can muster.

In the first conflict, the camp of Arab countries had the support of
the Arab oil nations. In the ongoing war, the civilian population of
Gaza, 2.3 million before the launch of the Israeli genocidal attack,
is left to its own devices, faced with indiscriminate bombings against
residential areas, mosques, churches, hospitals, and United Nations
schools.

In the fifty years between these two wars, the world has changed: wars
and truces, invasions and withdrawals, peace treaties, normalization
agreements, economic sanctions, the decline of several world powers
and the rise of others. And the Gulf, too, has changed.

So, what are these transformations, and how do they prevent the Arabs
of the Gulf from using their hydrocarbons to defend the Arabs of Gaza
against the incessant Zionist massacres?

The New East-East Axis of World Oil

The first transformation occurred at the level of the oil market
itself, as Adam Hanieh explains in his contribution to the collective
book _Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in
the Arab Region_
[[link removed]] (Pluto,
2023).

The timeline drawn up by Hanieh covers the evolution of oil since its
beginnings, but three main stages emerge from his analysis. The first
is the wave of nationalization during the 1970s and 1980s, which
allowed Gulf governments to assume direct control of upstream
production, with national oil companies such as Saudi Aramco, the Abu
Dhabi National Oil Company, and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation
taking over the exploration, extraction, and export of the Gulf’s
oil supplies.

The second decisive stage began in the late 1990s, with China’s
opening to the world economy and its subsequent positioning at the
center of global manufacturing.

The third phase, which started in the 2010s, saw the confirmation of
China as “the workshop of the world.” In 2019, about 45 percent of
all the world’s oil exports were flowing to Asia — with more than
half of these destined for China alone. “Most of these oil supplies
originated in the Middle East, with the Gulf states and Iraq
collectively providing almost half of China’s oil imports by 2020
(up from around one-third in 2001),” Hanieh explains, adding that
this is a “pan-Asian trend” with around 70 percent of all crude
oil exports from the Middle East (primarily from the Gulf) . . .
currently destined for Asia.”

The United States, which was shaken during the oil crisis of 1973, has
since become the world’s leading oil producer. The memory of the
Texas oil fields that could not make up the difference fifty years ago
was so bitter that the Americans searched diligently for new oil
sources, in the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, and Alaska. Washington
has also done everything to weaken OPEC’s grip on oil by
undermining, through wars and sanctions, some of its most prominent
members, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Venezuela.

Washington has also done everything to weaken OPEC’s grip on oil by
undermining, through wars and sanctions, some of its most prominent
members.

According to a recent report
[[link removed].] by
the US Energy Information Administration, “since 1977, the
percentage shares of U.S. total petroleum and crude oil imports from
OPEC countries have generally declined” and in 2022 the Saudi
Arabia, the largest OPEC petroleum exporter to the United States, was
the source of 7 percent of total US petroleum imports and 7 percent of
US crude oil imports. Saudi Arabia is also the greatest source of US
petroleum imports from Persian Gulf countries. About 52 percent of
total US petroleum imports came from Canada.

Although the oil weapon may be ineffective against Washington, it
could have dissuaded several European governments from their
unconditional support for Israeli crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

The European Union (EU) has found itself lacking reliable energy
supplies since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 and the
ban on seaborne imports of Russian crude oil and gas. According
to Eurostat figures
[[link removed]],
EU imports of crude oil from Saudi Arabia grew from 6.3 percent to 8.8
percent of trade in value between the second quarter of 2022 and the
second quarter of 2023. In the same period, the Russian share of
EU-imported gas shrank, while the Algerian share increased from 7.2
percent to 16.5 percent of trade in value. Both Saudi Arabia and
Algeria are major Arab members of OPEC and their weight could have
made a difference in the map of EU energy suppliers and its foreign
policy towards Israel and Palestine.

Past Enemies, Future Allies

The second reason why the Saudi minister might have laughed is that
Israel, which was a foe to Riyadh in the past, has now become a
friend. While the Saudi king Faisal displayed his hatred towards
Zionism, today senior officials and political leaders in the Gulf
States see Israel as a strategic ally with whom they can exchange
words of praise and friendly visits.

After sealing peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan in 1978 and 1994
respectively, in 2020 Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Zionist
government concluded the so-called Abraham Accords with the United
Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

The Abraham Accords are a US-brokered normalization deal that also
seeks to reinforce (already existing) normalizing relations with other
Arab countries that are not officially part of the agreement,
including those that have formal diplomatic ties with Israel, such as
Egypt and Jordan, and those have not yet formalized their
long-standing relations with Israel, such as Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Gulf states claim that they are not abandoning support for the
Palestinians. The United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister explained,
before signing the agreement
[[link removed]] in
Washington on September 15, 2020, that:

This agreement will enable us to continue to stand by the Palestinian
people and realize their hopes for an independent state within a
stable and prosperous region. This agreement builds upon previous
peace agreements signed by Arab nations with the State of Israel. The
aim of all these treaties is to work towards stability and sustainable
development.

Yet, contrary to the Emirati minister’s claims, the Abraham Accords
— and other “eco-normalization” initiatives brokering deals with
Israel on energy and water — have led to more repression against the
Palestinians.

The Palestinian scholar Manal Shqair, in her chapter
[[link removed]] in _Dismantling
Green Colonialism_ dedicated to eco-normalization, analyzes the
repercussions that such ongoing Arab-Israeli projects have on
Palestinians — in the occupied West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in the
annexed Syrian Golan Heights, and even in the Palestinian territories
colonized in 1948, where brutal apartheid is rife.

For Shqair, “no matter what forms the energy projects in the
Mediterranean and Israel take, two important facts remain.” First,
she links the violence and dehumanization endured by Palestinian
fishermen and besieged people in Gaza to the highly militarized gas
reservoirs that Israel controls in the Mediterranean and the projects
linked to them, where Gulf petrodollars are a major asset. Second, she
argues that the EU is once again showing its hypocrisy: by importing
Israeli gas as part of efforts to hold Russia accountable for its
invasion of Ukraine, European nations are blatantly treating
Palestinian and Jawlani (i.e. Golan Heights) peoples as less human
than Ukrainians.

Through their deals with Israel, the “normalizer” Arab states,
like Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, UAE and Morocco, “are now openly taking
part in the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians and Syrians at
the hands of both Zionists and European governments,” Shqair argues.
Hence, “The dehumanization of the colonized, and the complicity of
Arab states in this, are greenwashed by the EU and Israel as they
collaborate in what is portrayed as a transition to a greener future
and lower-carbon economy.”

The Saudi minister’s laughter was, some would say, just a laugh. But
it is a bleak sign of the cynicism of the Gulf states and other Arab
regimes, which continue to witness the Zionist massacre of the
Palestinian Arabs with complicit, cowardly, and criminal indifference.

_HAFAWA REBHI is a journalist from Tunisia. She writes about water,
climate issues, and social justice._

_Subscribe to JACOBIN [[link removed]] today, get
four beautiful editions a year, and help us build a real, socialist
alternative to billionaire media. Donate to Jacobin.
[[link removed]]_

* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Arab states
[[link removed]]
* Oil
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Economy
[[link removed]]
* international relations
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]