Lebanon: Gas, Oil and the Axis of Resistance

Opinion

October 30th, 11:39am

Nabil Amr

Nabil Amr - Palestinian writer and politician

Let us inject ourselves with a magic serum that makes us imagine the UN-sponsored border demarcation negotiations between Lebanon and "the Zionist enemy" will surely be successful. Since imagining compels further imagination, this success implies Lebanon is going from one situation to another… Lebanon no longer owes a penny, and it won't be awaiting aid loaded with international and regional agendas to survive between one war and the next. The Port of Beirut will come back to life much, becoming much grander than it had been. The Lebanese, Arab and international banks will prosper as had they before, filling their vaults with all kinds of currencies, euros, dollars and yen, alongside token currencies from various Arab and foreign countries. Those with clean, halal money return, feeling assured and more secure than those with money to launder. The newspapers that had closed after going bankrupt are reestablished. Publishing, printing and libraries prosper. Tourism and swimming in the summer are invigorated. Casino du Liban brims with patrons in the winter. The Lebanese and Arabs go back to saying: "lucky is he who has a goat shed in Lebanon." Since we are still high on imagination, we inevitably see that an equivalent to Hamra in the west and Antelias and Jounieh in the east has emerged in the southern suburbs, where the Rafic Hariri International Airport is located. These suburbs resemble the areas surrounding the airports in Dubai or Riyadh, and since we are in Lebanon, it would be logical to imagine these suburbs coming to resemble the area surrounding Orly, since the architect Macron is still in business. In an oil-rich Lebanon, two questions emerge. First: what has become of the Shebaa Farms? Here, our fantasy leads us to imagine that this small patch of land has turned into a massive economic project with oil refineries and petrochemical plants. It is perhaps the point of origin for pipelines that transport oil and liquefied gas. As for the second, more significant question, it is: “What has become of the axis of resistance?” Its Lebanese branch has thousands of regular and precision missiles, hundreds of tons of rifles and thousands of die-hard fighters who won't find jobs that fit their original vocational skills. They will find it difficult to live with the fact that the smell of oil and gas has replaced that of rifles and weapon lubricants. And since imagining compels further imagination, how will Hassan Nasrallah be doing during the oil era? He will not find it difficult to provide an answer, for he has an endless supply of arguments and propositions that can make even the impossible possible. However, he might stop making screened appearances, since there is a problem with him making a live appearance in the new oil-rich era. There will is longer a need to occupy a part of Galilee, or potentially all of it, in the event that Israel persisted with its actions. In this imagined era of oil-rich Lebanon, old rhetoric might be replaced. Instead of "beyond Haifa," we will hear sober calls to reform OPEC. After the oil boom, what will become of "all of them means all of them"? Observers believe that this slogan will fizzle out. We will only hear about it when people discuss memories, as the era of speaking about demarcation negotiations in whispers has wilted and withered away. Hariri still symbolizes "all of them" as he did during the revolution, but, in light of the new independence approach that Macron represents, Hariri symbolizes "all of them" in Baabda, the Serail and the southern suburbs. This happened before we saw a liter of gas, or even enough gasoline to fill up a lighter. On the margins of the oil wells and gas reserves is a situation that demands a question or a few… the camps… For the first time in history, two realities that have never been adjacent to one another will exist side by side: camps and oil. We are not talking about a single UNRWA funded camp that could be moved somewhere. Indeed, we are facing a series of camps that have spread their roots across deep into Lebanese life; geographically, they are scattered across the country's four corners, and they have ties with all segments and classes of society. The camps' residents consider themselves guests whose stay has gone on for seventy-two years. They have what they have, and they owe what they owe. Their visit has not been exemplary in any sense, and it was shaped by the inevitable return home. Here, whether we like it or not, politics bursts our imagination's bubble. Demarcating the borders with Israel will logically imply a change in the political relationship between the two sides sharing the oil. What will come out of then, given that politics cannot be isolated from the economy, and there can be no economy without permanent political protection? An imagined state of affairs has occupied most of this strange article, is underpinned to some extent, by logic. In the event that this state of affairs were to play out, the difficulty of answering this question about the camps during the oil boom era will force us to awaken from our fantasy. We have to say what we have been saying over the past century; let destiny run its course, which is known only by god. Oh, how blissful is fantasy while we are immersed in it, and how painful it is when we awaken.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2595451/nabil-amr/lebanon-gas-oil-and-axis-resistance