When I was in yeshiva, our tenth grade gemara teacher was Rabbi Wehl, and he would often take time in class to talk to us about Israel and how important it was to the Jewish people, how miraculous its very existence was, given the world’s hostility to the Jews and how it was absolutely a sign of God’s will at work in the world that Israel’s Arab neighbors had been unable “to push the Jews into the Mediterranean”–or whatever paraphrase he used of that phrase, which originated with the PLO (if I remember correctly). Moreover, he would insist, the way God protected the land of his chosen people should be absolute proof for us that one day the land of Israel, the literal geographical space, would be revealed as the richest place on earth. “I guarantee you,” he would say. “The day will come when scientists discover that Israel rests on oil reserves that will make the Arabs blush with shame!”
I haven’t thought about those speeches of Rabbi Wehl’s in years, but then yesterday I was read this in an article by Joshua Hammer in Fast Company called “The Land of Oil and Money:”
How much crude could there be here? Bartov and I drive from the Valley of Elah to a wheat field at the edge of a road near the town of Kiryat Gat. This is the site of one of seven exploratory holes that IEI has drilled over the past two years. The rock samples were analyzed by IEI chemists at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and at Weatherford Labs in Houston. Bartov says their estimates matched the company’s “highest expectations”; if so, the equivalent of 500 million barrels of oil may lie beneath this wheat field. “What you see here would supply Israel’s needs for five years,” he says. And that’s just a tiny percentage of the territory controlled by IEI. According to Bartov and other IEI geologists, oil-shale deposits in Israel could produce as much as 250 billion barrels of crude. That’s roughly equal to the total reserves of Saudi Arabia.
IEI stands for Israel Energy Initiatives and the oil-shale deposits are rich in kerogen, which can be converted into oil if the shale is heated to a high enough temperature. The entire article is worth reading for the science of it, and it’s interesting to read some of the rest of the press about this (here, here, here and here’s a blog post that goes into quite a bit of detail). Clearly there are serious implications for Israel’s future, the future of the Middle East in general and even for the world if Israel does become a major energy supplier, but for me the most lasting impression of this news will be the moment when I was reading Hammer’s article and all I could think was, “Holy shit! Rabbi Wehl was right.”
Good for Israel. I hope they can take advantage of this.
That’s very interesting. It could be good for Israel; it could be good for other countries in the middle-east that then might be of less concern to the U.S. On the other hand it makes Israel all the more a prize to its surrounding neighbours, doesn’t it?
“we will push the Jews into the sea” predates the PLO, which was formed in the early 60s.
It goes all the way back to the 1930s.