NATURAL GAS
Israel’s recent discovery of mega gas fields titled Tamar and Leviathan are located off the Israeli coast from Haifa. These massive discoveries will soon transform Israel as they will adequately look after Israel’s domestic needs forever and thereafter to supply foreign markets. A number of countries are pursuing involvement in these finds. Among them are Russia, China, Europe and South Korea. Putin was in Israel two months ago pursuing a contractual relationship with Israel on its gas development projects. Nothing has been signed yet.
Tamar is due to come online sometime in 2013 and Leviathan to follow in early 2014. Additional target areas are being explored all the way down the Mediterranean coast of Israel.
The likelihood is that a pipeline from the gas discovery area will be built to Cyprus and on to Greece. This will help Greece with some of its financial troubles. It is expected there will be a plant built to liquefy the gas at the Greek end of the underwater pipeline.
OIL
Geologists have recently completed a large mapping of most of southern Israel and preliminary findings indicate there are vast amounts of oil trapped in rock layers under about 15% of the State of Israel. This shale oil is technically difficult to extract but Israel and the companies involved are becoming very familiar with the methodology to extract this oil called ‘fracking’. Retired Canadian experts in this system are now resident in Israel working on this huge project.
The World Energy Council and Israel Energy Initiatives have completed a detailed study and presented it to the government on their estimates of Israel’s shale oil potential. They estimate that Israel’s shale reserves could contain as much as 250 billion barrels of potentially recoverable oil.
This would be putting Israel on a par with Saudi Arabia in terms of its oil reserves!
Israeli planners believe that if the gas and oil finds reach the levels that the potential indicates, Israel’s current group of allies, trading partners and opponents could drastically change. Israel’s geo-political standing in the world will also change. It’s amazing what friends can be made when you have oil and gas to export!
MED-RED RAILWAY
China is in very serious negotiation (contracts have been exchanged) – the Chinese will build and finance most of a high speed railway from Eilat to Ashdod. This would allow tankers and freighters to avoid the Suez Canal as well as cut the time frame from canal usage in half, by using the railway. This is a huge development for Israel as it will open up the Negev , which was always the dream of David Ben Gurion. It would not be surprising that a major announcement on this development with all its details should be expected by mid 2013.
CHINESE INVESTMENT IN ISRAEL
The Chinese Government, while they are negotiating the Med-Red Railway, have made it clear to Israel that they have a multi-billion dollar fund that they would put to use, to fund Israeli hi-tech start-ups and companies needing mezzanine financing. The Israeli Government is very amenable to this opportunity, and the Chinese have already agreed to the stringent conditions that Israel wants to apply on any of the investments. Look for an announcement on this in 2013.
You should be aware that the Israeli Government and various agrarian companies are extremely busy today in China – assisting the Chinese with their need to get much more production out of their land, while following the Israeli system of water economy. Further, the Chinese are learning every possible method Israel has on how to maximize milk production, and other elements necessary for the Chinese to raise the level of feeding their huge population. This relationship is being very well received by the Chinese and its government.
ALIYAH
Numerous European countries are seeing their Jewish populations diminishing because of a resurgence of anti-Semitism and violence against their Jewish communities. Islam is on the march in many of the European countries. In particular, sizable numbers of French, British and smaller numbers of Jews from other EU countries have left or are in the process of going to Israel. The Jewish Agency for Israel is planning for a significant aliyah to continue as well as increase over time with the Jews leaving Ukraine and Russia.
Again the planning of the Jewish Agency indicates that Ben Gurion’s dream of large communities in the Negev is now nearer to realization than ever before. Hi-tech companies are being offered significant inducements by the government to establish their campuses and their R&D facilities in communities being formed in the Negev. Currently the hi-tech campuses are extremely crowded in an area south of Tel Aviv. Bear in mind that nothing is far in Israel.
EMP (Electromagnetic impulses)
The magnitude of this enormous devastating project is hard to fathom. Whoever develops this will have a commanding position facing any adversary. EMP could cripple a country by shutting down its electronics. It uses non-lethal gamma energy to react with the magnetic field and produces a powerful shock wave that can devastate any power grid and communications system. Try as I did, I could not get anyone to make any kind of comment regarding Israel’s involvement. All I got were small, relatively short smiles.
CONCLUSION
The problems of Iran and the Palestinian State and a horrible neighborhood need to be dealt with Israeli resolve. Assuming all of the things described previously like oil, gas, Chinese investment, Med-Red Railway, as well as things still to be developed, the future for Israel is extremely bright.
The IDF, the IAF, the MOSSAD, the SHIN-BET, the AMAN, are amongst the best of their kind in the world and will do their utmost to safeguard the State of Israel and the Jewish people wherever they are to be found.
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The Israelis Are At It Again!
1. Scientists in Israel found that the brackish water, drilled from underground desert aquifers hundreds of feet deep, could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants, and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proves an ideal environment.
2. Israeli-developed designer-eyeglasses, promise mobile phone and iPod users, a personalized, high-tech video display. Available to US consumers next year, Lumus-Optical’s lightweight and fashionable video eyeglasses, feature a large transparent screen, floating in front of the viewer’s face that projects their choice of movie, TV show, or video game.
3. When Stephen Hawkings recently visited Israel , he shared his wisdom with scientists, students, and even the Prime Minister. But the world’s most renowned victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, also learned something, due to the Israeli Association for ALS’ advanced work in both embryonic and adult stem cell research, as well as its proven track record with neurodegenerative diseases. The Israeli research community is well on its way to finding a treatment for this fatal disease, which affects 30,000 Americans.
4. Israeli start -up, Veterix, has developed an innovative new electronic capsule that sits in the stomach of a cow, sheep, or goat, sending out real-time information on the health of the herd, to the farmer via email or cell phone. The e-capsule, which also sends out alerts if animals are distressed, injured, or lost is now being tested on a herd of cows, in the hopes that the device will lead to tastier and healthier meat and milk supplies.
5. The millions of Skype users worldwide will soon have access to the newly developed KishKish lie-detector. This free Internet service, based on voice stress analysis (a technique, commonly used in criminal investigations) will be able to measure just how truthful that person on the other end of the line, really is.
6. Beating cardiac tissue has been created in a lab from human embryonic stem cells by researchers at the Rappaport Medical Faculty and the Technion – Israeli institute of Technology ‘s biomedical Engineering facility. The work of Dr. Shulamit Levenberg and Prof. Lior Gepstein, has also led to the creation of tiny blood vessels within the tissue, making possible its implantation in a human heart.
7. Israel’s Magal Security Systems, is a worldwide leader in computerized security systems, with products used in more than 70 countries around the world, protecting anything from national borders, to nuclear facilities, refineries, and airports. The company’s latest Product, DreamBox, a state-of-the-art security system that includes Intelligent video, audio and sensor management, is now being used by a major water authority on the US east coast to safeguard the utility’s sites.
8. It is common knowledge that dogs have better night vision than humans and a vastly superior sense of smell and hearing. Israel ‘s Bio-Sense Technologies recently delved further and electronically analyzed 350 different barks. Finding that dogs of all breeds and sizes, bark the same alarm when they sense a threat, the firm has designed the dog bark-reader, a sensor that can pick up a dog’s alarm bark, and alert the human operators. This is just one of a batch of innovative security systems to emerge from Israel which Forbes calls ‘the go-to country for anti-terrorism technologies.’
9. Israeli company, BioControl Medical, sold its first electrical stimulator to treat urinary incontinence to a US company for $50 Million. Now, it is working on CardioFit, which uses electrical nerve stimulation to treat congestive heart failure. With nearly five million Americans presently affected by heart failure, and more than 400,000 new cases diagnosed yearly, the CardioFit is already generating a great deal of excitement as the first device with the potential to halt this deadly disease.
10. One year after Norway’s Socialist Left Party launched its Boycott Israel campaign, the importing of Israeli goods has increased by 15%, the strongest increase in many years, statistics Norway reports.
In contrast to the efforts of tiny Israel to make contributions to the world so as to better mankind, one has to ask what have those who strive to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth done other than to create hate and bloodshed
Truly, Israel has become a land of wonders all but beyond comparison, in terms of medical, industrial, hydrocarbon energy reserves and extraction, high-speed inter-sea railroad construction plans with China, and even online lie detectors.
Nonetheless, Israel must undertake three additional accomplishments, some immediate and others long-term, the lack of which endangers not only the future of the Jewish state, but which could drag the Jewish nation as well into a maelstrom of ultimate destruction.
1) Israel must get out from underneath its present overlordship of the USA and its Western European NATO/EU cooperators. These, individually and collectively, comprise little more now than the wreckages of the Western European empires that dissolved shortly after World War 2 and the Roosevelt-Truman empire which all but took their place in the 1940s and 1950s. The USA still imagines itself as the master of the world, and this country indeed has the world’s largest navy and air force. But there no longer is a national will in American society to sustain foreign wars, especially in the massive shit-hole of mankind which is the way most Americans regard the Middle East. Moreover, this country is rapidly becoming bankrupt to pay for its massive load of social entitlements and the vast fortunes sunk each year into public educational systems which accomplish little more than preparing white teen age youth to apply for employment in industries that are dying, and black teen age youth for lives of unmarried teen pregnancy among the girls and prison sentences for narcotics use and gang violence for the boys. Thus, there is no money to pay for boots on the ground anywhere, including the Rio Grande borderline to keep out unwanted Mexicans. Unless there is some massive turnaround in American society, the advent of which is at best unlikely, the USA as a superpower will be a continually shrinking entity which Israel and the Jewish nation will not be able either to trust nor to depend upon in some future defense-related crisis.
2) Israel in its present borders — including Shomron, Yehuda and the Golan Heights — is too small to be considered permanently defensible. Israel must acquire control over all lands located within the quadrilateral bounded by gthe Syrian Desert on the east, the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Suez on the west, the Litani River gorge and the Anti-Lebanon Mountain range on the north, and the Straits of Tiran to the south. These lands must be taken in order to provide Israel a defensible hinterland. That imperative does not imply that the Jewish state must either absorb the Arabs now resident in these territories or expel them en masse. Instead, a system of local autonomy must be put in place that will enable all these Arabs to live in comparative peace with one another and with the Jewish state planted in their midst, but allowing only small numbers of them Israeli citizenship, including voting rights and social benefits paid for by Israeli taxpayers.
3) If Yoram Ettinger’s demographic trends hold true, and I think they shall, then Israel’s Jewish population increases on average about 2 percent per year, which means it doubles about every 35 years. Which means about 12.5 million Jews in Israel 35 years from now — which notably shall mark the first centennial of the modern Jewish state — and about 25 million well before the end of the 21st century. But they must have a land area in which to live comfortably and in which the state can defend them in times of the wars that shall always characterize the Middle East.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI