The two renewable energy projects on the eco-normalisation agenda, Prosperity Green and ENLT-NewMed, bolster the image of Israel as a hub for creative renewable energy technologies. In upraising Israel in this regard, the mainstream narrative omits that its innovations in the energy sector are predicated on (green) energy colonialism in Palestine and the Jawlan. Energy colonialism refers to foreign companies and countries plundering and exploiting the resources and land of countries and communities in the Global South to generate energy for their use and benefit. Perpetuating the North/South dichotomy, energy colonialism also wreaks havoc on the socioeconomic life of local populations in the South, along with their environments. Green energy colonialism includes the appropriation and plunder of green sources of energy while maintaining the same political, economic and social structures of power asymmetry between the North and the South. Energy colonialism is ingrained in the colonial capitalist paradigm of power, exploitation, dehumanisation and otherness, and persists decades after many parts of the world entered the post-colonial era.28 In Palestine and the Jawlan, energy colonialism, including through green sources of energy, is one facet of Israeli settler colonialism. Israel employs it as a means, among others, to dispossess and ghettoise Palestinians and Jawlanis (the 26,000 Syrians currently living in the Israeli-occupied Jawlan) in ever-smaller enclaves, while expanding Israeli-Jewish supremacy on their land. Both Prosperity Green and ENLT-NewMed can also be seen as energy colonialist projects that enable Israel to continue its settler colonial project and geopolitical power in the Middle East and North Africa, under cover of a greenwashing narrative.
Prosperity Green
According to the terms of Prosperity Green, Jordan will sell to Israel all the electricity generated from the solar farm to be built on its land, for $180 million per year. The proceeds will be split between the Jordanian government and Masdar, the Emirati firm that will build the solar farm. The rationale is that Israel will not need to use its energy to operate the water desalination station that will supply Jordan with 200 million cubic metres of water annually. This is part of the Israeli goal of strengthening both its energy and water desalination sectors. Water desalination, which Israel seeks to rely on as its main source of water by 2030, is energy-intensive, accounting for 3.4 percent of its energy consumption.29 Israel is thus seeking to increase its access to alternative sources of energy, with Prosperity Green offering one such source.30
The deal does not allow Jordan, whose imports of fossil gas account for 75 percent of its energy sources, to receive energy from the project and to leverage its own energy sector.31 Thus, while the country’s solar energy will be extracted, its heavy reliance on imported fossil gas will remain. Jordan will continue to receive gas from Israel, which since 2020, after the infamous 2014 gas agreement was struck between the two countries, has become a major exporter of fossil gas to the country. According to the $10 billion deal, Leviathan, a natural gas field in the Mediterranean over which Israel exercises control, will supply Jordan with 60 billion cubic metres of gas over 15 years.32 Thus, Jordan will remain hostage to imports of natural gas (particularly from Israel), while it exports its own green energy in order to receive desalinated water from Israel!33
In the way it is designed to empower Israel’s renewable energy sector while maintaining Jordan’s reliance on Israeli fossil energy sources, Prosperity Green is a form of energy colonialism – or, more specifically, green colonialism. This is clear in the fact that the solar farm will be built in Jordan rather than in Israel. Consider this 2021 quote from Axios, an American news website: ‘The logic was that Israel needs renewable energy but lacks the land for massive solar farms, which Jordan has’.34 This is echoed by Karine Elharrar, previously Israeli energy minister: ‘Jordan, which has abundance of open spaces and sunlight, will help advance the state of Israel’s transition to green energy and to achieve the ambitious goals we have set, and Israel, which has an excellent desalination technology, will help tackle Jordan’s water shortage’.35 This hierarchical categorisation of the land, where the desert is perceived as inferior to (superior) cultivated/green land, is informed by the Zionist discourse, which portrays the creation of Israel on the ruins of hundreds of destroyed Palestinian villages as redeeming the land.36 Such discourse seeks to legitimise and moralise Israel’s actions: it depicts Israel as a moral and progressive steward of land efficiency, rather than an immoral settler colonial and apartheid regime.
In line with this discourse of greenwashing and redeeming the land, the construction of the solar plant is considered a favour to Jordan: under the beneficent Abraham Accords, barren, ‘unproductive’ land in Jordan will become productive thanks to Israel’s environmental development and benevolence. In effect, Prosperity Green moralises and legitimises green grabbing and green colonialism as progressive acts that deserve praise rather than condemnation.
ENLT-NewMed
ENLT-NewMed is also portrayed as demonstrating Israeli environmental and moral superiority over its Arab neighbours, including Jordan. After reaching an agreement to develop energy projects with Jordan, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Oman, ENLT stated that the project ‘will bring to light the great experience and expertise of the two Israeli companies in the field of energy.’37 Bringing to light the ‘experience’ and ‘expertise’ of Israel keeps in the dark the experiences of Palestinian and Jawlani struggles against Israeli energy colonialism. Although ENLT-NewMed presents itself as helping to meet the energy needs of seven Arab countries, it too should be understood as an act of energy colonialism, for two main reasons. First, ENLT-NewMed aims to further integrate Israel in the Arab region’s economic and energy spheres, in a dominant position, thereby creating new dependencies (via energy access and control) that further the normalisation agenda and position Israel as an indispensable partner. Second, it will allow ENLT and NewMed, two companies that are deeply involved in Israeli energy projects, to normalise and finance their colonial activities in occupied Palestine and the Jawlan. ENLT operates several renewable energy projects in the Jawlan, with the support of the Israeli government, including Emek Habacha, Ruach Beresheet and Emek Haruchot. ENLT has a 41 percent and a 60 percent stake, respectively, in the first two of these,38 which are funded by a consortium led by Hapoalim Bank, listed in the United Nations database of businesses and companies that are complicit in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.39 ENLT is also involved in renewable energy projects in illegal West Bank settlements. It is developing a 42 MW wind turbine project (in which it holds a 50.15 percent stake) in Yatir Forest, which is located in the Naqab desert and parts of the West Bank.40
The wind farm projects in the Jawlan and in parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories are a part of Israel’s plans to increase its renewable energy sources. The Jawlanis have protested to assert their sovereignty over their land and resources for years, and they consider these projects another Israeli tool to take over their land.41 Israel already controls 95 percent of the Jawlan, which it manages in favour of around 29,000 illegal Israeli settlers living in 35 settlements in the area.42 The wind turbines, as a green colonial project, are further disrupting the sustainable relationship between the Jawlani people and their land: since their construction started, the Israeli authorities have restricted Jawlanis’ access to their agricultural land. The projects will affect 3,600 dunams (890 acres) of apple, grapes and cherry orchards belonging to Jawlanis. The fight of the Jawlanis against these wind farms is part of decades-long resistance to settler colonial expulsion, plunder of resources and denial of their indigenous sovereignty and identity in relation to the land.43
NewMed Energy, which specialises in the extraction of natural gas from the Eastern Mediterranean, is as complicit as ENLT in entrenching Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. Formerly Delek Drilling, in 2022 it changed its name following its growing business in Arab countries, primarily Jordan, the UAE and Egypt.44 NewMed Energy has pioneered the Israeli natural gas sector in the Eastern Mediterranean and was involved in most of the Israeli discoveries of gas in the Mediterranean in the last 30 years. One of these, and the most remarkable, was the 2010 discovery of the Leviathan field, the largest natural gas reservoir in the Mediterranean, in which NewMed Energy holds a working interest of 45.3 percent.45 A year earlier, in 2009, the company, jointly with Chevron, discovered the Tamar natural gas reservoir, also in the Mediterranean.46 Together, these two gas reservoirs hold an estimated 26 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and have elevated Israel’s status in the regional and global energy market, representing a source of geopolitical and economic might in the region and beyond.47 They are expected to meet Israel’s electricity needs for 30 years and to allow it to be a regional exporter of gas (including to the European Union (EU) – especially now, in the context of the war in Ukraine). Both Egypt and Jordan (as mentioned earlier) currently import Israeli gas from the Leviathan and Tamar fields.48
For years, Israel has denied Lebanon’s declaration that a portion of the Leviathan reservoir falls within its Exclusive Economic Zone.49 Israel has also denied Lebanon’s share in Karish, another gas field discovered by NewMed Energy in 2013.50 In 2022, the two sides reached an unfair US-brokered agreement through which Israel retains full access to the Karish field.51 Lebanon is only able to develop the Qana field, another disputed gas reservoirs in the Mediterranean which could contain nearly 100 billion cubic metres of natural gas, while paying some agreed royalties to Israel. The agreement reflects the asymmetrical power relations between Lebanon, Israel and its staunch supporter, the US.52 Meanwhile, and in response to Lebanon’s claims, Israel has been intensifying its militarisation of the Mediterranean, increasing the presents of its warships.53 Even as it fuels dispute over these gas fields and strengthens the position of a highly militarised settler colonial power both regionally and globally, NewMed Energy nevertheless emphasises its commitment to developing green energy sources.54
The main operator and negotiator with Israel on its share in Qana is TotalEnergies, a French company, which holds a 35 percent stake in the field. TotalEnergies is part of a consortium operating Qana that includes Italian ENI and also the state-owned Qatar Energy, which holds a 30 percent share in the project (Qatar Energy replaced Novatek, a Russian company that was excluded due to the sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine).55 Qatar Energy’s role in the development of the Qana field was approved by the Israeli government56, and makes Qatar complicit in normalisation with Israel in the field of energy. This overt normalisation by Qatar, which from the 1990s had been engaged in under-the-table normalisation, is to the detriment of the Palestinians57 and reflects a pattern seen in relation to other Arab countries as well: the fact that Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and the UAE are involved in various energy projects (including green ones) with Israel or Israeli companies shows that this normalised relationship is no longer considered scandalous for Arab leaders.
In regard to Egypt, another important point is the fact that the Israeli Leviathan gas bought by the Egyptian government is extracted and transferred via Israel’s violent and illegal exercise of control over the Palestinian Exclusive Economic Zone,58 which is manifested in systematic attacks on Palestinian fishermen by the Israeli navy.59
Egypt’s relations with Israel concerning natural gas go beyond electrifying Egyptian households. Egypt and Israel, along with Cyprus and Greece, are part of a consortium that aims to supply Europe with gas from the Mediterranean, now as part of EU efforts to end reliance on Russian gas. The consortium aims to build a new pipeline system that will carry gas from Israel and Cyprus to liquefication facilities in Egypt, to be liquified and then transported to Europe by ships/tankers. The project also includes building a liquification facility on the eastern shore of Cyprus, and constructing ‘a floating liquefication facility as part of the expansion of the Leviathan field’.60 It is not clear yet if the proposed pipeline and liquefication system will replace the planned construction of the Eastern Mediterranean (EastMed) Pipeline, but it seems that it is being considered as an alternative to EastMed, whose feasibility has been questioned.61
No matter what forms the energy projects in the Mediterranean take, two important facts remain. First, the suffering under siege and traumatic experiences of violence and dehumanisation endured by Palestinian fishermen and people in the Gaza Strip cannot be dissociated from the highly militarised gas reservoirs Israel controls in the Mediterranean, and the projects linked to them. Two, the EU is once again showing its hypocrisy: treating Palestinian and Jawlani peoples as less human than Ukrainians by importing Israeli gas as part of efforts to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of Ukraine. As for Egypt and the other normalising Arab states, by entering into dirty energy deals in the Mediterranean they are now openly taking part in the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and Syrians at the hands of both Israel and the EU. The dehumanisation of the colonised, 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. In this respect, portraying fossil gas as a clean source of energy is misleading to say the least.62