Lebanon wants to settle its maritime borders to exploit rich oil and gas fields. Nothing more.
Much publicity has been given to the news about Israel’s normalisation of relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and now what appears to be Sudan. But another set of bilateral negotiations has also recently occurred between Israel and an Arab state, which has garnered far less attention – those between Israel and Lebanon.
The question here though is not one of a normalisation of relations. Rather it is something far more prosaic – the delineation of disputed maritime boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, in order to allow exploitation of the potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas and oil believed to lie under the water.
As with any maritime border negotiations that determine access to resources, this one would be complex even if there were no complicating factors other than different national methods of establishing borders. The technical difficulties of the negotiation are challenging enough.
The talks themselves were conducted at Naqoura, the UN base in the south of Lebanon, and were mediated by the United States. The delegations from each side were made up of technocrats, the two parties didn’t talk to each other directly, and the first meeting lasted for only an hour. The next talks are scheduled for 28 October.
Read the article by Rodger Shanahan in The Interpreter.