The war ends with oil and gas pipelines running west through the Arabian Peninsula to Israeli Mediterranean ports,

Kernow Damo ·

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Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has gone on camera, been asked what the end of this war with iran is supposed to look like, and answered not with some last-ditch line about centrifuges being destroyed, not with some grim little sermon about imminent nuclear doom if they fail, but he came out with something else entirely instead, which has now got people wondering if he’s just given the game away.

The war ends with oil and gas pipelines running west through the Arabian Peninsula to Israeli Mediterranean ports, bypassing Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb entirely for forever and a day. Israel’s security assured, who would target the global hub for all oil and gas coming out of the Middle East? He said the old sea lanes have to be bypassed and the new route ends in Israel.

So the man who went to war and went scurrying away again last year, who convinced Trump this was an easy win to try again this year, and is again being handed his backside, has all the same suddenly dropped the Iran will have a nuclear bomb in 30 minutes line and started talking up oil and gas rerouting instead.

War in the language of emergency has started describing victory in the language of infrastructure and commercial interests.

Of course the head of the IAEA Rafael Grossi has already said there is no evidence Iran is building a nuclear bomb, the entire premise of the Israeli -US attacks on Iran are built on sand. The IAEA has said diplomacy is needed to ensure Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons as well, showing where they sit politically too, knowing there’s no plans still at this time to do so on Iran’s part, the fatwa in place forbidding it, put in place by the former Supreme Leader remains in place as well. A state with no nukes has been hit under the language of having them anyway, all besides Israel very much having them and not being signatories to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty unlike Iran as well. And yet then we have Benjamin Netanyahu starting to talk about pipelines and ports. You do not get to do that and still expect people to pretend this is a neat little act of necessity. You do not get to march everybody up the hill on existential threat and then, when asked what winning looks like, start daydreaming out loud about redirecting the entire region’s oil and gas to your own shoreline. That leaves him with his own words on tape, making a post-war sales pitch, that is in all likelihood a pipe dream, but nails on perhaps the true intent behind all of this.

He did not say the world needs a bit more resilience in case tankers get delayed. He said the choke points should be done away with forever. Forever is not contingency planning. Forever is replacement. Forever is a new route, a new map, a new dependency, and Israel sitting at the western end of it collecting all the strategic value. That is why these remarks land so heavily. Can’t be ignored. He has not merely hinted that Israel could benefit if the Gulf remains a place that can be easily bottle-necked by those they chose to pick a fight with. He has started sketching a future out in which the danger becomes the excuse for a different system altogether, with Israel no longer just fighting a war but fully marketing the aftermath.

The Strait of Hormuz carries around 20 million barrels a day. That is about a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption and more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade. Bab el-Mandeb matters too because it links the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea and knocks route times, insurance costs and shipping patterns all over the place when it gets put under pressure. Of course we know all of this by now don’t we? Benjamin Netanyahu named both in his speech there. He named the two marine arteries that make Gulf energy movement possible, said they must be bypassed, and then pointed the replacement west to Israeli ports. That is not some stray flourish in a long answer. That is the answer. That is the future he chose to describe when asked what this war is meant to produce, much of that supplying Asia of course, now pointing into the Mediterranean away from them as this would mean.

The US Energy Information Administration has put numbers on that Asian trap as well. Eighty-four per cent of the crude and condensate moving through Hormuz in 2024 went to Asian markets. China, India, Japan and South Korea and the like. So the old system has Asia highly exposed to Gulf disruption, which is exactly why a leader trying to sell a replacement route can pretend he is offering order when he is really offering Western-facing leverage. If Israel becomes a major western outlet for rerouted Gulf energy, it does not become untouchable and it does not swallow the whole market, because Asia still takes most of that oil and would fight to keep direct access to it. What it does do is raise Israel’s value to the states trying to de-risk westbound supply, and that pushes up the political cost of confronting it, which you would imagine Asia would do can’t you? Rather than end war, it could refocus it for nations who do typically stay out of such matters, should they even allow matters to get that far of course.

The International Energy Agency has said the Middle East provided around 30 per cent of global oil production in 2024. The Energy Institute has put the region at 31 per cent of global oil output. So that is the scale Netanyahu is speaking around when he starts fantasising about a route ending in Israel. That is the scale of global oil and gas domination Netanyahu is referring to here. You are talking about an attempt to place Israel at the western outlet of one of the most important hydrocarbon regions on earth, with Europe on one side, Asia on the other, the pipeline only pointing in one direction and the whole argument dressed up as sensible crisis management.

The boring little technical escape hatch to this tale does not save him either. People will say yes yes yes, but there are already bypass lines in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which is true, and those numbers ruin the fantasy of easy substitution. Saudi Arabia and the UAE together have only limited spare capacity to move additional oil around Hormuz in an emergency. EIA estimates about 2.6 million barrels a day of spare bypass capacity there. Saudi Aramco’s East-West pipeline can handle up to 7 million barrels a day on paper, with about 5 million made available for exports in March. The UAE pipeline to Fujairah, just outside the Strait of Hormuz is 1.8 million barrels a day. So these are not trivial numbers, but they do not replace Hormuz and they certainly do not make the existing system safe. That is why Netanyahu’s language matters here. He is not talking about using the current bypasses better. He is talking about a much larger redirection in which the old sea routes stop being the centre of gravity, they stop being used for oil and gas transit full stop and Israel tries to become the answer instead.

Israel has been trying to sell versions of this for answer for years though, so its not totally a glaring admission by Netanyahu here. The 2021 UAE-Israel oil arrangement was built around Gulf crude arriving at Eilat, at the north of the Red Sea by tanker, going by pipeline across Israel to Ashkelon, and then moving onward to Europe. The Europe Asia Pipeline Company already runs the core piece of that plan: a 254 kilometre line linking Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean, with a stated northbound capacity of 60 million tonnes a year and 30 million the other way.

So no, Benjamin Netanyahu did not invent the idea in that press conference. He did something more useful for people trying to understand this war. He took a long-running ambition to turn Israeli geography into major oil and gas transit leverage and he pushed it into the centre of the conclusion to this warfare.

Israel has had years to think about how to make itself more valuable as a corridor between eastern supply and western demand. The Abraham Accords opened one lane for that thinking. The Eilat-Ashkelon route already sat there as the skeleton of it. Red Sea disruption and Hormuz risk have made the sales pitch that bit easier, Asian markets aside. Then the Iran war arrives, sold to the world as an emergency around nuclear danger, and Benjamin Netanyahu starts describing a post-war transport order that just so happens to place Israel at the profitable and strategic centre of a rerouted energy system. Anybody still pretending those dots don’t join up into a pretty little picture are deluding themselves.

The deeper problem for Netanyahu is that he has now made the prize, if we can call this that, visible. Not the whole prize, because wars like this never have only one prize. There is military degradation, regional messaging, domestic politics, US alliance management, coercion aimed at Iran’s future, all the usual filth. But once a leader starts talking about new routes for oil and gas to his own ports, one prize has been said out loud. He cannot hide that again. The war stops looking like a narrow response and starts looking like a way of producing a different region afterwards, one in which Israel is not merely defended by allies but needed by them.

That is where the moral problem gets worse, as if morals and Israel ever decently sit in the same sentence, but bear with me, because necessity and opportunity are not the same thing. If a government says it has acted because it faces an immediate threat, that is one argument. If the same government then starts speaking about the commercial and geopolitical architecture that can be built on the other side of the bombing, it has moved from necessity into gain. Not hypothetical gain either. Structured gain. Route gain. Port gain. Leverage gain. The kind of gain that sits in contracts, shipping schedules, insurance markets, refining strategies and alliance behaviour. A war framed as emergency starts to look like a war that can be used to set the terms of what comes next, and that leaves anybody listening with a very uncomfortable choice about what they are really being asked to support here, whichever side of the divide you sit.

Benjamin Netanyahu has therefore done something embarrassingly common among men who think they are the smartest person in the room. He has overexplained the victory lap before the job is finished. He has spoken as though the argument is already settled in his favour and in doing so he has told people what kind of settlement he has in mind. The war was supposed to be read through threat. He has started reading it through rearrangement. He was supposed to be talking about stopping something. He has started talking about building something after now. He was supposed to be defending the old order from danger. He has started marketing a new order that would pay Israel in relevance, leverage and protection. That is not a slip about wording. That is a glimpse of the endgame.

So the line people should leave with is not just that Netanyahu said too much, though he plainly has. It is that once he answered a question about war in the language of pipelines and ports, the official story could no longer stand there on its own pretending to be the whole truth. A country without a nuclear bomb has been attacked under the guise of nuclear panic, and the man selling the war has started describing a future in which Israel becomes the western outlet for energy from a region producing roughly a third of the world’s oil.

That’s not declaration of emergency that’s division of the spoils before the war is won and he said it straight to camera.

For more on the latest goings on in the Middle East right now, affecting us all as they are, but the actual news and not the mainstream dross do stick with this channel for more, such as this example here, as the Houthis formally get involved, very much making the Red Sea look rather vulnerable once more.

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