Will Israel’s Natural-Gas Fields Ever Get Developed?

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago, the Israeli government was at complete loggerheads with an American company and its Israeli partner over the future of “Leviathan,” Israel’s massive offshore natural-gas reserve. The question was whether either of the two companies, Noble Energy of Houston and the Delek Group of Israel, would be allowed to participate in actually developing the field they had discovered five years earlier. And then, in August, with negotiations stalled, and no other candidates in sight, the Italian energy giant ENI announced the discovery, in Egyptian waters, of an even larger and more easily accessible gas field. Some energy experts were beginning to wonder if Leviathan would ever be developed at all.

At the same time, Israel’s relations with Turkey, formerly one of its closest allies, could not have become worse. Ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan took office as Turkey’s prime minister in 2005, a diplomatic chasm opened between the two countries, exacerbated in 2010 when the Israeli navy boarded the Mavi Marmara, a blockade-running ship bound for Gaza, and by Erdogan’s galloping regional ambitions. The latter have been accompanied by Erdogan’s growing penchant, now as Turkey’s president, to vilify the Jewish state in extremist language mirroring that of Tehran, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.