And then he ordered his national security advisor to draft a prime-time address for him to deliver the following Tuesday night.
Jack Mitchell was right. It was time to challenge Gogolov on Russian hypocrisy. It was time to let the world know that Russia was, in fact, introducing dangerous nuclear technology to the Middle East, not trying to create a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region, as Gogolov claimed.
He just prayed it would work.
The country didn’t have the stomach for another war.
32
Bennett stared out the window.
Cruising up Highway 1 toward Jerusalem in a bulletproof Chevy Suburban, he would arrive at the King David Hotel in less than an hour.
By noon he’d be in a closed-door meeting with Israeli prime minister David Doron, despite the fact that it was the Jewish Sabbath.
He knew the first question that would come out of Doron’s mouth: Was the U.S. prepared to stand by Israel militarily if Moscow pressed for war?
He just wished he had a good answer.
Bennett’s thoughts inevitably tried to turn to Erin, but it was too painful. There was still no word, no leads, nothing at all to go on. He couldn’t afford to let himself become emotionally paralyzed. There was too much to do.
He blinked hard and tried to refocus. He stared out the window and shook his hand in wonder at all the changes the last few years had brought. Where there were once villages and farmland stretching out on either side of Highway 1, there were now oil wells as far as the eye could see. It was ugly. But with so much money pouring into the country, few Israelis seemed to care at the moment.
What a revolution Israel had been through. It had all begun in 1999 when a marine geologist working for National Geographic—the same geologist who’d located the sunken Titanic in the North Atlantic — was trolling the floor of the Mediterranean with high-tech sonar equipment near the Israeli city of Ashdod, just north of Gaza. He was looking for the shipwrecks of ancient Phoenician vessels, and he found them — two of them, in fact — dating back to 750 years before the time of Christ.
But that wasn’t all.
The geologist had also stumbled upon the most spectacular energy discovery in the history of the Holy Land — enormous, hidden, underwater reserves capable of producing 30 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, every day, for decades, perhaps centuries.
Bennett could still remember the jolt of adrenaline he felt on September 15, 2000, when he’d read a startling front-page headline in the New York Times: “GAS DEPOSITS OFF ISRAEL AND GAZA OPENING VISIONS OF JOINT VENTURES.”
That story was quickly followed on September 28, 2000, by another dramatic headline in the Times: “ARAFAT HAILS BIG GAS FIND OFF THE COAST OF GAZA STRIP.”
And that, it turned out, was just the beginning.
Soon the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s English-language daily, ran a headline declaring, “NATURAL GAS, OIL FOUND IN DEAD SEA.”
By May 4, 2004, Haaretz—one of the largest Hebrew daily newspapers in Israel — ran a story headlined “OIL VALUED AT $6 BILLION DISCOVERED EAST OF KFAR SAVA,” reporting that an Israeli company had first found traces of oil at the site the previous September but that new tests were leading to a stunning new conclusion: “There could be reserves of 980 million barrels of oil at the Meged-4 well east of Kfar Sava.” And maybe more.
The prospects were tantalizing. What if there was more?
With McCoy at his side, Bennett had moved quickly, positioning Global Strategix to take the biggest gamble of his career: a billion-dollar bet on a joint venture between Medexco — owned by Dmitri Galishnikov, a Russian Jewish émigré to Israel — and the Palestinian Petroleum Group, run by Dr. Ibrahim Sa’id.
Bennett hit the jackpot.
When the final test results came in, Bennett could hardly believe the stunning news: the Israelis and Palestinians were sitting atop the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and GSX had cornered the market. In the blink of an eye, the geopolitical landscape — and Bennett’s entire life — had changed forever.
Bennett was drafted by the White House to design the administration’s new Middle East peace plan. McCoy was allowed to come clean as an operative of the CIA. And the Oil-for-Peace plan they crafted soon became front-page news. If both the Israelis and Palestinians agreed to put behind them centuries of violent hostilities to sign a serious peace agreement, develop a joint petroleum industry, and integrate their two economies, then — and only then — the United States would help underwrite the billions of dollars of loan guarantees needed to turn the dream into reality.
Polls quickly found a majority of Palestinians ready to give the Oil-for-Peace plan a chance. Did they still want to throw Israel into the sea? Polls found many did. But the same polls also found the vast majority of Palestinians were exhausted by violence, sick of the grinding poverty, desperate for a ray of hope, and ready for the first time in their lives for a strategic course correction.
The key, as in every successful deal, was timing, and in Bennett’s estimation, the timing could not have been more perfect.
Ariel Sharon had been replaced by Prime Minister David Doron, a hard-core, right-wing Likudnik who preached the doctrine of “reciprocity”—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — but did, in fact, have a pragmatic streak.
Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terror network were finally out of business. Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his regime had waged their last jihad.
Yasser Arafat had seen his last days, and his regime had eventually been replaced in a dramatic turn of events by Ibrahim Sa’id, the world’s wealthiest Palestinian and a man with whom the U.S. and Israel could finally do business.
Within months, an interim three-year peace agreement had been struck. The U.S. provided loan guarantees to help finance the drilling platforms, pipelines, and refineries needed by Medexco (now a joint Israeli-Palestinian petroleum consortium headed by Galishnikov), and Prime Minister Sa’id kept his word. He cracked down on radical Islamic terror cells, cut off their money, rounded up their shock troops, threw hundreds of militants into prison, and destroyed dozens of terror tunnels coming into Gaza from Egypt.
When Israel hadn’t seen a single suicide bombing in more than twenty-six months, Doron had no choice but to reciprocate.
All Israeli troops were now out of the West Bank and Gaza. The policy of assassinating top terrorist operatives was mothballed, made easier by the fact that most were now either dead or in jail anyway. Palestinian assets — frozen in Israeli banks — began to be released. Permits allowing Palestinian day laborers to reenter Israel were again being issued, subject to background checks.
Israel was even beginning to tear down sections of the so-called “security fence,” and Doron was publicly suggesting that upon the signing of a full treaty with the Palestinians, he would tear the rest of the wall down as well.
As a result, foreign investment was pouring into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Tourism had once again begun to surge. Housing starts on both sides of the Green Line were at a record high. Refugee camps were being replaced by gleaming new apartment complexes, new schools, playgrounds, shopping centers, and malls.
And, of course, as Israeli and Palestinian oil and gas flowed out, hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign currency began flowing in. An IPO on the New York Stock Exchange drew millions of investors to Medexco, but only after every Israeli and Palestinian family was given shares. As the joint venture’s share price soared, so did the fortunes of every Muslim, Jew, and Christian in the Holy Land.