Just a few weeks into the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran, it became clear that the Islamic Republic would not collapse. On the contrary, the war provoked Iran to demonstrate its leverage over global energy flows by closing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a quarter of the world’s oil moves on a daily basis.
As the crisis intensified, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a main architect of the war—attempted to reassure the world that he had a solution. “Once we achieve our goals,” he said in a March 19 press conference, “what has to be done is to have alternative routes. Instead of going through the chokepoints of the Hormuz straits and Bab al-Mandab straits [sic] . . . just have oil pipelines, gas pipelines, right up to Israel . . . to our Mediterranean ports, and you’ve just done away with the chokepoints forever.”
Netanyahu’s proposal—versions of which are shared by an array of leaders and pundits—is more hallucination than vision. Restructuring the hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Middle East to avoid the Strait of Hormuz and place Israel at the center would be no more secure than the current arrangement and would create undesirable new dependencies. These geopolitical daydreams have deep roots, and stem from a colonial fantasy that technical fixes and military might can bypass the Middle East’s central political questions.
The Fantasy
Netanyahu’s campaign to reroute regional infrastructure through Israel has been ongoing for years. In September 2024, he held up two maps in front of the UN General Assembly. The first, labeled “The Curse,” showed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and portions of Yemen in black, representing the network of alliances between Iran and the “Axis of Resistance” before the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The second, labeled “The Blessing,” showed Israel linked to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, with a line traversing these states extending from India to the Mediterranean.
The presentation showed the thinking behind the proposed India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major U.S.-backed initiative to use energy, transportation, and communications infrastructure to bind regional states to Israel while circumventing both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz. As others have pointed out, IMEC has become linked to the Trump administration’s plan for the ethnic cleansing and “reconstruction” of Gaza, creating an infrastructural basis for both genocide and normalization.
The proposed India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). Source: OpenStreetMap and its contributors, available under the Open Database License. Read more: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright.
The most bizarre idea appeared in Newt Gingrich’s apparently serious post on X promoting a satirical plan to blast a canal through the Arabian Peninsula with nuclear weapons.
Similar concepts for routes that could circumvent Hormuz have circulated since the strait’s closure on March 2. Saudi Arabia has already activated the East–West Pipeline, a key export route that the Kingdom built during the “tanker war” of the 1980s specifically for this purpose. Some proposals for new routes have been more serious than others. On the more plausible end of the spectrum, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol has floated the idea of a new pipeline linking the southern oilfields of Iraq through Basra to a terminal in Turkey. Other ideas have included natural gas pipelines from the Gulf states to Israel or Turkey, with Syria’s new government positioning itself as a key hub with a Mediterranean coastline of its own. The most bizarre of these visions was embodied in Newt Gingrich’s apparently serious post on X of a satirical plan to blast a canal through the Arabian Peninsula with nuclear weapons.
In March, Newt Gingrich posted an image of a satirical plan to use nuclear weapons to blast a new canal through the Arabian Peninsula. Source: X post by @newtgingrich on March 15, 2026
Colonial Origins
These fantasies are gaining attention now because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but they have much older origins. In 1934, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC)—an international consortium made up of British, Dutch, French, and U.S. oil interests—built pipelines to Haifa, in the British Palestine Mandate, and Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, to carry Iraqi crude oil from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean. This project helped make Haifa into a major refining and industrial complex, and provided Western Europe with much of its oil supply into the 1970s. In the mid-1940s, Aramco began planning a second oil pipeline project that would originate in eastern Saudi Arabia and also terminate in Haifa. This project—called the “Trans-Arabian Pipeline,” or Tapline—was conceived as a means of circumventing the long and expensive tanker route around the Arabian Peninsula and through the Strait of Hormuz and Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.
A screenshot from a 1950 film, “Oil Across Arabia” made by Bechtel International Corporation to promote the Trans-Arabian pipeline. Source: “Oil Across Arabia,” published to YouTube by PublicResourceOrg (@PublicResourceOrg) on June 23, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsigc0NXUPA.
But these pipelines were vulnerable to the politics surrounding the colonization and partition of Palestine and rising resource nationalism throughout the region. IPC’s infrastructure in Mandate Palestine was repeatedly sabotaged during the 1936–39 Great Arab Revolt. In 1946, Saudi Arabia demanded that Tapline’s route be moved north, to southern Lebanon, in order to avoid implication in—or disruption by—Palestine’s partition. In 1949, the United States helped overthrow Syria’s elected government to ensure that Syria would approve a ceasefire with Israel and Tapline’s passage through its territory, contributing to the long-term militarization of Syrian politics. IPC was targeted again by Zionist militants and Palestinian nationalists during the fighting that resulted from partition in 1948. Once Tapline was completed in 1950, it became a target for sabotage by groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which regarded Tapline as imperial infrastructure that linked Israeli colonialism to reactionary Arab regimes under the aegis of U.S. power. And the Ba’athist Syrian government used its ability to halt pumping through the pipeline as leverage in negotiations to increase its share of the revenues Tapline realized for Aramco. The repeated closure of IPC, Tapline, and the Suez Canal led to the development of the modern supertanker, which rendered these pipelines obsolete and gave the Strait of Hormuz its central importance in the 1970s. Conflict led to the final closure of both pipelines by the 1980s.
Good Targets for Drone Wars
In the drone era, routes from the Gulf to Israel would be even more vulnerable. Iran and its allies have demonstrated a capacity to target Gulf energy infrastructure with great precision. In 2019, during Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, the Houthi movement launched a drone attack against Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqa’iq and Khurais that briefly disrupted more than 5 million barrels per day of Saudi exports—around 5 percent of global oil supply. Though Iran’s targeting of tankers and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz have received the most attention during the current war, strikes on oil infrastructure have also had a dramatic impact. Targets have included major oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, natural gas processing and liquefaction plants in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and oil fields and processing facilities in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Russia has also used Iranian-designed Shahed drones to effectively target Ukrainian energy infrastructure despite Ukraine’s extensive anti-drone air defenses.
Circumventing the Strait of Hormuz with oil pipelines will not eliminate this vulnerability. In early April, a drone attack on a pumping station belonging to Saudi Arabia’s East–West Pipeline cut off 700,000 barrels per day—around 10 percent of the kingdom’s exports—demonstrating that this alternative route can be cut, too. Any pipeline that is built from the Gulf through Israel (or Turkey, or Syria, or anywhere else) would be equally vulnerable, and any benefit from refusing to pay an Iranian toll on passage through the Strait of Hormuz would almost certainly be offset by the cost of imperfectly defending hundreds of miles of pipeline infrastructure.
More importantly, such a project would help cement the relationship between Israel and the Gulf states even as Israel continues its genocidal actions in Palestine and Lebanon, pulls the region into an endless series of nihilistic wars, and repeatedly demonstrates its lack of respect for other states’ sovereignty. It is difficult to take seriously the idea that deepening the Gulf’s infrastructural links to Israel would bring greater security than would a peace settlement with Iran.
There is no technical fix to the consequences of this war of choice and aggression. Only a lasting peace, and substantive Palestinian (and Lebanese, and Syrian) sovereignty, can achieve any kind of security worth the name.
Header Image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the UN General Assembly on September 27, 2024 in New York City. Source: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
New Pipelines Won’t Solve the Hormuz Crisis
Just a few weeks into the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran, it became clear that the Islamic Republic would not collapse. On the contrary, the war provoked Iran to demonstrate its leverage over global energy flows by closing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a quarter of the world’s oil moves on a daily basis.
As the crisis intensified, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a main architect of the war—attempted to reassure the world that he had a solution. “Once we achieve our goals,” he said in a March 19 press conference, “what has to be done is to have alternative routes. Instead of going through the chokepoints of the Hormuz straits and Bab al-Mandab straits [sic] . . . just have oil pipelines, gas pipelines, right up to Israel . . . to our Mediterranean ports, and you’ve just done away with the chokepoints forever.”
Netanyahu’s proposal—versions of which are shared by an array of leaders and pundits—is more hallucination than vision. Restructuring the hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Middle East to avoid the Strait of Hormuz and place Israel at the center would be no more secure than the current arrangement and would create undesirable new dependencies. These geopolitical daydreams have deep roots, and stem from a colonial fantasy that technical fixes and military might can bypass the Middle East’s central political questions.
The Fantasy
Netanyahu’s campaign to reroute regional infrastructure through Israel has been ongoing for years. In September 2024, he held up two maps in front of the UN General Assembly. The first, labeled “The Curse,” showed Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and portions of Yemen in black, representing the network of alliances between Iran and the “Axis of Resistance” before the fall of Bashar al-Assad. The second, labeled “The Blessing,” showed Israel linked to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, with a line traversing these states extending from India to the Mediterranean.
The presentation showed the thinking behind the proposed India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major U.S.-backed initiative to use energy, transportation, and communications infrastructure to bind regional states to Israel while circumventing both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz. As others have pointed out, IMEC has become linked to the Trump administration’s plan for the ethnic cleansing and “reconstruction” of Gaza, creating an infrastructural basis for both genocide and normalization.
Similar concepts for routes that could circumvent Hormuz have circulated since the strait’s closure on March 2. Saudi Arabia has already activated the East–West Pipeline, a key export route that the Kingdom built during the “tanker war” of the 1980s specifically for this purpose. Some proposals for new routes have been more serious than others. On the more plausible end of the spectrum, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol has floated the idea of a new pipeline linking the southern oilfields of Iraq through Basra to a terminal in Turkey. Other ideas have included natural gas pipelines from the Gulf states to Israel or Turkey, with Syria’s new government positioning itself as a key hub with a Mediterranean coastline of its own. The most bizarre of these visions was embodied in Newt Gingrich’s apparently serious post on X of a satirical plan to blast a canal through the Arabian Peninsula with nuclear weapons.
Colonial Origins
These fantasies are gaining attention now because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but they have much older origins. In 1934, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC)—an international consortium made up of British, Dutch, French, and U.S. oil interests—built pipelines to Haifa, in the British Palestine Mandate, and Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, to carry Iraqi crude oil from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean. This project helped make Haifa into a major refining and industrial complex, and provided Western Europe with much of its oil supply into the 1970s. In the mid-1940s, Aramco began planning a second oil pipeline project that would originate in eastern Saudi Arabia and also terminate in Haifa. This project—called the “Trans-Arabian Pipeline,” or Tapline—was conceived as a means of circumventing the long and expensive tanker route around the Arabian Peninsula and through the Strait of Hormuz and Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.
But these pipelines were vulnerable to the politics surrounding the colonization and partition of Palestine and rising resource nationalism throughout the region. IPC’s infrastructure in Mandate Palestine was repeatedly sabotaged during the 1936–39 Great Arab Revolt. In 1946, Saudi Arabia demanded that Tapline’s route be moved north, to southern Lebanon, in order to avoid implication in—or disruption by—Palestine’s partition. In 1949, the United States helped overthrow Syria’s elected government to ensure that Syria would approve a ceasefire with Israel and Tapline’s passage through its territory, contributing to the long-term militarization of Syrian politics. IPC was targeted again by Zionist militants and Palestinian nationalists during the fighting that resulted from partition in 1948. Once Tapline was completed in 1950, it became a target for sabotage by groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which regarded Tapline as imperial infrastructure that linked Israeli colonialism to reactionary Arab regimes under the aegis of U.S. power. And the Ba’athist Syrian government used its ability to halt pumping through the pipeline as leverage in negotiations to increase its share of the revenues Tapline realized for Aramco. The repeated closure of IPC, Tapline, and the Suez Canal led to the development of the modern supertanker, which rendered these pipelines obsolete and gave the Strait of Hormuz its central importance in the 1970s. Conflict led to the final closure of both pipelines by the 1980s.
Good Targets for Drone Wars
In the drone era, routes from the Gulf to Israel would be even more vulnerable. Iran and its allies have demonstrated a capacity to target Gulf energy infrastructure with great precision. In 2019, during Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, the Houthi movement launched a drone attack against Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqa’iq and Khurais that briefly disrupted more than 5 million barrels per day of Saudi exports—around 5 percent of global oil supply. Though Iran’s targeting of tankers and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz have received the most attention during the current war, strikes on oil infrastructure have also had a dramatic impact. Targets have included major oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, natural gas processing and liquefaction plants in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and oil fields and processing facilities in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Russia has also used Iranian-designed Shahed drones to effectively target Ukrainian energy infrastructure despite Ukraine’s extensive anti-drone air defenses.
Circumventing the Strait of Hormuz with oil pipelines will not eliminate this vulnerability. In early April, a drone attack on a pumping station belonging to Saudi Arabia’s East–West Pipeline cut off 700,000 barrels per day—around 10 percent of the kingdom’s exports—demonstrating that this alternative route can be cut, too. Any pipeline that is built from the Gulf through Israel (or Turkey, or Syria, or anywhere else) would be equally vulnerable, and any benefit from refusing to pay an Iranian toll on passage through the Strait of Hormuz would almost certainly be offset by the cost of imperfectly defending hundreds of miles of pipeline infrastructure.
More importantly, such a project would help cement the relationship between Israel and the Gulf states even as Israel continues its genocidal actions in Palestine and Lebanon, pulls the region into an endless series of nihilistic wars, and repeatedly demonstrates its lack of respect for other states’ sovereignty. It is difficult to take seriously the idea that deepening the Gulf’s infrastructural links to Israel would bring greater security than would a peace settlement with Iran.
There is no technical fix to the consequences of this war of choice and aggression. Only a lasting peace, and substantive Palestinian (and Lebanese, and Syrian) sovereignty, can achieve any kind of security worth the name.
Header Image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the UN General Assembly on September 27, 2024 in New York City. Source: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Tags: energy crisis, iran war, Hormuz, strait of hormuz, iran