The Weekly Lift - December 1, 2022

The Editor's Page

Dear Readers

Unless one has been living under a rock for the last ten days, or perhaps in the United States (despite the country being in the competition), it is hard to miss the fact that the world has been overtaken by football (soccer in North America) fever. The World Cup is ongoing in Qatar and so far, has not lacked excitement, surprises, or controversy on and off the field.

Has this World Cup been put under a bigger geopolitical microscope or is it because the world is more connected and information gets amplified in ways that did not impact prior tournaments? Or is it double standard because Qatar is an Arab, Muslim, non-White country? Some (older) readers might remember Argentina being the host in 1978, while the Military Junta exerted a ruthless dictatorship, or Russia in 2018 under Putin, while human rights and political freedom had been restricted for years.

This year's event in Qatar has been marred in controversy before it even started, first due to allegations of corruption trying to explain how a tiny country in the Arabian Peninsula with a limited football tradition was selected to host a planetary event, and second, to the 6,500 foreign migrant workers who died building the stadiums in the country, shedding the light on the rights of these workers across the Middle East.

The decision by Qatar to prohibit alcohol inside stadiums two days before the start of the event added fuel to the fire. Last and certainly not least, the country banning and prohibiting players and spectators from wearing rainbow colors symbolizing their support of LGBTQ rights has been the most infuriating, provocative, and in the eyes of many participants, observers, and human rights advocates, the tipping point for questioning Qatar's fit as a host.

These points of contention are also happening with a backdrop of geopolitical issues that have added to the tense atmosphere of the event. The latest incident is the US team publishing a doctored Iran flag without the Islamic Republic's symbol before the game between the two countries this past Tuesday, prompting Iran to request the US to be exited from the tournament. Serbia was reprimanded for displaying a map of the country on the team's shirts, inclusive of Kosovo, a country that has become independent in 2008 against Serbia's will.

Algeria's television channels chose to ignore Morocco's win over Belgium in the qualifying round of the competition despite it being one of the most significant upsets of the first week, amid tensions between the two neighbors. Last, the Saudi Crown Prince visiting Qatar during the tournament was seen as a clear sign of rapprochement between the two countries, following years of tension and confrontation. Yet, Saudis are not able to watch the games due to a contract dispute about broadcasting rights between the two countries.

Many Muslim countries qualify the issues of alcohol and LGBTQ rights as another example of the West trying to impose its values on Muslim countries, fueling what many see as a worsening clash of civilizations. The event has also seen several African teams (Morocco, Senegal), performing well or at least better than expected, while being coached by Africans and not Europeans (see article below), affirming that these countries are emerging on the football world stage and deserve the same respect afforded to European and Latin American teams. The North-South geopolitical face-off also hovers over the competition.

Have geopolitics overtaken the World Cup? It has certainly felt that way. The Weekly Lift believes it has sometimes been difficult to focus on the games because the geopolitical headlines have been distracting. Some argue the World Cup should not be shielded from the world's complex dynamics and instead, should abide by the same universal values and principles as those advocated outside the tournament.

FIFA, the international body governing the World Cup, is a very powerful organization and has fought hard to regain credibility after years of turmoil and corrupt leadership. It should continue to do some introspection, as it tries to balance the need to respect local cultural values and laws, with the responsibility to uphold human rights and freedom of expression when selecting a host country, without compromise. Depriving certain minorities of being their authentic selves while celebrating football should not be tolerated. Qatar could have chosen to respect those rights and shine as a beacon of tolerance. Instead, it may have irreparably damaged its image and standing on the world stage.

Is hosting the event worth it? Qatar was the fastest-eliminated host country in the tournament's history. Some already call it a 200 billion dollars expensive experiment. This Word Cup may serve as a case study for future global sports events.

Meanwhile and with almost three weeks to go in the tournament, The Weekly Lift hopes the world will strive to temper the geopolitical noise and allow fans to celebrate the beauty of the game. I know I will...

Curated Articles

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

Global Development: Something Remarkable Is Happening In African Football

The New York Times (US) reports that "something exciting is happening in the World Cup: The five teams representing Africa in the tournament have African coaches.

This may not sound?exceptional. Gregg Berhalter, who coaches the United States team, is a New Jersey native; Hansi Flick, who manages the German squad, hails from Heidelberg. But typically, African national teams have relied on European coaches — mostly unknown in their home countries, effectively mercenaries bouncing around the world — when big tournaments come around. If an African country hired an African coach, he would be summarily fired right before a big tournament, even if he took the team through the qualifiers.

Not this year. Of the five African coaches, four made their careers in top-tier European football: Aliou Cissé was born in Senegal and Rigobert Song in Cameroon. But both made their careers in the English Premier League. Cissé immigrated to France when he was young. Song made his debut for the Cameroonian national team in the 1998 World Cup, but joined a French team shortly afterward before going on to England.

Walid Regragui was born outside Paris, and played for a string of French teams?before starting a coaching career in Morocco. Otto Addo, who is coaching the Ghanaian team, was born and grew up in Hamburg and played in the German Bundesliga. Only Jalel Kadri is a product of his home country’s leagues, having played and coached in Tunisia.

African football is discovering the power of the diaspora. Of course there’s a long history of the Black diaspora playing a part in events on the continent: Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian independence leader, incorporated pan-Africanist thought by way of America and Britain into his program when he took power in 1957. Since the era of democratization in the early 1990s, some African countries and their leaders — in Senegal and Ghana, for example — have been more open to the political and economic power and expertise of the diaspora beyond mere remittances.

That seems to have accelerated in the new century. And we are increasingly watching this kind of solidarity on the football field. Take Cissé, the coach for Senegal. He has been at his coaching job the longest and is probably the most interesting of the lot. He was appointed in 2015 and coached Senegal in the 2018 World Cup, in which the team performed admirably well and was eliminated only on?a bizarre technicality. Under him, Senegal won the 2022?African Cup of Nations.

But it’s not just his winning record that keeps Cissé in a job. Another reason for his longevity is that he understands the pressures of his players. He was captain of the last great Senegal team, the 2002 squad. That team shocked everyone at the World Cup in South Korea and Japan by beating the defending champion, France, in the opening match and making it as far as the quarterfinals.

Cissé understands that he derives his strength as a coach from his deep connection to Senegal. In?an interview?this year, he said, essentially, that people from the diaspora understand their home countries in a way that outsiders cannot. He cited technical and tactical expertise as crucial to successful coaching, but added: “It’s also important to know about the country’s past. For me, if you don’t know about the past, it’s difficult to talk about the future.”

The prominence of coaches like Cissé comes as African countries’ relationship with their diasporas is changing. There are now millions of African immigrants and their descendants in Europe. From Algerians who moved to France in the 1960s to near-daily arrivals of irregular African migrants in Italy today, Europe has been becoming Blacker for decades.

Even as these groups are integrated — and shape popular culture, politics, the economy and, of course, sports — many still maintain some allegiance to their ancestral homes and go back to visit regularly, send remittances and follow Moroccan or Cameroonian news as closely as they would in Marrakesh or Yaoundé. (Social media cements this relationship even further.)

But there is another important change underway, reflective of the rising power and relevance of Africa to Europe. African players are increasingly on the center stage of world football. Though African players have a long history in Europe, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that they began to star in the top leagues there.

At first, they were signed for their?“speed” and “natural strength.”But coaches like José Mourinho and Roberto Mancini also appreciated their skill, leadership and smarts. Players like Michael Essien, Didier Drogba, John Obi-Mikel, Samuel Eto’o and Yaya Touré became global stars by the first decade of the 21st century. Sadio Mané of Senegal was a key part of Liverpool F.C.’s attack for years (and the team struggled after his departure for Bayern Munich). His national teammate, the defender Kalidou Koulibaly, captained Napoli before he moved to Chelsea.

Today, a majority of Africans — like most football fans across the world — follow the top European leagues. Football in this way cultivates a sort of pan-African identity, even if it is only for 90 minutes at a time. And there is a kind of continental solidarity that emerges for many African fans during the World Cup. If your home country’s team has made it, you first support it; when it gets eliminated, you support whichever African country is doing well. As the novelist?Chimamanda Adichie put it?during the 2010 World Cup, your “nationalism expands its boundaries as your country loses.”

The results after a week of matches have been mixed. Morocco and Senegal, after stumbling in their opening matches, have bounced back with convincing victories. Cameroon, Ghana and Tunisia have been less convincing. But as Argentina’s loss to Saudi Arabia or Germany’s to Japan remind us, the World Cup can be full of surprises.

No team from Africa has yet made it beyond the quarterfinals of the World Cup. But I and the millions watching across the continent this year are cheering on these new head coaches, and hoping for the impossible."

Climate Change: How Pakistan Emerged As A Climate Champion

The Economist (UK) reports that "Pakistan is not?often praised for its leadership. Yet its climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, was one of the star turns at the?un?climate talks held in Sharm el-Sheikh last week. At the helm of the “g77+China” negotiating group of developing countries, Ms Rehman won plaudits for shepherding a new deal to channel money from rich countries to poor ones that have suffered climate-related disasters. It was the annual climate jamboree’s single main achievement.?

Ms Rehman, a former journalist, information minister and ambassador to America, blends well-heeled glamour and toughness. A rare champion of Pakistani liberalism, the 61-year-old Karachiite is known for her fights against honour killings and the country’s cruel blasphemy laws.

They have earned her multiple death threats. She also bears scars from a suicide blast aimed at her friend Benazir Bhutto (the former prime minister survived that jihadist attack, but not one weeks later). By comparison, the talks in Sharm el-Sheikh must have seemed like the holiday camp that the Egyptian town usually is.

Yet Ms Rehman was also assisted by the fact that the massive floods Pakistan suffered this year, costing an estimated $30bn in damages, are one of the biggest climate-related disasters on record. They gave moral authority to her argument that poor countries should receive “loss and damage” funds from the rich countries whose emissions have contributed to such calamities. A study attributes the engorged monsoon floods in part to global warming. Yet Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the stock of global emissions.?

Pakistani environmental activists, a subset of the country’s embattled liberal campaigners, hope Ms Rehman’s triumph will stir more climate action back home. It had been modestly increasing before the floods—with, for example, a few cases in which activists sued the government for neglecting its environmental commitments. Yet Pakistan’s climate change ministry is vastly underfunded.

Just $43m were allocated to it this year from a federal budget of $47bn. A proposed national climate change authority has yet to be formed, five years after a law was passed to facilitate it. Pakistan, which experiences some of the hottest temperatures on Earth, has only just begun serious work on a national adaptation plan.?

The floods helped publicise such shortcomings. Pakistan’s few climate experts were suddenly hot property on the country’s news channels. But will that focus be maintained? As the government scrambles to provide flood relief, it is giving little thought to climate-proofing against future disasters. Before the floods, Ms Rehman was pushing a $11bn-17bn initiative to regenerate the Indus river that supports the livelihoods, indirectly or directly, of over 200m people. But funds that might have been earmarked for the programme are now going on flood relief.

The heightened global attention she has brought to Pakistan’s flood losses could attract a lot more money and relevant expertise. That could make the country a poster child not only for loss-and-damage activism but, more usefully, for long-term planning and climate resilience. There is a precedent for this. After a devastating cyclone in 1970 Bangladesh built one of the world’s best disaster preparedness schemes.

A tragic, likelier scenario would see the momentum generated by Pakistan’s calamity and Ms Rehman’s astute diplomacy lost in a protracted relief effort and Pakistan’s usual obsessions with politics and scandal. At least, until the floodwaters rise again.

International Relations: For Putin’s Opponents, Exile From Russia Proves a Boon

The New York Times (US) reports that "sitting before a large video monitor in his suburban Moscow office last week, President Vladimir V. Putin addressed local officials opening a turkey breeding center in distant Siberia.

Before several dignitaries pushed a platter-size orange button in unison, Mr. Putin lauded homegrown turkeys as a model for assuring Russia’s independence. “Without any exaggeration, this is a question of our technological, scientific and food sovereignty,” he said.

The ceremony was carried solemnly by state television in Russia. But across the border in Vilnius, Lithuania, the event served as raw material for a very different type of broadcast: A skewering of the Russian president on YouTube by the exiled political team of Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader.

“With everything happening, it is completely insane,” said Nino Rosebashvili, an anchor at a YouTube channel run by the movement founded by Mr. Navalny. Mr. Putin, the anchor suggested, has taken to presiding over the most humdrum of events to avoid linking himself with Russia’s stumbling war against Ukraine.

In the months since Mr. Navalny was sent to a penal colony in 2021, his political network across Russia was crushed and the country’s opposition movement seemed dead. Many liberals fled into exile.

But now, with Russia mired in war, exile has proved a boon to the opposition movement. In Vilnius, the unofficial capital of Russian opposition abroad, the Navalny team is using YouTube to spearhead antiwar efforts in a way that is unthinkable at home.

“We threw away all our plans and reinvented ourselves as a media organization,” said Leonid Volkov, long Mr. Navalny’s chief of staff and now the head of its manifold efforts to counter the Kremlin narrative about the war. “This is the information front.”

Mr. Navalny used to stream videos a couple of hours each week. But at the start of the war, his team launched a new channel, Popular Politics, and it now broadcasts about 30 hours a week, producing more than 50 segments that are posted online as individual clips. The number of employees rose to 130 from about 70 back in the Moscow days, and the team just doubled its production space.

Mr. Navalny, too, is still being heard from, even as the Kremlin keeps piling years onto his sentence and the penal colony where he has been incarcerated since early last year subjects him to increasingly?harsh?conditions.?With his trademark irony,?he noted?via Twitter last Thursday that he kept hearing a radio station advertising local funeral services for military combatants. The funeral business must be booming for a mortuary to afford such advertising, Mr. Navalny said.

“Grandfather Putin” and his elderly cronies, he said, “imagined themselves as Napoleons, and the price is paid by those who get buried at a discount.” No ghost writers create Mr. Navalny’s social media posts, according to members of his team, but they declined to be more specific. Mr. Navalny has repeatedly sued over his treatment, using court hearings where he appears via video link to lambaste the war.

Amid questions about whether the Navalny movement is viable without the political mandate and charisma of its founder, his lieutenants point to their YouTube audience. Popular Politics has grown to 1.64 million subscribers. That’s a fraction of the viewership for two channels originally created by Mr. Navalny himself, however, which are still running and have attracted around 9.5 million subscribers.

Addressing the question on a recent broadcast, Mr. Volkov said: “It is not a single person. It is a serious political organization which has accomplished several things in the past.”

Among other things, the organization had built a network of 45 regional offices in Russia working to unseat Putin supporters in local elections. That campaign ended when the Kremlin labeled the budding political party an extremist organization in April 2021, but over the past month, the Navalny organization has started trying to re-establish about 20 to 30 regional offices on a “virtual” basis, Mr. Volkov said, with more than 12,000 people quietly volunteering.

Popular Politics remains available to viewers inside Russia. Although Russia has banned Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, YouTube is still operating, not least because the Kremlin is desperate to reach the younger audience that shuns state television. Legions of Russian political figures, activists and journalists now host their own YouTube channels.

While the Navalny channels attract a steady stream of viewers, few of the Popular Politics clips become real blockbusters. Crowd funding brings in tens of thousands of dollars monthly, as does revenue generated from YouTube viewings, though YouTube’s decision to stop paying outlets for views generated inside Russia grates on the independent media outlets.

At the Vilnius offices, the walls are hung with posters calling for Mr. Navalny’s release. The conference rooms are named after highlights from previous investigations by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a longstanding arm of the Navalny organization, such as one involving the Scheherazade, a superyacht tied to Mr. Putin.

Videos detailing the anti-corruption investigations pull in millions of viewers; one from last year alleging that a $1.3 billion palace was built for Mr. Putin on the Black Sea has garnered 125 million views. YouTube called it the most-watched Russian-language video in 2021, and the Kremlin, which usually ignores corruption allegations, issued a denial. The group has made unconfirmed claims of corruption against other senior officials, as well.

The most recent investigation alleged that Gen. Sergey Surovikin, who is overseeing the Russian war effort, had accepted a roughly $1.7 million payment from an oligarch close to the Kremlin in exchange for liberating two phosphate mines in Syria in 2017. The Russian government did not react to the investigation.

Most of Mr. Navalny’s top lieutenants have done some jail time, so they left Russia to avoid longer sentences or worse, even if they are keenly aware that Putin foes have sometimes been poisoned in Europe as well.

“In Russia you need a 20-character password for your phone and 30 characters for something else, and you have to leave a camera on in your apartment when you go out to see if someone broke into your home, and on the street you have to check if you are being followed,” said Georgy Alburov, one of the anti-corruption investigators. “You feel safer here.”

The mobilization announced in late September proved a big audience draw, with more than 17 million unique views, the best month ever, plus an additional 200,000 subscribers, said Ruslan Shaveddinov, one of the anchors. YouTube will not publicly confirm specific viewer numbers by month.

The idea is not to counter the lies propagated by Russian state media one by one — there are too many, team members said — but to counteract them more generally with verifiable news. One program concentrates on the ills of daily life in Russia, like a story about a woman who fell into a pothole at night while walking to find her husband’s mobilization camp. The hole was so deep that she had to wait until morning to be rescued.

Their YouTube channels go much further than regular news channels in attacking Mr. Putin, regularly condemning him as a “fascist.”Their latest project is a public advocacy campaign to try to get the European Union and the United States — which have imposed sanctions on roughly 1,200 individuals for the war — to expand the list to 6,000 Russian government apparatchiks and Kremlin allies. Wider sanctions would help create rifts in the ruling hierarchy, Mr. Volkov said.

Journalists and political analysts, while praising the Navalny team’s YouTube offerings overall, say they are more advocacy than news and note that they have an emotional edge that regular news channels avoid.

“It’s not a media project in the professional sense,” said Tanya Felgenhauer, a longtime talk show host at Echo of Moscow, a liberal radio station closed at the beginning of the war, who now works on various YouTube shows of her own. “It’s a political media project of Aleksei Navalny’s team, and they do great, really. It’s just not journalism.”

Members of the team acknowledge that they are mainly activists and say they believed that creating the channel was the best way to try to end both the war and Putin’s rule.

“We are not journalists, we are a political organization, and we’re trying to reach our political goals, we are trying to make Putin suffer,” said Mr. Volkov."

Human Rights: Tech-Savvy Iranian Activists Reveal Islamic Republic's Abuses

The Telegraph (UK) reports that "when videos posted on Friday appeared to show the ancestral home of the late founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic on fire, state media derided the news as "a lie". But footage posted by the activist network 1500tasvir told a different story.??

The incident occurred on Thursday evening in Khomein, the birth town of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the group said, as strikes and protests over the death of?Mahsa Amini shook Iran for a ninth week.?They shared footage showing flames amid the distinctive arches that matched file photographs of the residence. The truth was out.?

In a country where free media is banned, 1500tasvir has quickly emerged as a hub for independent information, developing a reputation for a comprehensive and dependable network relied upon both by protesters in the street and Western media.

On an ordinary day the group typically shares hundreds of videos on Instagram and Twitter. Its accounts have gone from 150,000 and 50,000 followers respectively in September, to over 1.5 million and 350,000 currently. No other group has developed such a wide network of coverage of the protest movement.

The Telegraph interviewed two members of 1500tasvir, who agreed to speak anonymously over a secure messaging app to provide an inside account of how a small group of young volunteers is challenging the combined security apparatus of the Islamic republic. “The only purpose we have is to harm the Islamic republic, in the end destroy it, as all people in Iran want and in the end that’s why people trust us,” one of the activists said.

The group, whose name means 1,500 windows, was formed after Iran’s Bloody November protests in 2019 with the goal of creating an accurate tally of the number of protesters killed by security forces.

Those protests had erupted nationwide following a rapid hike in fuel prices, and authorities responded ruthlessly with a week-long crackdown and near-total internet blackout. While this restricted coverage of the brutal response, 1500tasvir activists were able to document the death of at least 1,500 protesters, hence the name.

The group’s secret volunteer network – made up mostly of young people inside Iran, though some are also based abroad – was well established when protests erupted again in September?after Amini’s death.? Its activists were well placed to challenge the state media’s narrative of a nation beset by rioters, terrorists and agents in the pay of Western powers plotting to foment a civil war.

This year’s demonstrations have not, as yet, been as deadly as 2019, nor as widespread as the 2009 Green Movement, which mobilised up to three million people at a time and lasted for six months.?

But the protests over the death of Amini show no sign of abating, and what distinguishes them is the brazenness and conviction of protesters calling for the overthrow of the regime, activists say.?“People are angrier this time,” one of the members told The Telegraph. “This time people understood from these experiences that they should defend themselves, they shouldn’t just stand there and be killed.”

They are also younger. “In 2009 it was over 25-year-olds,” the activist said. “This time it’s about teenagers, 14, 15 years old. It’s their fight this time.” Those claims are partially borne out by the death toll so far. Of the 362 deaths documented by the group Human Rights Activists in Iran,?56 were of minors, including an eight-year-old killed in Zahedan?last month and a nine-year-old killed in the western city of Izeh on Wednesday.

It is documenting deaths like these that motivates 1500tasvir, who say they have a life or death stake in the protests as ordinary Iranians, rather than as impartial observers or journalists. “One of the reasons people trust us is because we do not consider ourselves journalists, we’re a part of the people and we document people in their routine life,” the activist said.

The group says it is independent, not affiliated with any political party, nor funded by any other states. Through behind-the-scenes work, the group has gained enough credibility with Twitter and Instagram to obtain blue tick verification.

Its main goal is to support ordinary Iranians protesting in the street and amplify their voices, another member of the group said. “The most important thing for us is for people in the street here, that’s our number one priority, everything is arranged and coordinated according to that,” the individual said. “The people in the street needed their voices to be heard internationally.”

While the struggle is taking place primarily on the streets of Iran, the movement is being inspired, amplified and assisted by digital technology. An arms race is under way between protesters reliant on access to the internet to share information and get their message out and authorities intent on thwarting them, throttling their access and spying on them online.

Iranian dissidents – and online shoppers – all use proxy servers and virtual private networks to mask their location and encrypt their traffic, enabling users to bypass blocks imposed on sites like Twitter and to communicate safely without interception.

Some apps have been developed more specifically to thwart authorities, like Gershad, a crowdsourced app that lets users share and track the real-time locations of morality police patrols.

Authorities are so concerned by what citizens are doing online that security forces conduct random searches of people’s devices.?“Even if you are not protesting they walk up to you and make you open your phone. If you don’t put the passcode, they will arrest you and take you to the police station,” the first activist said.

Heavy-handed approaches like this are only hardening the resolve of protesters, they said.“We are not savages or in the street because of US sanctions, we want freedom, we want a better life,” they continued.?

“Before the Islamic republic could just hide it but this time the world is seeing the truth of the protesters, how brave they are and how cruel the government can be.”

Like many in Iran who now believe the government cannot be reformed, the first activist predicted its downfall was inevitable. “The people will be the winners of this war, it’s just a matter of time.”

Energy: Gaza Gas Deal Could Make Improbable Partners Out Of Israel And Hamas

The Washington Post (US) reports that "Europe’s race to secure alternatives to Russian energy supplies is reviving a long-forsaken Palestinian initiative to extract natural gas off the coast of the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Palestinian officials said that rapidly advancing negotiations with Egyptian investors could bring a rare glimmer of hope to Palestinians, after plans to develop Gaza’s gas — along with plans for the creation of a Palestinian state — were sidelined by more than two decades of grinding conflict with Israel and equally intractable Palestinian political divisions.

The $1.4 billion project, which will be finalized by February 2023 and may launch gas production by March 2024, will be a high-stakes collaboration among the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that rules the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Israel have engaged in four devastating wars in the Gaza Strip. Both will need to be, at least tacitly, on board.

The multilateral partnership will also, industry and political analysts say, throw a lifeline to the cash-strapped and deeply unpopular Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank and has for the past 15 years held no authority in the Gaza Strip.

The Ramallah-based authority sees Gaza’s gas reserves as a “pillar to improving its fiscal plans,” said Zafer Milhem, chairman of the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority. “We’ve been waiting for this development and the prosperity that comes with it,” he said. “I hope this will be a step toward the future.”

The Egyptian-led project “will contribute to strengthening Palestinian national independence,” said a February 2021 memorandum of understanding between the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF) and Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Co. (EGAS), an Egyptian consortium of investors.

Since first discovered by British Gas in 1999, Gaza’s natural gas — estimated to be 1 trillion cubic feet — has been mired in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and locked below the sea.

In 2000, a day after Palestinian nationalist leader Yasser Arafat hailed the gas discovery as a “gift from God,” the Palestinians’ second intifada, or uprising, erupted. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon halted the project, warning that the profits could be channeled to Hamas and other militant groups.

But the booming global energy market and increased regional energy collaborations have spurred progress, and they could finally open up one of the Palestinians’ few, potentially very lucrative natural resources, said Palestinians involved in the negotiations.

In October, Egyptian Petroleum Minister Tarek el-Molla announced a framework agreement between the Egyptian and Palestinian sides, with close oversight and unofficial consent by Israel. The Palestinian Authority ratified the deal that month and says it is waiting for Israel, which is planning to swear in its next government, to send an official “letter of comfort” to officially greenlight the project.

Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister and now its prime minister-elect, in 2011 called the proposal “good for stability, good for prosperity and good for peace.” And Palestinian negotiators said they have received positive signs from Israelis when discussing the issue in recent years at the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, of which both Israel and the Palestinian territories are members.

The offices of Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the far-right Religious Zionist party that is expected to be the second-largest in the incoming Israeli government, did not respond to requests for comment on the current Gaza project.

Ghassan Khatib, former Palestinian minister of planning, said the Palestinians don’t yet know whether Israel,?which is preparing for the most right-wing government in its history,?will put up opposition.

“Israel has changed,” he said. “It is gradually less interested in making the Palestinian Authority viable, because it’s no longer convinced of the idea of the two states,” in which an independent Palestine would exist alongside Israel.

But even if the whole enterprise has an Israeli sign-off, the Palestinian Authority will still face its bitter rival, Hamas, which has demanded a share of the projected windfall. “We will not allow gas to be monopolized and Gaza not to fully benefit from it,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told The Washington Post. In a ceremony in September, Hamas hung banners near the Gaza harbor saying “Our gas, our right.”

The still undisclosed deal grants a 27.5 percent stake to the PIF and another 27.5 percent to the Athens-based and Palestinian-owned Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC). The remaining 45 percent will go to the Egyptian consortium, EGAS. According to the deal, the gas will be developed in Palestinian waters, then transferred via a 40-mile undersea pipeline to Egyptian processing facilities, where it will merge with the Egyptian energy grid and then be sold, as an export, to Palestinians and others.

“It needs to be commercial, between the developing companies and the buyers, not linked to politics,” said a Palestinian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal is not yet finalized.

The prospects come as Europe scours the Earth for alternatives to Russian gas and oil, especially in the eastern Mediterranean.

Gaza’s offshore gas fields, known as Gaza Marine 1 and 2, are 20 nautical miles off the coast. The estimated trillion-cubic-feet reserve is a drop in the bucket when compared with Europe’s annual 20 trillion cubic feet of usage, and it is also vastly smaller than Israeli gas fields.

But Europe’s future energy strategy will be intentionally patchwork and diversified, and Milhem, the Palestinian Energy Authority chairman, said outside pressure has been a significant motivator. “The crisis in the Ukraine, coming at the same time as increased activities in the eastern Mediterranean, have helped move the gas deal forward,” he said.

Mkhaimar Abusada, an associate professor of political science at al-Azhar University-Gaza, said Palestinian officials have also taken note of Israel’s recent maritime boundary?agreement with Lebanon, a country with which it is technically still at war.

In his reelection campaign, Netanyahu called the U.S.-brokered deal, which will enable Israel and Lebanon to exploit potentially rich offshore gas deposits, a “historic surrender” to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group based in Lebanon.

But Abusada said the Palestinians were heartened to see that the deal, which initially spurred opposition from Hezbollah, ultimately went through. “The Palestinians feel there’s a regional and international interest in developing this Gaza gas field,” he said.

Gas would bring Palestinians closer to energy independence from Israel, its largest supplier. The West Bank imports 750 megawatts of its total 850-megawatt consumption. Gaza relies on 120 megawatts of Israeli electricity as well as Israeli fuel for its power plant, which produces around 45 megawatts.

In August, during the most recent flare-up with Israel, Gaza’s regular eight-hour blackouts extended to 12 hours, and hospitals operated on generators as medical staff tended to the wounded. Residents here fear that either Israel or the Palestinian Authority — or most likely both — will get in the way of completing the gas project.

“There are many resources in Gaza — antiquities, gas, manpower — but no one is using these resources properly,” said Mahmoud Sayad, a 44-year-old father of seven from al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.

“The Palestinian Authority does not care about Gaza; for them, the gas field is a source of money,” said Ramy Susi, a 35-year-old construction worker from the same camp, who said he expects the profits to be squandered by corrupt politicians. “How can this gas make a difference in my life?”

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