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CHAPTER FIVE: FUTURE HEADLINE

ISRAEL DISCOVERS MASSIVE RESERVES OF OIL, GAS

When I began writing the Last Jihad series, I based it in large part on prophecies in the book of Ezekiel that indicate two things that must occur before Israel’s last-days showdown with Russia and Iran. The first “prerequisite” is that there must be a period of calm and stability in Israel before the War of Gog and Magog. The second is that Israel must build up significant wealth.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the “peace prerequisite.” But first I want to take a look at the “prosperity prerequisite” from Ezekiel 38. In this passage, the ancient prophet is conveying a message from God to a future dictator of Russia:

After many days you [dictator of Russia] will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are living securely, all of them. . . . And you will say, “I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will go against those who are at rest, that live securely, all of them living without walls and having no bars or gates, to capture spoil and to seize plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places which are now inhabited, and against the people who are gathered from the nations, who have acquired cattle and goods, who live at the center of the world.” Sheba and Dedan [ancient names for modern-day Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states] and the merchants of Tarshish [historically southern Spain, though it could refer more generally to Europe or the Mediterranean states] with all its villages will say to you [the Russian dictator], “Have you come to capture spoil? Have you assembled your company to seize plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to capture great spoil?” (Ezekiel 38:8, 11-13, NASB)

It’s important to note that this passage comes after the rebirth of the modern State of Israel prophesied in chapter 36 yet before the Russian-Iranian attack. According to the passage, prior to the attack

Ezekiel 36:11 provides yet another clue: “I will increase not only the people [in the land of Israel], but also your animals. O mountains of Israel, I will bring people to live on you once again. I will make you even more prosperous than you were before. Then you will know that I am the LORD” (emphasis added). That would be quite a development, I thought when I first read this passage. After all, when Solomon was king of Israel, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Yet Ezekiel was saying that modern Israel would be wealthier still.

In The Coming Peace in the Middle East, Dr. LaHaye had considered a number of ways that Israel could become so peaceful and prosperous. Among them: “Suppose that a pool of oil, greater than anything in Arabia . . . were discovered by the Jews. . . . This would change the course of history. Before long, Israel would be able independently to solve its economic woes, finance the resettlement of the Palestinians, and supply housing for Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, East Bank, or anywhere else they might choose to live. Even if something besides oil were discovered, it would have the same far-reaching effect if it were able to produce high revenues.”84

When I first read that, I nearly laughed. Oil in Israel? Wouldn’t that be nice? Israelis have long complained that if they are really the chosen people, why in the world didn’t God resettle them in Saudi Arabia? As the late prime minister Golda Meir once put it, “Moses dragged us for forty years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil!”85 But the more I thought about LaHaye’s theory, the more it seemed exactly like something God would do—unveil a dramatic plot twist near the end of the story.

Then in the fall of 2000, as I was working for Sharansky and Netanyahu, the New York Times published two headlines that captured my attention:

GAS DEPOSITS OFF ISRAEL AND GAZA OPENING VISIONS OF JOINT VENTURES

The New York Times, September 15, 2000

ARAFAT HAILS BIG GAS FIND OFF THE COAST OF GAZA STRIP

The New York Times, September 28, 2000

Wrote reporter William Orme: “Drilling deep below the seas off Israel and the Gaza Strip, foreign energy companies are discovering gas reserves that could lift the Palestinian economy and give Israel its first taste of energy independence. Industry experts, including those on this giant platform, say the Palestinians and Israelis will both profit if they can work together in a high-stakes partnership.”86

What’s more, experts had calculated that Israel had “some three to five trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves,” and according to Yehezkel Druckman, Israel’s petroleum commissioner, “there may be more.” At current prices, Orme reported, “the value of the strike was estimated [at] $2 billion to $6 billion, depending on pressure, quantity, and other variables.”87

Israel? Proven reserves? Billions? When I read those words, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. True, the stories spoke only of natural gas, not a massive oil strike. But what if Commissioner Druckman was right? What if this was only the beginning? What if there was more where that came from?

By the time I sat down to write Jihad, I had decided to add a fictional oil strike—discovered by a fictional American investment company working with a fictional Israeli company called Medexco, run by a fictional Russian Jewish petroleum engineer named Dmitri Galishnikov. I did so not because I believed that the Bible specifically predicted it, but because it suddenly seemed plausible, and I wanted this thriller to seem as realistic as humanly possible.

Little did I know.

BLACK GOLD

Just days before Jihad was released in November 2002, a curious headline flashed across the newswires: “Israeli Geologist Drills for Oil Based on Biblical Guidance.” The article told the story of Tovia Luskin, an Orthodox Jew born and raised in Russia who became so convinced by studying the Bible that there was black gold buried under the sands of the Jewish state that he moved to Israel, conducted extensive research, launched a limited partnership called Givot Olam, and came to the conclusion that “there are 65 million barrels of oil” in central Israel alone.88

There was just one problem. Tovia Luskin was wrong. A year later, just before The Last Days was published, the news broke that Luskin and his colleagues had discovered oil reservoirs at their Meged-4 drilling site in central Israel holding not 65 million barrels but 100 million barrels.89 A few months later came even more stunning news: new testing had revealed that the Givot Olam site contained not 100 million barrels but upward of a billion barrels, leading the Associated Press to report, “An Israeli oil company has made the largest oil find in the history of the country” and driving Givot Olam shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange up 30 percent.90

People e-mailed me from all over the country to see if I had seen the stories and to ask me yet again if my novels were coming true. But the gusher of headlines about oil in Israel had only just begun to flow.

NATURAL GAS, OIL FOUND IN DEAD SEA

Jerusalem Post, April 1, 2004

ISRAEL STRIKES BLACK GOLD

Arutz Sheva, May 4, 2004

OIL BARON SEEKS GUSHER FROM GOD IN ISRAEL

Reuters, April 4, 2005

IN ISRAEL, OIL QUEST IS BASED ON FAITH

Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2005

HIS MISSION: SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND OIL

USA Today, May 19, 2005

A VISION OF OIL IN THE HOLY LAND

Newsweek, June 13, 2005

MOSES’ OILY BLESSING: WILL ISRAEL FIND OIL?

The Economist, June 18, 2005

SEARCHING FOR OIL IN ISRAEL

CBS News, September 20, 2005

IS ISRAEL SITTING ON AN ENORMOUS OIL RESERVE?

WorldNetDaily, September 21, 2005

The story in the respected London-based Economist magazine particularly caught my eye. It turned out that Tovia Luskin was not the only businessman who believed the Bible talked specifically about the existence of oil in Israel: “In the 1980s, John Brown, a Catholic Texan cutting-tools executive, and Tovia Luskin, a Russian Jewish geophysicist and career oilman, both had religious epiphanies. Mr. Brown became a born-again Christian, while Mr. Luskin joined the Orthodox Jewish Lubavitch movement. Soon after, each found inspiration in chapter 33 of the book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, nearing death after guiding the tribes of Israel to the border of the Promised Land, leaves each tribe with a blessing.”91

The article went on to describe the blessing Moses gave to Ephraim and Manasseh, two tribes descended from Joseph: “Their land, says Moses, will yield the ‘precious fruits’ of ‘the deep lying beneath,’ of the ‘ancient mountains’ and of the ‘everlasting hills.’”

Luskin believed Moses was giving “a classic description of an oil trap.” The name of his company, Givot Olam, means “everlasting hills.” According to the article, John Brown came to a similar conclusion, founding his own company, Zion Oil, in the hope of discovering the treasures Moses had described.

Intrigued, I tracked down Luskin at his office in Jerusalem and chatted with him by phone about all the headlines he was generating.

Luskin, a graduate of Moscow State University with a degree in geology and a love for oil exploration, explained that he left Russia in 1976 and moved to Canada, where he worked for Shell Oil and other petroleum companies. Later he worked for oil companies in Indonesia and Australia before immigrating to Israel with his family in 1990.

“Initially,” he told me, “I came to the idea of looking for oil in Israel from reading the Chumash, the first five books of Moses. And then I came to Israel and started studying the geology here. . . . When I got the Israeli geological data it was striking in that it was very similar to the Syrian Basin, which seemed to me to extend down to Israel, which turned out to be exactly right. . . . Since 1993, we’ve drilled three wells and all three wells encountered oil. It’s a big oil field.”

“So, how close are you to commercial production?” I asked him.

“We are about to start a new well,” he said. “Hopefully this well will take us to production stage. Eventually, we will probably need to drill around forty wells.”92

OIL AT ARMAGEDDON?

In August 2005, while on the Ezekiel Option book tour, I had lunch in Dallas with Gene Soltero, the president and CEO of Zion Oil, the company founded by John Brown. I had never heard of the MIT-trained economist and petroleum engineer before, but I took a liking to him immediately. Balding, with short tufts of gray hair over each ear and small, wire-rimmed glasses, Soltero was a soft-spoken man in his sixties who looked more like a professor of management at some college in the American Midwest than a treasure hunter in the Mideast. But he had quite a story to tell, and a lot of questions for me.

On a recent visit to Israel, an investor in his company had picked up a paperback copy of The Last Jihad in Ben Gurion International Airport. He’d read it on the plane home and gotten so excited about it that he had e-mailed Soltero and everyone else in the company, urging that they read it too. Why? Because to Soltero and his colleagues, the discovery of oil in the Holy Land described in the novel wasn’t fiction. It was their lives.

As Soltero explained it, all the top executives in the company quickly read Jihad and The Last Days. The more Soltero and his colleagues read, the more intrigued they got. How had I come up with such an oil-and-gas story line? Did I know about all the biblical prophecies that said Israel would, in fact, discover oil in the last days? More to the point, did I know just how close their company and others were to seeing these prophecies come to pass?

I had questions of my own.

What had gotten him involved in such a risky and speculative hunt for oil in the Holy Land? What exactly were these prophecies upon which he and Brown and Luskin were basing their companies? And what did he believe the future held?

As we shared our stories, Soltero, who had worked in the oil-and-gas business for more than four decades, explained that he joined Zion Oil not long after Brown had founded the company in 2000 because Brown had such a compelling way of looking at Israel. Soltero didn’t use this terminology, but what he meant was that Brown looked at Israel through the third lens.

In 1981 Brown had visited a church in Clawson, Michigan. There he heard a sermon by the Reverend James Spillman, who wrote a short book called The Great Treasure Hunt.

In his book Spillman argued:

Biblical prophecy describes an event in which the armies of the world, led by Gog and Magog, would invade Israel “to take a spoil.” What could Israel possibly possess in the last days that would make it such a prize for conquest that the world’s armies would meet there to fight for the spoils? . . . Countries don’t invade their neighbors for pomegranates and olive oil, but they do go to war over another kind of oil. Petroleum. . . . The problem, however, is that Israel is an oil poor country. Fifty years of oil exploration and production in Israel have produced about 20 million barrels total. That’s a little over two days of the oil production coming out of Saudi Arabia. Armies will go to war over oil, but not two days’ worth. But what if a significant amount of oil were discovered in Israel?93

That night Spillman made a similar case to Brown and the rest of the assembled congregation, then walked them through a series of Old Testament passages describing God’s ancient promise to unlock enormous wealth and treasures for the children of Israel in the last days.

As Soltero explained it, John Brown was electrified. He went home and carefully studied these Scriptures and many others Spillman had laid out, asking God to help him understand them and know how, if at all, he could be involved in finding such a treasure. For the next two decades, Brown traveled back and forth to Israel, learning everything about the oil-and-gas business he possibly could, meeting everyone in the industry that he could, studying maps, researching locations, cross-checking with the Scriptures, and praying for wisdom all the while. By April of 2000, he finally felt he knew enough to begin a company. He launched Zion Oil with the help of an Israeli lawyer named Philip Mandelker, using the following mission statement:

Zion Oil & Gas was ordained by G_d94 for the express purpose of discovering oil and gas in the land of Israel and to bless the Jewish people and the nation of Israel and the body of Christ (Isaiah 23:18). I believe that G_d has promised in the Bible to bless Israel with one of the world’s largest oil and gas fields and this will be discovered in the last days before the Messiah returns.95

The company was soon awarded a license by the government of Israel to explore for oil and gas on 28,800 acres in northern Israel, and it was during this time that Gene Soltero joined the company.

“So how is it going?” I asked.

“We were recently awarded an expanded permit to explore some 219,000 acres in northern Israel,” Soltero told me. “We’ve been drilling for the past several months and the initial results are very exciting. For legal reasons, I can’t say more right now. But let’s just say it’s possible that your novels have vastly understated how much oil is out there.”

As he described where they were drilling, I realized it was only a few miles from the Jezreel Valley and the ancient city of Megiddo. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me you think you’ve found oil under Armageddon?”

Soltero smiled. “I wish I could say more, but right now I can’t,” he demurred.

In talking to other oil experts in Israel and the U.S. over the next few months, I was able to confirm that there is, in fact, both oil and natural gas under the region known in the Bible as Armageddon, where the Scriptures say the final cataclysmic conflict of history will occur. Just how much is there remains unclear as I write this. There is more testing to do, and many technical challenges abound before any of it will be commercially viable to pump and refine, challenges that Tovia Luskin and his team are encountering as well, despite having already found a billion barrels of oil not far away.

What intrigues me is that Zion Oil and Givot Olam are not alone in their efforts to examine Israel’s economy and geology through the third lens of Scripture. Philip Mandelker, Zion Oil’s lawyer, told me that their company is one of six whose founders were originally inspired to start drilling because of Old Testament passages.96 And several of them are beginning to see promising results.

Will one of these companies hit the big one? Will they all? Will someone else? The truth is, we cannot know exactly who will tap into the oil reserves believed to be waiting beneath Israel’s soil or exactly when it will happen, because the Bible does not tell us. But the Bible does make it clear that Israel will be wealthy before the Russian-Iranian coalition attacks. That much we can take to the bank. And I believe the Bible’s hints about the existence of oil in Israel present a viable means for the fulfillment of that prophecy. Thus, expect to read future headlines like this one: “Israel Discovers Massive Reserves of Oil, Gas.”

ISRAEL, HOME OF MILLIONAIRES

That said, let’s be clear: Israel has already become enormously wealthy over the last six decades—far wealthier than her immediate neighbors. Finding oil would simply be icing on an already impressive cake.

Despite a population of only 7 million people, for example, Israel is now home to more than 6,600 millionaires. Of these, seventy possess liquid assets of $30 million or more. Of the 500 wealthiest people in the world, six are now Israeli, and all told, Israel’s rich had assets in 2004 of more than $24 billion, up from $20 billion in 2003, according to a report published by Merrill Lynch.97

Today Israel has become an economic powerhouse, one of the world’s high-tech leaders, and a magnet for foreign investment. “Israel is like part of Silicon Valley,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said on his first trip to the country in October 2005. “The quality of the people here is fantastic. . . . It’s no exaggeration to say that the kind of innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business. So many great companies have been started here.”

In May 2006, Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, announced that he was investing $4 billion in a Galilee-based metalworking company. Given that this was the largest investment Buffet had ever made outside the United States, it was widely seen as an enormous vote of confidence in the present vitality and the future potential of the Israeli economy.98

No wonder, then, that more Israeli-based companies and companies started by Israelis are listed on NASDAQ than from any other country. Or that Intel, whose next-generation chip was designed in Israel, broke ground in February 2006 on a new $3.5 billion microchip factory and research-and-development facility in the town of Kiryat Gat and reported that it now has more employees in Israel than in Silicon Valley. Or that Google announced in 2005 that it was opening new research-and-development facilities in Israel. Or that over the past decade, more than $8.7 billion has poured into Israeli venture-capital funds. Or that an Israeli professor, Robert Aumann of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Economics.99

And it is not just high-tech successes that Israelis are experiencing today. Israel now leads the world in exports of industrial oils, fertilizers, and polished diamonds. In 2005 the tiny Jewish state placed eighth worldwide in per capita exports. Tourism, too, is surging, climbing 26 percent in 2005 and up 78 percent in the number of first-time visitors. The list of economic achievements could go on and on.100

That is not to say Israel does not still struggle with poverty, unemployment, and underemployment. It certainly does, and these are challenges its leaders must constantly and compassionately address. But Israel has made extraordinary—some would say miraculous—economic gains since 1948 and has become dramatically wealthier than any of its immediate neighbors.

MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES GDP

COUNTRYGROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
Israel$123 billion
Egypt$81 billion
Syria$26 billion
Lebanon$21 billion
Jordan$12 billion

Source: CIA World Fact Book, 2005

What’s more, Israel is poised for even more explosive economic growth, quite apart from future oil and gas discoveries. Ben Gurion International Airport has been expanded and modernized. New highways and light railways are being built. Inflation, which raged at 100 percent or more a year in the early 1980s, was a mere 1.2 percent in 2004. Interest rates are historically low. The exchange rate has been stable. And after a serious recession in 2001–2002 due to the global economic downturn combined with the Al-Aksa Intifada (aka Arafat’s War), growth is surging again, hitting 4.4 percent in 2004 and 5 percent in 2005.

In June 2005, I attended a $1,000-a-plate dinner with Benjamin Netanyahu at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. The evening was part of a fund-raising event for Israel’s leading free-market-reform think tank, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, run by Daniel Doron, who has been a friend and mentor of mine on all things Israel since the early 1990s.

That night Netanyahu, who was then serving as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister, talked about the sweeping changes enacted during his tenure—deep tax cuts, privatization of state-owned industries, banking deregulation, and so forth—and the remarkable economic growth that had resulted. But he insisted there was much more to come.

“In ten years, Israel could be one of the ten richest countries in the world,” Netanyahu explained, noting that nine of the ten wealthiest countries in the world are small countries with fewer than 10 million people each and that many of them were not on the list at all a decade or two ago.

Ireland, for example—a country of only about 4 million citizens, roughly two-thirds of Israel’s population—was barely a blip on the global economic radar for most of the twentieth century, Netanyahu observed. By 2005, however, the Emerald Tiger had a roaring, low-tax economy and was ranked the eighth richest country in the world in GDP per capita.

“There is absolutely no reason why Israel can’t soon become one of the most successful countries in the world,” Netanyahu concluded.101

Looking back, I am grateful for the opportunity to attend that night. For whether he meant to or not, Netanyahu had just confirmed that Ezekiel’s promise of a dazzling economic future for Israel in the last days was rapidly coming to pass.