A plan to pipe oil from Iraq to Israel, devised nearly 20 years ago with the help of current US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has re-emerged.
Israeli Infrastructure Minister Mr Joseph Paritzky wants to reopen the pipeline leading from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul to the Israeli port of Haifa after the end of the US-led war in Iraq, Haaretznewspaper reports today.
The newspaper said Mr Paritzky hoped the large Haifa refineries could be directly supplied with Iraqi oil, saving Israel the cost of importing expensive crude from Russia.
He said he was convinced the US administration would favour the idea.
After the British inter-war mandate over Palestine ended in 1948 with a war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Iraqi oil was diverted from Haifa's refineries to Syria.
Israel has never signed a peace accord with either Iraq or Syria but there have been several attempts to re-establish the pipeline, including efforts during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Syria agreed to an Iranian demand to cut Iraqi oil exports via the Mediterranean.
At the time, Tehran was preventing Iraqi oil tankers from leaving the Gulf, and then Israeli prime minister Mr Yitzhak Shamir proposed bringing the oil through Haifa.
Haaretzreported that Mr Hanan Bar-On, at the time the assistant director general at the foreign ministry, said that Israel was involved in the 1980s in discussions to build a pipeline bringing Iraqi oil to the Red Sea port of Aqaba in Jordan, next to the Israeli resort of Eilat. Another pipeline would then have shipped the oil from Eilat to Israel's Mediterranean coast.
Those discussions involved current US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was an advisor to president Ronald Reagan at the time.
AFP