International shipping lanes have landed back on the front pages amid President-elect Trump’s threats to seize the Panama Canal, and Egypt’s estimate this week that the Red Sea crisis has cost the Suez Canal $7 billion in lost revenue.
Behind the headlines, a lesser-known but no less important Israeli project known as the Ben Gurion Canal is in the works, and tied to both the Gaza crisis and the global strategic and economic competition between the US and China.
Conceived in 1963 at the height of the Cold War amid raging tensions between US-aligned Israel and Soviet-backed Egypt, the project envisions a 260-300 km long canal running through the Negev Desert, linking the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.
An array of maps of the canal’s proposed route are available, including versions running adjacent to or through northern Gaza.
The proposed Israeli waterway has seen some eccentric construction pitches – including a 1960s Lawrence Livermore Labs ‘nuclear excavation’ plan to detonate 520 two-megaton nukes (over 1 gigaton total) under the Project Plowshare program, declassified in the 1990s.
The same program also proposed using the same technique to widen the Panama Canal and cut a new commercial waterway straight through Nicaragua.
The nuclear excavation had an estimated price tag of $5 billion in today’s money – pocket change compared to the estimated $55-$100 billion cost using conventional construction. But there was one ‘small’ problem: permanent nuclear irradiation of the canal route.
Conventional Construction would also need an estimated 300,000 engineers and technicians cutting and blasting through desert, mountains and the Dead Sea Basin. If approved, the canal would immediately become one of the most complex and largest modern construction projects of the modern era.
Besides cost, security headaches also plague the idea – with Yemen's Houthis proving the skilled use of a handful of drones and missiles can wreak havoc on shipping in the Red Sea – into which the new canal would flow.
But the potential long-term upside (for Israel and allies) speaks for itself, giving Tel Aviv the chance to grab a share the 12% of shipping passing through the Suez, allowing Washington to strike a blow against China’s Belt and Road, which relies heavily on the Suez, and providing Israel-aligned countries preferential transit rates for both commercial and military vessels.