We didn’t really start funding the Israelis till after 1967 and that was due the The Cold War, not because of oil or powerful malevolent Zionists in the US.
Well, optimistically, I’d say that without the other Arab nations funding the hardline groups and making vague promises of support, the Palestinians would have seen the writing on the wall long ago and agreed to work towards a solution other than the destruction of Israel. Pessimistically, the Israelis could have just done whatever they wanted to them, up to and including simply expelling them.
As for US support, with no oil-rich Arab neighbors, there isn’t a need for huge amounts of military aid to Israel. In our alternative oil-free timeline, there still might be Arab-Israeli conflicts as proxy wars between the US and Soviet Union, but I don’t think the overall conflict (and thus need for US aid) would have persisted much past the 70’s.
Someone wrote a history of the world through the lens of oil a couple of years back and tied almost every major world event since the industrial revolution to oil politics. I didn’t read the book but the John Stewart interview with the author was fascinating.
Its probably on wikipedia somewhere.
Welp, if the predictions about oil production are correct, we won’t have too long to wait to find out.
I suppose they’ll have one last really big hoorah when peak oil production is reached and prices go way up. Then the alternatives will become attractive and the price of oil will probably drop through the floor.
Once the alternatives (and there are actually quite a few already) really come online, OPEC will have its legs cut out from underneath it. At that point, it’s every country for itself trying to unload what oil it still can.
A few countries have made preparations for that day, but other than some gambling and a few financial centers, not much has been done. Most countries will go back to being dirt poor, and I can easily see lots of internal fighting over grabbing the biggest piece of the rapidly shrinking pie. Egypt and Israel will probably gain relative power in the region.
The big question I have is: what happens to Iran? They’ve kind of bumbled along for decades and still manage to finance terrorist groups in a big way. Do they finally have to scale back on their adventures? Without any other viable allies in the region, do they finally throw in the towel and start acting like a real nation again? Do they double down and try to take advantage of the relative weakness of other countries in the region? Other than Egypt and Israel, they won’t have any significant rivals.