Gulf of Aqaba

The term Melek was stamped onto the infrastructure of daily life to project this omnipresent authority.

There was a massive ancient trade route running from the Gulf of Aqaba up through the Transjordan all the way to Syria.

It was a vital economic artery and they called it the King's Highway.

We also see the phrase royal bounty in the text, which literally translates to with the hand of the king, denoting a level of wealth and generosity that only the sovereign could provide.

The ink flag, that image became one of the defining photographs of the War of Independence.

The Negev Brigade Commander at that time, Sarig, and Golani Brigade Commander, Nochem Golan, later transmitted a message to the Israeli government announcing that the brigades were presenting the Gulf of Eilat to the State of Israel as a gift.

So this Yohanan El Yishuv as one of the last survivors of the War of Independence, died this week at the age of 95, and I think that's something that should be noted.

Now, I want to go on to another topic.

Another same little narrow passage to get into the Red Sea.

Problem there, or the Gulf of Aqaba, actually, but same idea.

The problem there, though, is that now you have these Houthi rebels.

And we've heard that name a bunch, the Houthi rebels, the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And he builds what are basically kit ships, five of them, I think.

and transports them on camelback across the desert to the Gulf of Aqaba, builds these ships up, launches them into the Red Sea, and starts plundering and destroying coastal ports, ships.

His raiders are sent inland into what is today Saudi Arabia to threaten Mecca, the holiest site of Islam.

And eventually Saladin, you know, because Saladin is not expecting this.

That was another factor.

They wanted Israel involved in this kind of sharing of an economic development of major proportions that would take place at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Saudis wanted to have something where there would not be strict Sharia, so it had to be far from Mecca and Medina, that would be a Saudi response to Abu Dhabi and to Dubai.

They did not want to lose that kind of a commercial position to the Emirates, so they tried to build their own, and they would have benefited tremendously from Israeli participation in that.

Now, in order to understand this move from Nasser, we have to go back to 1956, when Israel illegally invaded Egypt and only withdrew from Egyptian territory after Egypt accepted the aforesaid UN emergency force to be stationed in Sharm el-Sheikh to physically guarantee free Israeli

passage through the Straits of Tehran and in and out of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Prior to Israel's 1956 invasion, as we've already been over, Nasser pointed to the overarching state of war between Israel and Egypt to justify refusing Israel its peacetime rights, including free passage through Egypt's territorial waters.

Since no formal peace treaty was signed after the 1948 war and only a ceasefire was put in place, Nasser argued that he was legally entitled to do this.

Article 16 of this Convention explicitly expanded the traditional definition of a strait to accommodate the Straits of Tehran.

Believe it or not, the Straits of Tehran, despite their name, weren't clearly legally considered straits at the time because they don't connect two open high seas, which was the legal requirement.

Instead, they connected the high seas to the Gulf of Aqaba and then Israeli territorial waters while running through sovereign Egyptian territorial waters.

It was because of this, Nasser argued that Egypt had the right to assert belligerent jurisdiction and refuse Israeli peacetime access through Egyptian territorial waters.

Many of the archaeologists talk in terms that there must have been a single location where the crops were domesticated.

And so we see the 10 probable centers of domestication running down from Turkey down to the Gulf of Aqaba, where we're finding the very earliest seeds and the dates for those bees.

So we have a package of the bees, the beans, the vetches, the fig, the wheats, the barleys.

all in that area.