Australia is once again at an energy crossroads — one that seriously implicates us in the occupation of Gaza by Israel and the US. As revealed by Kellie Tranter at Declassified Australia, Australia’s biggest export to Israel is fossil fuel. As she reported earlier this year, Australia shipped $30 million’s worth of coal between January and December 2024, taking the long (and carbon intensive) route in avoiding Houthi blockades on Israel’s shipping routes to deliver coking coal and briquettes to fuel the war machine of occupying forces.

Energy is at the heart of the military machines of both the US and Israel, who control the Tamar and Leviathan gasfields in the Mediterranean Sea. According to Mondoweiss, “‘Energy diplomacy’ is used to create co-dependencies and exert influence over strategically important … countries; a dynamic which Israel also seeks to exploit with the fossil fuel wealth looted from occupied Palestine.” Through deals with Jordan for $10-billion gas contracts and a Memorandum of Understanding with Egypt, fossil fuel companies are propping up the razing of Gaza.

A similar covert energy diplomacy is occurring in Australia, driven by the rise of AI centres and surveillance technology. At the beginning of 2025, the US-owned company Tamboran Energy proposed to the Trump administration to build a data centre based in Central Australia, powered by shale gas sourced from fracking in the Northern Territory. The centre would support the development of artificial intelligence capabilities in connection with the Pine Gap military base in Mparntwe/Alice Springs.  

Tamboran’s CEO, Joel Riddle pitched the $8 billion project as Donald Trump unveiled a $500 billion investment in OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle in a venture known as Stargate. Executive actions and emergency declarations were announced to facilitate the construction of such facilities and provide them with easier access to cheap energy. At a time of increasing militarisation around the globe, it’s an unsettling prospect that could see Australia’s complicity in warfare deepen through the use and development of AI-assisted surveillance technology.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) operates at Pine Gap on Arrernte land. The agency currently has eight intelligence-sharing agreements with the directorate known as Israeli Signals Intelligence National Unit (ISNU). Israel was recorded as using Australian intelligence sites for missile geolocation during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and even earlier, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002: “During the [1991] Gulf War, Israeli reports praised Australia for relaying Scud missile launch warnings from the Nurrungar joint US-Australian facility in South Australia, a task now assigned to Pine Gap.”

Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2017 confirmed that Pine Gap surveillance data is used to inform the geolocation and targeting of cruise missiles, special forces operations and armed drones. Since then, NSA employees have confirmed that today operations at Pine Gap see around 400 American personnel tasked directly with analysis of surveillance data. According to former NSA employee David Rosenberg, who worked for eighteen years at the military base, this includes detailed analysis and reporting on signals and electronic intelligence. A leaked document from the UK’s surveillance agency, GCHQ, involves a Targeting Exchange Agreement between the GCHQ, the NSA and the ISNU, where a specific intelligence topic was “Palestinians”.

The data operations at Pine Gap are highly secretive. Photographs that do exist present a surreal image. Hovering 33,000 kilometres above the earth are the US military satellites Mission 7600 and Mission 8300. Both are controlled and commanded by operators at Pine Gap and another base in the UK. The satellites collect and process data including phone, radio, microwave signals before transmitting the results to the Pentagon through optical cables. “Pine Gap is crucial in keeping lethal drones on target,” Peter Cronau reported for ABC Background Briefing in 2017, noting that the rate of civilian deaths from drones tripled in this first year that Trump first became president of the US.

Now that we are well into Trump’s second term, we see civilian deaths in Palestine skyrocket as the crosshairs of fossil fuel interests and military powers intersect over Central Australia. Northern Territory politicians are falling over themselves to follow in Trump’s lead, parroting his soundbites and welcoming fossil fuel moguls onto Indigenous lands. “Pine Gap is crucial and there is the Tindal Air Force Base, where there are now nine B52s on the tarmac,” says Joel Riddle, CEO of Tamboran Energy. “This is a highly strategic part of the world for US interest.”

Tamboran has been fracking for gas in the Beetaloo Basin for about a year. The NT government signed a nine-year deal to buy gas from Tamboran in April 2024. Around this time, the company donated $28,000 to the NT Labor party in advance of the election in August. In yet another depressing example of the revolving door between ex-politicians and the fossil-fuel lobby, following the retirement of Nicole Manison, who was then deputy Chief Minister of the Territory, Tamboran would end up recruiting her as their vice-president of government relations and public affairs.

Enter the NT Country Liberal Party (the CLP). Upon forming government, the CLP introduced the Territory Coordinator Bill, a piece of legislation allowing the CLP to appoint a bureaucrat to fast-track approvals for projects deemed to be significant. The Coordinator has the power to override regulatory processes and laws including the Environment Protection Act, Energy Pipelines Act, alongside more than thirty other acts of parliament. The Territory Coordinator Act also allows the NT Chief Minister to exclude a host of other laws that would ordinarily apply to major developments by issuing exemption notices, and both the appointed Coordinator and the NT Chief Minister are able to issue “step-in” notices to take over assessment of approvals from the relevant regulatory bodies.

Months before the Bill was even put in front of parliament, in November 2024 the CLP government appointed Stuart Knowles as the interim coordinator for the Territory. Knowles is the former NT general manager of Inpex, Japan’s largest petrochemicals company, which drills for gas about 800 square kilometres offshore in the Timor Sea and operates a processing facility in Darwin Harbour. Inpex came under fire in June 2024 for breaching its environmental impact statement by emitting in excess of eight times the permitted amount of volatile organic compounds, including sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide and benzene (a known carcinogen) at its LNG plant.

Given the appointment of such an industry figure as Knowles to the interim position, it was somewhat unsurprising that during the Bill’s debate in parliament, Deputy Chief Minister Gerard Maley cited the gas industry and defence sector as the primary areas of benefit. A little more surprising was the fact that, less than a day after the Bill was passed into law, Maley parroted the Trump slogan “drill, baby, drill” during question time.

The influence of Trump’s regime on Australia’s energy politics extends to the upper echelons of the US administration, including Chris Wright, the new American energy secretary. Famous for downing a cocktail of chemicals used in fracking (including bleach) in a 2019 video, Wright is the former CEO and founder of Liberty Energy, a gas company which has invested over $15 million in Tamboran. Wright has also said he would “love to see Australia get in the game of supplying uranium.” It’s also worth mentioning here that Wright is a board member of Oklo, a nuclear reactor company which has backing from the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman.

From corrupt politicians to tech billionaires, the fight against fracking once again sees the communities on the front lines of the climate crisis come up against an intricate network of big business interests. It is more crucial than ever to fight back against the investors that would see more land turned into sacrifice zones for the war machine. To quote Celeste Liddle as she writes in her Archer essay From Pine Gap to Gaza: Surveillance from Stolen Land, “There has been enough killing on Arrernte lands. Now is the time to stop the killing being enabled from Arrernte lands.”

Our government insists that Australia is not an instrumental player in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but the facts speak for themselves: Pine Gap is said to be the most powerful military intelligence facility outside of the United States, and Australian coal continues to power the weapons that kill. Up until 2024, Israel’s largest coal supplier had been Colombia, but that country declared an embargo on its coal exports to Israel in June of last year. As Rula Jamal wrote for Jacobin, “this decision is not only a victory in symbolic terms but shows the enormous impact that a wider energy embargo could have in ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the power of the transnational organizing that brought the decision about.”

If Australia refused to supply coal to Israel, it might actually put a dent in the war machine. As Jamal adds, Colombia’s embargo will force Israel to turn to other suppliers — not just Australia but also Kazakhstan, Russia, and South Africa — and be forced to pay higher premiums. In other words: not only is Australia supplying fossil fuels to Israel’s genocide, but stands to receive a higher profit margin for doing so.

Yet our leaders are feeling increased pressure to cut economic ties with Israel. Cutting the cord to Australia’s fossil fuel industry would be a good start. Across the globe, consumer blocks are boycotting Chevron for its construction and supply of fuel to the occupying forces in Israel, while communities in Mparntwe/Alice Springs are putting their bodies on the line in protest Pine Gap. These efforts are propelled by the sense that time is running out: as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gas, the American military, throws its firepower behind Israel’s war machine, they are sealing the fate of many future generations to come, alongside those already lost to its brutal regime.

This piece is sponsored by CoPower, Australia’s first non-profit energy co-operative. To find out more about CoPower’s mission, services, and impact funding, jump online at https://www.cooperativepower.org.au/ or call 03 9068 6036 today.