YEHUDIS LITVAK: A History of Sourthern Lebanon *

 A History of Southern Lebanon

How Western powers’ division of the Middle East after World War I ultimately failed the local population.

The area between the Litani River in southern Lebanon and Israel’s northern border had originally been included in the territory designated for the Jewish state in the Balfour Declaration. Due to French influence, it became part of the newly formed state of Lebanon, where it remains a hotbed of terrorism.

Southern Lebanon before World War I

Before World War I, what is now Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was divided into administrative districts, or vilayets, each governed by its own governor. Southern Lebanon, as well as what is now northern Israel all the way to “to about half-way between Nablus and Jerusalem1”, were part of the Beirut Vilayet.

The population of the Beirut Vilayet was varied, consisting of large minorities of Shi’i Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Maronite Christians, as well as small minorities of Druze, Greek Orthodox, and Greek Catholics.

Map of the Ottoman Empire in 1900. Julieta39, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Maronite community of Lebanon

To understand the history of Lebanon, it is important to know the history of the Maronite community. The Lebanese Maronite Christians are a unique group. They are followers of a fifth century Syrian hermit Maron, founder of a certain spiritual practice, which a contemporary historian Theodoret called “the philosophy of an open-air life2.”

Maron’s disciples built up the community, spreading throughout modern-day Syria and Lebanon. They persevered after the Muslim conquest, even though they faced persecution from both the Muslim conquerors and from non-Maronite Christians. Due to the oppression, the Maronite community moved away from more populated and cultivated areas into the rocky arid regions of Mount Lebanon3.

According to the Maronite Foundation’s history page4:

The newcomers faced many challenges throughout their settlement in Mount-Lebanon, however, their biggest and most daring one was not their subsistence throughout all empires; it was rather their survival in a rough wild nature. If nature could speak, it would recount what went on between this community and the land. At first, it was a relation of enmity that turned later on into a friendship, and then into a love story and a unique way of life, tying the fate of the Maronites to their new land.

During the Crusades, the Maronites took the side of the Franks. In turn, they received religious freedom and renewed their relationship with the Church.

After the Muslims defeated the crusaders in the late 13th century, they took revenge on the Maronites, destroying their villages. Many of them fled. The remaining Maronites continued to endure persecution throughout Muslim rule.

Under the Ottoman rule, the Maronites became the link between the west and the east, translating books between Arabic and Latin and establishing a printing press. Highly educated, they embraced the values of the French Revolution: freedom, justice, and equality. They also established business ties with France, importing silk and improving maritime transportation5.

In the beginning of the 20th century, many Maronites fell victim to Muslim massacres perpetrated against Christians. Though some fled, a sizable community of Maronite Christians remained in the Mount Lebanon area at the end of World War I.

World War I.

 A French post card showing four Christian men from Mount Lebanon with their full set of weapons. Late 1800s. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Balfour Declaration and the land intended for the Jewish State

In 1917, in the midst of World War I, the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration, expressing British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people6.”

In his book Phantom Nation, American-Israeli journalist Shai ben-Tekoa compares several contemporary maps produced in Europe to determine the boundaries of the Jewish state intended by the British politicians when they issued the Balfour Declaration. He writes7:

The Britannica map and all others in circulation at the time of the Balfour Declaration were based on the Biblical descriptions of the Land… maps of Palestine from France (1907), Spain (1907) and Sweden (1914) in use during the First World War… are pretty much the same, all of them based, and not surprisingly, on the Bible, the borders of the Promised Land as described in several word-maps found in the Five Books of Moses /Pentateuch.

Using these and other sources, ben-Tekoa demonstrates that the territory intended for the Jewish state by the British extended north through Sidon, which today is located in Lebanon, 25 miles south of Beirut8.

Early Jewish Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, also implicitly assumed that the Jewish state would extend at least as far north as the Litani river9.

Thus, if it would have been up to Britain, the area known today as southern Lebanon would have been part of Israel. But other countries, notably France, had their own interests that frustrated these plans.

Post-World War I land negotiation

In 1918, at the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was defeated. The winning powers – Britain, France, and the United States – proceeded to divide up the land that had previously been under the Ottoman rule.

Having expressed support for a Jewish state the year before, Britain claimed all of Palestine, which included what is now southern Lebanon.

However, the French wanted the support of their centuries-old allies, the Maronite Christians, who had been suffering from Muslim persecution. They wanted to diminish Muslim power.

France insisted that they wanted control over not only Beirut but also Damascus. A memo from the French Foreign Ministry stated10, “Damascus is a Muslim center which is very hostile to France… It is there where all the plots against our authority in the Muslim countries are hatched, and it is there where agitators come and preach rebellion… Damascus must be placed under our control.”

The Weizmann-Faisal agreement

The Arab leader at the time was Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein bin Ali Al-Hashimi. Born in Saudi Arabia, he was the son of the emir and grand sharif of Mecca and a direct descendant of Mohammed. Prince Faisal had led the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire and befriended Colonel T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Prince Faisal expected that for the assistance he’d provided to the British during World War I, he would be awarded the title King of the Arabs with the full support of the western world. In November 1918, together with Colonel Lawrence, he attended the Peace Conference in Marseille. However, the French, explains ben-Tekoa, “gave him the cold shoulder, saw him as a puppet of the British and told him he had no standing with them11.”

Prince Faisal then traveled to Britain, where he received more support but was told that he might have to accept French terms.

While in London, Prince Faisal met, for the second time, with Chaim Weizmann, a leader of the Zionist movement who later became the first president of the State of Israel. They had previously met at Aqaba, today’s Jordan, when it had still been part of the Ottoman Empire. Both Prince Faisal and Colonel Lawrence, who served as their interpreter, had previously expressed support for the Zionist movement.

Prince Faisal did not see the increased immigration of Jews to what was then called Palestine as a threat. Educated and sophisticated, he was aware of the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel.

In January 1919 in London, Weizmann and Prince Faisal discussed the boundaries of the planned Jewish national home. According to Colonel Lawrence, Israel “…included Jabl Amal (southern Lebanon south of the Litani River) and the first chain of hills east of the Jordan River, from the Golan southwards through the hills of Gilead, Moab and Edom, with the whole of the Dead Sea incorporated in Palestine, though without the Negev12.”

Clearly, both Prince Faisal and Weizmann expected the area south of the Litani River to be in Jewish territory.

At their meeting, they signed what became known as the Faisal-Weizmann agreement13, where they committed to work together so that Arabs and Jews would live peacefully side by side.

Shortly after the meeting, both Prince Faisal and Weizmann attended the Paris Peace Conference. The conference lasted many months, as representatives of 32 countries negotiated their new borders.

Prince Faisal spoke at the conference, ready to compromise in order to receive an Arab state. When he presented his expected state’s boundaries, he did not include either Palestine, designated for the Jews, or Lebanon, designated for the Christians by the Europeans.

Weizmann also spoke. A document from the conference summarizes his speech14:

…on historical, economic grounds, it is proposed that the boundaries of Palestine should be as follows: In the North, the Litani River, to Banias close to and north of the sources of the River Jordan; then in a south easterly direction to a point just south of the Damascus territory and close and west of the Hedjaz Railway, In the south, a line from a point in the neighborhood of Aqaba to El Arish. In the west, the Mediterranean Sea.

Neither Weizmann nor Prince Faisal received what they’d claimed as rightfully theirs. Prince Faisal was later exiled from the Middle East by the French. Britain, in turn, crowned Faisal king of the newly formed Iraq, where he reigned from 1921 until his death in 1933.

 Prince Faisal's party at the Peace Conference, 1919. Left to right: Rustam Haidar, Nuri as-Said (Nuri al-Said), Prince Faisal (front), Captain Rosario Pisani (rear), T. E. Lawrence, Faisal's slave (name unknown), Captain Hassan Khadri.

The practical significance of the Litani River

Besides historical and religious reasons to include the Litani River in the Jewish state, there were also practical considerations. The main challenge to agricultural development in the Land of Israel has always been sparsity of water. The Zionist leaders intended to make use of the Litani River in land irrigation, as well as for building hydroelectric plants.

In August 1919, Britain’s Lord Balfour, who’d originally issued the Balfour Declaration, wrote a memorandum emphasizing that the Jewish state must have the water sources of the upper Jordan and the Litani River15.

The land south of the Litani River was also important for defense purposes. If this land were to fall into the hands of Israel’s enemies, the towns and villages in northern Israel would be vulnerable to enemy attacks.

France opposes the Jewish state’s proposed borders

While Britain expressed support for a Jewish state extending to the Litani River, France was concerned. They wanted as much influence in the region as possible, and it was in their interests to expand the territories allotted to Syria and Lebanon.

Back in 1916, three years before the Peace Conference, Britain and France had secretly signed the Sykes-Picot agreement, where they’d agreed that the land designated for the Jewish state would be given to Britain while the land north of it would be given to France. It was based on this understanding that France demanded more land for Syria and Lebanon, which in effect meant more influence for France itself.

In September 1919, after extended negotiations, Britain and France finally reached an agreement. Unfortunately for the Jewish state, the border between Israel and Lebanon was drawn far to the south of the border originally proposed by Zionist leaders and supported by Britain. In fact, it closely corresponded to the arrangement of the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Neither Zionists nor Arabs had any say in this new border and were powerless to change it.

Consequences of the resulting Israel-Lebanon border

The immediate unfortunate consequence of the imposed border was the Arab attack on the northern settlement of Tel Hai in March 1920, where eight Jews were killed.

The long-term consequence of losing the area south of the Litani River is precisely what we are experiencing today. For decades, the area has been used by terrorists to attack the State of Israel.

In the past, Israel has fought two wars against the terrorists embedded in southern Lebanon, in 1982 and in 2006. Though Israel had managed to clear the area of terrorists, after Israeli withdrawals, the terrorists eventually returned to southern Lebanon.

The British-French agreement failed to bring peace to the Lebanese citizens as well. Though the Maronite community was treated well under the French Mandate, they lost their majority status as Lebanon expanded, gaining more Muslim citizens. The tensions between the Christians and the Muslims continued to grow, culminating in civil war in the 1970s. The situation remains unstable to this day.

Lebanese American author and political commentator, Brigitte Gabriel, grew up as a Christian in Lebanon. In 1975, the Lebanese Muslims attacked her family and community, massacring thousands of people. For seven years, she and her family lived in a bomb shelter. They were eventually rescued by the Israeli army in 1982 and taken to Israel for medical treatment.

After her move to USA in 1989, Gabriel continued writing and speaking about the dangers of Islamic terror. In 2009, she was quoted in Jerusalem Post16:

Lebanon was torn and ruined by Muslim radicals. Even though the Christian Lebanese say things against Israel in public, inside their homes they cheer Israel on, hoping Israel will crush the Islamic fanatics. They would never dare express these views in public out of fear of death threats. They write me letters and thank me for speaking out, telling me that I am their voice.

Unfortunately, just like a century ago, the western world refuses to listen to the voices of the local population, pursuing their own interests instead.

Today, the Iranian-back terrorist organization Hezbollah occupies southern Lebanon, terrorizing not only Israel but also the local residents.

1. 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, as cited in ben-Tekoa, Sha'i (2018-06-13). Phantom Nation: Inventing the Palestinians as the Obstacle to Peace (Kindle Location 330). Gefen Publishing House. Kindle Edition.
2. A Brief History of the Maronites. Available at https://maronitefoundation.org/MaroniteFoundation/en/MaronitesHistory/66, accessed on September 22, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The full text of the Balfour Declaration is available at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/text-of-the-balfour-declaration.
7. Ben-Tekoa, Sha'i (2018-06-13). Phantom Nation: Inventing the Palestinians as the Obstacle to Peace. Gefen Publishing House. Kindle Edition.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Quoted in ibid.
13. The full text of the agreement is available at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-207006/.
14. Quoted in ben-Tekoa, Sha'i (2018-06-13). Phantom Nation: Inventing the Palestinians as the Obstacle to Peace (Kindle Locations 663-666). Gefen Publishing House. Kindle Edition.
15. Ibid.
16. Deena Yellin. An Inside Ally. Available from https://www.jpost.com/magazine/features/an-inside-ally, retrieved on September 23, 2024.

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* NOTE FROM ME:  Southern Lebanon, i.e. Tzidonians (Tyre), featured prominently in the days of King Ahav, and his wife Izevel who was born there . Her father Ishtabaal was a very influential international business traveler, and this is probably why King Ahav married his wicked daughter, hoping to increase his Tribal govt. wealth and value.