EARLY ZIONISM AND LEBANON
Zionism’s interest in Lebanon is not recent nor is it incidental. From the outset, Zionist planners included parts of southern Lebanon within their vision of “Israel”. Early proposals by the World Zionist Organisation’s (WZO) argued that the Jewish national home should extend to “the northern and southern banks of the Litani River,” and it’s 1919 map staking a claim to historic Palestine included this territory.
The WZO, originally founded as the Zionist Organisation (ZO) in 1897, has been the primary international organising body for the Zionist movement since its establishment. Its interest in – and claims to – the south of Lebanon, up to the Litani River, are therefore highly significant, reflecting not a fringe opinion, but a core historical ambition. From its earliest stages, Zionist planning was closely tied to the control of natural resources, specifically water. As early as 1905, proposals were put forward to divert the Litani river southward, driven by concerns that the Jordan River basin would be insufficient to meet the water needs of expanding Zionist colonial settlement. In 1919, Chaim Weizmann, then head of the WZO and later Israel’s first president, argued at the Paris Peace Conference that the Litani was essential to a future Jewish state and that Lebanon could do without it. This early history is significant. It situates Israel’s interest in Lebanon not as a matter of recent security concerns, but within a longer trajectory of Zionist settler expansion where territorial ambition and resource extraction are deeply intertwined.
The Litani River, stretching 170 kilometres from the Beqaa Valley to the Mediterranean Sea north of Tyre, has long been central to these ambitions.
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