Lebanon's Litani River Has Long Been a Goal of Expansionist Israel

The “ceasefire” agreement between Israel and Lebanon states that Hezbollah is to end its armed presence in the south of Lebanon, moving its fighters and weapons to north of the Litani River. (Israeli media recently boasted, claiming that the Israeli military had reached the Litani for the first time since the year 2000.)

There’s much that could be said about the text of the agreement and its implementation, but one thing that people should understand is that acquisition of the area of Lebanon south of the Litani River is a long-standing imperial goal.

Livia Rokach noted in her 1985 book Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents: “On May 16 [1954], during a joint meeting of senior officials of the defense and foreign affairs ministries, Ben Gurion again raised the demand that Israel do something about Lebanon. The moment was particularly propitious, he maintained, due to renewed tensions between Syria and Iraq, and internal trouble in Syria. Dayan immediately expressed his enthusiastic support:

According to him [Dayan] the only thing that's necessary is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad.

In the prefix to Rokach’s book, Naseer Aruri wrote:

The 1982 "operation," as well as its predecessor, the "Litani Operation" of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine, which this transition of the Sharett diary illuminates. In fact, that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine "from the North Litani River up to Banias." In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the "vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources."

During the Paris conference, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion (who later became, respectively, Israel's first president and first prime minister) attempted to persuade Patriarch Hayik, who headed the Lebanese delegation, to abandon South Lebanon in return for a promise of technical and financial assistance to develop the area to the north, which they hoped, would become a Christian state.

The Zionist military forces that invaded Palestine in 1948 also occupied part of the district of Marjayun and Bint Jubayl, and reached the vicinity of the Litani River, but were forced to withdraw under international pressure. Then, in 1954, the leaders of the newly established state of Israel renewed Zionist claims on Lebanese water when President Eisenhower's envoy Eric Johnston proposed a formula of sharing the Litani waters among Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Israel, in fact, threatened to use force against Lebanon to prevent the utilization of the Litani waters to develop South Lebanon….

And in the 1982 "Operation Peace for Galilee," the entire length of the Litani River came under Israeli control.

Palestine Remembered states in “Expansionism (or The Greater Israel) -- The Zionist version of Lebensraum”: “From the beginning, Zionists advocated a ‘Jewish State’ not just in Palestine but also in Jordan, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights as well. In 1918, Ben-Gurion described the future ‘Jewish state's’ frontiers in detail as follows”:

"to the north, the Litani river [in southern Lebanon], to the northeast, the Wadi 'Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al-'Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan" (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 87)

Expulsion of the Palestinians is by Nur Masalha and is available online as a PDF.

The Litani River

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