Thread by @ycmizrahi

While we sit patiently watching what kind of de/escalation unfolds between Israel and Hezbollah, here's a short thread on the Zionist movement's conceptions of the geographic boundaries of "Eretz Israel" and her northern borders in Lebanon 🧵

At the Paris Peace Conference in February 1919, the Zionist movement’s map included southern Lebanon, up to and including Sidon. In 1922 British and French excluded southern Lebanon and the East Bank from the parameters of the “Jewish national home,” as the mandates were created.

Yet the Zionist movement continued to lay claim to these regions in their visions of the Land of Israel in their textbooks and popular culture. The Jewish National Fund published a map entitled “This Shall Be Your Patrimony” that included parts of Syria and Lebanon in 1937.

Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s second President and a prominent Labor Zionist leader, argued in 1933 that the border of the Land of Israel continued up through the Hula Valley, despite the land’s previous division between the French and the British.

This question of borders came to the forefront of the Zionist agenda in the debate over partition in 1937, which Ben Gurion's MAPAI openly endorsed, almost leading to a schism in the party, with Yitzhak Tabenkin’s faction continuing to claim the entire Land of Israel.

The Zionist movement considered land acquisition in southern Lebanon, both for economic considerations and to buttress their claims to these territories, which remained alive in the conception of the Land of Israel for many leaders well into the 1940s.

My aim is not to legitimize the voices calling to settle/annex southern Lebanon, only to show this wasn't an extremist right-wing fantasy. Many Labor Zionists were maximalist with their aims for the Land of Israel when these territories and their boundaries were being decided.