This article appears in Protean Magazine Issue V: Contra Temps.
In 1975, Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was invited to the Oval Office for a meeting with President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The three statesmen would discuss the prospects of a Lasting Peace in the Middle East—ostensibly, America’s evergreen goal for the region. Rabin took the floor to clarify his country’s position:
As we see it, a return to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state means that Israel cannot survive… In terms of the readiness of Israel for a final peace and the needs for Israel’s security, the 1967 lines with respect to Egypt and Syria does not allow for security arrangements which are required for a small country of three million people against a composition of states who total 60 to 65 million. We are ready to try to achieve peace, but the gap on [these] issues is wide. We have not sensed an Arab readiness to come close to the essentials of peace as we see them from our point of view.
From their “point of view,” Israel has found itself, since 1948, in an inexplicable sea of hostility. From their point of view, it is a self-evident fact that it would be three million against 60 million. And it follows that, because Zionists find themselves so grossly outnumbered in the Arab jungle, and because the only language their enemies understand is force, Israel must resort to violent means for securing its unlikely advantage—with the aid of a superpower. The solution should be advancing borders, for security’s sake. Assuring Israel’s security on stolen land, as the only viable gateway to Peace.
After reiterating America’s commitment to Israel, Kissinger asked Rabin about this familiar dance:
Secretary Kissinger: In this concept of security and sovereignty, would you want a change in the borders and also a different deployment line?
Prime Minister Rabin: A deployment line [pointing to a map] would [be] defensible if combined with a political [l]ine which would be the final border. We don’t claim Sharm el-Shaykh [a part of Egypt Israel had occupied]; we just want to be there, until we see a commitment to peace which is solid.
We don’t claim it, we just want to be there. Israel will occupy the land—to protect it from its people—until Peace arrives. Rabin, considered by the West to be a dove, despite his policy of ordering Israeli forces to literally break Palestinian bones, would later be assassinated—by one of his own—for his efforts to make Peace from Israel’s point of view.
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From the start of the French and British Mandates over Lebanon and Palestine, respectively, until the late 1930s, the border between Palestine and Lebanon was marked only by ink on colonial maps. In 1938, the British tried to build a fence. By then, it was clear to many Palestinians that Zionists had colonial intentions. In response, Palestinians escalated their armed popular mobilizations, drawing the attention of the British. Meanwhile, Zionist militias were taking steps of their own. In October 1935, as Palestinian dock workers unloaded drums of cement at Jaffa Port, a drum broke open. Guns and ammunition poured out. In all, hundreds of rifles, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, were confiscated by the British authorities. The weapons were meant for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organization and a precursor to the IDF.
According to an article from The Palestine Post (now The Jerusalem Post), despite the “vigor and intensity of the investigations… into the very serious offense of smuggling arms…energetically supported by the [Mandate] authorities,” the Jewish merchant in Tel Aviv for whom the weapons were marked was not found. The event, coupled with the massive influx of European Jewish immigrants to Palestine around this time—and despite assurances from Palestine’s colonizer that “all possible measures are being taken to expose and bring to justice those responsible”—reinforced the rising suspicion among Palestinians that the Zionist movement was, with the help of the colonial powers, amassing the population and the military strength required to seize the land.
The British found their Palestinian subjects unreasonable. The Post article laments “too much toleration” on the part of the British authorities vis-à-vis the “agitation…being worked up deliberately by Arab leaders,” “pilloried without the slightest proof,” “a trifle too theatrical to ring true.” These Arabs were cynical, parading propaganda against their overseers without believing even their own words, “quite a number of them stirring up this hatred with their tongues in their cheeks.” The article’s author, his breath spent, insists that “the Arab majority in Palestine—need it be repeated?—[has] certainly nothing to fear in the way of attack from Jewish settlers,” whom he elsewhere calls “Palestine’s Jewish minority,” underlining the Arabs’ overreaction, their impenetrable illogic. The facts on the ground simply did not support their concerns. Perhaps, he added, Palestinians’ touchiness around this matter suggested they could benefit from the analyst’s couch: “the excessive protests, reaching to the ends of the world, may well hide a guilty conscience.”
In November 1935, the British martyred the anti-imperialist militant leader Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had years earlier traveled to Haifa from Jableh, Syria, where he was born. Al-Qassam was, as Rashid Khalidi puts it, “the first articulate public apostle of armed rural resistance” in Palestine. It is said that his funeral was the largest political gathering of the British Mandate period. The anger that flooded the streets in the wake of his assassination, together with pooling economic discontent across Palestinian class strata and premonitory instances of dispossession, precipitated what would come to be known as the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. As news of the uprising spread northward, Arabs from Lebanon and Syria—French Mandate countries—traveled a short distance in the opposite direction to help their brothers and sisters resist.
The British, through the lens of their incentive to divide and conquer, understood this unity of fronts to be a dangerous development. In December 1937, Sir Charles Tegart, who had previously served in the British colonial police force in India and then on the colonial advisory Council of India based in London, arrived in Palestine as the “advisor to the Palestine Government on the suppression of terrorism” to assess the gravity of the insurgency and determine what should be done about it. He toured police outposts, met with colonial officials, and made his recommendations, among which were the construction of dozens of fortified police stations, pillboxes, and other fortresses across Palestine, as well as a large fence dividing Palestine and French-Mandate Lebanon and Syria. The fence would come to be known, hyperbolically, as “Tegart’s Wall.” It was thought that it would prevent the mobilization of militants and the influx of weapons from the north. It would cost something like $450,000. Solel Boneh, a Zionist construction company, was commissioned to build part of it. Barbed wire was brought in from Mussolini’s Italy.
In August 1938, the nine-foot “reinforced barbed wire barrier”—large segments of which were constructed on private land, and all of which was imposed on the people of the land—was completed, compromising agricultural cultivation, trade, and people’s right to movement. According to Time Magazine (which claims in the same article that “a lot of Palestine’s tougher Arabs” come from Lebanon and Syria), almost as soon as the fence was announced to the League of Nations Permanent Mandate Commission in Geneva, “a band of Arab terrorists swooped down on a section of the fence… ripped it up and carted it across the frontier into Lebanon.” The fence would come down the following year, and the border would once again dissolve, until 1948.
Until 1948. In the days and months that followed the start of the Nakba, those who attempted to return to Palestine—to bury the bodies of loved ones they’d been forced to leave behind, to pray on the rugs still unfurled in their homes, to try to salvage what remained of their world—were designated “infiltrators” and shot at by an Israeli patrol tasked with defending the preliminary northern edge of their expansionist state. Eventually, the Israelis, like their colonial predecessors, erected a metal fence along the boundary line.
A fence does not make a border. The people on the ground refused a border. And they would find a way to cross the fence. Israel too, now as then, refuses borders, for different reasons: a border is a hard limit, both abstract and aesthetic, on the settler’s vision. Still, against a people that demands return, Israel has upgraded their fences to concrete walls, to minimize any friction that their will, which goes by the name of “Peace,” might encounter. The native has insisted that walls, like fences, should be surmounted; for this reason Israel has decided it must end the native.
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The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine of 1947 established a settler colony. The acting United Nations mediator between Israel and “the Arabs” explained in November 1948 that he was “not in a position to ‘press’ for any settlement.” Until recently, he had served as the mediator’s aide, and was appointed as mediator himself after his superior was assassinated by an Israeli paramilitary group, the Stern Gang, which would later be folded into the IDF. A New York Times headline from that time worried that “there is no prospect of any serious action by the United Nations in the near future—there is a growing feeling among observers here that no serious action by the United Nations on Palestine is in prospect at all—and with acceptance of the cease-fire, trouble there has slackened off for the moment.”
In October 1948, the Israelis invaded Lebanon in what appeared to be an attempt at a permanent occupation. The subheading of the same Times article mentioned above, which mulls over the UN’s lubrication of Peace, reads, “the latest ceasefire order in Palestine, where the Israelis had been fighting the Lebanese, seems finally to have been effective.” “Effective” as in, has gone into effect, in theory: as a function of this ceasefire, “the United Nations [had] ordered the Israeli Army… to withdraw those forces which, observers said, had crossed the Lebanese frontier to a depth of two to three miles along most of the northern front. The Israeli Government refused, it was understood.” An Israeli spokesman insisted the army knew of no UN order to withdraw. He added, however, that were such an order to exist, “We claim the right to occupy the territory taken before the second truce.” A Times headline from November 15th of that year reads, tapping its foot impatiently, “More delays seen on Israel borders.” The United States’ “uncertainty” around the appropriate degree of pressure to exert on the nascent state, is cited as a “big factor” in the delays. Still, sanctions against Israel for its territorial transgressions were deemed inadvisable, for fears they would “force the new nation to turn to the East for aid.”
On December 10th, the Consul General of Israel condemned “allegations” of Israel’s border violations against its neighbors, calling these “frivolous and without foundation [that] obviously have once again the ulterior motive to make difficult and to discredit the position of the Israeli Government before the United Nations.” Not yet a year in, the Zionist state was already exasperated by the demand that they take others into account.
The response exposes a key aspect of the Zionist psyche: naming another country’s sovereignty or identifying Israeli aggressions, no matter how reluctantly, will always be perceived by Zionism as an attempt to make it look bad. (The actual substance of the charges raised—today, genocide—must be beside the point.) The Israeli Consul around this time also condemned two articles published in The Economist, of all places, for having “the most favorable account yet of the Arab refugee situation.” “Arab” refugee “situation,” a shrug of a phrase: who knows how that happened.
On March 23rd, 1949, Israel and Lebanon signed an armistice demarcation agreement that required Israel to withdraw from nine occupied Lebanese villages “in addition to five she vacated recently as a good-will gesture.” This, the New York Times offered, again in vague language that refuses to name the responsible party, “will reduce Lebanon’s refugee problem.” The agreement went into effect with a prisoner exchange: seven Israelis for 38 Lebanese.
At the signing, the chief of the Israeli delegation asserted that “Israel has never had a quarrel with Lebanon in the past”—stunning to speak of a “past” at all, let alone a quarrel-less one, for a one-year-old country whose entire brief existence involved (and continues to involve) continuous war with everything around it. He continued on, facing forward, that Israel “sees no reason for any quarrel in the future.” Israel saw no reason for something even so trivial as future “quarreling” because it refused to see Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of whom had fled to Lebanon just over the past year since the start of the Nakba. Because the Israelis could not accept that the people of the land might owe something to each other. And because they refused to consider that Israel’s aggressions against Lebanon might have consequences. More importantly, as time would show, they refused to stop these aggressions in the name of “good-will.” “The agreement that has just been signed marks the close of an unhappy chapter,” the Israeli delegation chief celebrated. In 1951, the Times published a map classifying the Arab countries around Israel based on their “hostility” to it, a reminder that it is Europe and its offshoots that have tried to make the Zionist state the center of our world (“the Israelis and their Arab neighbors”). The map offered our countries’ population estimates, and divided us up into three shades of hostility, from greatest to least. Lebanon, then, ranked among the least.
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The metal fence, erected to separate Palestine from Palestinians, was easily breached. As the months after 1948 became years, people’s hope in the nascent field of international law continued to wane. Reasonable, given that international law was created by the same powers who had handed a land that was not theirs over to a people to whom it did not belong. Palestinian militant operations across the border from Lebanon into occupied Palestine intensified in direct proportion to what their means allowed. The PLO was founded in the mid-1960s, and after 1967 escalated its attacks against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank by way of Jordan. In 1968, Israel invaded Jordan, nominally to stop the attacks, and was ultimately made to withdraw. In 1970, Jordan, citing the growing corruption of the PLO and following mounting foreign pressure, targeted the Palestinian guerillas in what came to be known as Black September, expelling the PLO to Lebanon.
In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to eliminate, it claimed, the threat the PLO presented to its security. It demanded a demilitarized buffer zone in southern Lebanon that would be at least as many kilometers deep as the militants’ rockets could reach. This proposed depth belied an ulterior motive: Israel named this invasion “Operation Litani” after the river that the Zionists sought to claim for their state. The Litani, Lebanon’s longest river, feeds some of the area’s most fertile land, and has been the object of colonial conquest for a while: in the early 1940s, the Axis-allied French fought against British and Australian forces in a battle named after the river, as part of an operation code-named “Exporter.” Two decades prior, soon after Lord Balfour signed his famous declaration, two of the founders of the Zionist state, David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, presented a map of their future state at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. It would, ideally, include within its borders the Litani river, which the British and French had already decided belonged to the latter.
In 1982, in the wake of the unsuccessful Operation Litani, Israel invaded again, calling this new invasion of Lebanon “Peace for Galilee.” Israel’s plan, along with emptying Beirut of Palestinian fighters, was to occupy southern Lebanon permanently, both directly and via proxy force. It had by that point been building up a militia that called itself the South Lebanon Army (SLA) for several years. Around the start of Lebanon’s so-called civil war, the SLA declared that one of its principal aims was the seizure of the land “controlled” by Palestinians who had taken up positions in the south. The SLA, a separatist force administered by the people occupying Palestine, flew three flags at its headquarters: two Lebanese flags, shouldering an Israeli flag between them.
Much of the Palestinian factions’ resources, intended for use against Israel, were diverted northward as a result of Lebanon’s “civil war.” The war itself was sparked by a series of events, the final straw of which was the massacre of a busload of Palestinian refugees on their way to Tal el-Zaatar camp, by a literally Nazi-inspired group called the Kataa’ib, or Phalangists. The Phalangist militias imagined themselves as Europeans, believing that they shared with Europe not just an alleged descent from the Caucasus mountains but also a common enmity towards the Arabs. (Their founder, Pierre Gemayel, traveled to Berlin during the 1936 Olympics and fell in love with this model of nationalist militancy, onto which he grafted a more explicit, violent Christianity. He saw in the Nazi system, as he put it, “discipline. And we in the Middle East, we need discipline more than anything else.”)
The Phalangists, like their SLA allies, were funded by Israel. The relationship can be traced back to at least 1948, when the group asked Israel for assistance overthrowing the Lebanese government. (Recall that “Israel has never had a quarrel with Lebanon in the past.”) Israel’s relationship with Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, the sectarian identity of both the Phalangists and the SLA, goes back further, to at least 1920, when the Zionists and the Maronites “signed a cooperation pact.” The goal of the alliance, according to Israel’s first foreign minister, was “the taking out of Lebanon from the pan-Arab circle… Its affiliation with [Israel] is extremely heartwarming and opens the door to a far-reaching realignment in the whole structure of the Middle East.” (We hear echoes of this in Condoleezza Rice’s “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” to describe Israel’s massacre of Lebanese civilians in 2006.)
In August 1976, Time’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief toured the land between Lebanon and Israel and reported:
By word and deed, Israel is doing all it can—short of full-scale invasion—to neutralize its Lebanese border. To that end, it has established links with rebel Lebanese army units, the only quasi-government force left in the region, and is seeking the good will, if not the hearts and minds, of border villagers. Israel’s policy is paying off—so far. The area is peaceful.
Israel called their boundary with Lebanon during this period “the Good Fence.” Members of the SLA and their families vacationed and sought employment in Israel. Quickly Israeli goods lined the shelves of southern Lebanese shops or were shipped out from Lebanese ports for re-export. The Israelis refused to pay customs duties, despite the repeated protest of their Lebanese allies. Meanwhile, Lebanese goods were almost totally prohibited from entering Israeli markets. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1982 that “some Israelis hope—given evidence so far—that with or without a peace treaty Lebanon will become not only a growing export trade, but also a conduit for Israeli exports to the Arab world.”
In 2000, a Hezbollah-led coalition forced Israel to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, leaving behind its SLA proxies without warning. At the time, the SLA’s leader, Antoine Lahad, was in Paris trying to secure support for his army from Lebanon’s former colonizer. He lamented his forces’ abandonment and begged Israel to keep the border open so that his men could receive the medical attention and material support necessary to maintain their ability to fight. Despite his pleas, the Good Fence was sealed. Lahad himself fled to Israel, from where he was sentenced to death in absentia in his native Lebanon, for treason. He died peacefully in Paris, in 2015.
Immediately after southern Lebanon’s liberation was declared in May 2000, Palestinians on both sides of the fence installed by Israel rushed towards each other, in physical proximity for the first time in decades. In footage from those days, people exchange words and kisses, reaching their hands through the gaps. In one clip, a parent carefully passes their baby, presumably born in Lebanon, between two rows of barbed wire, into Palestine, to meet her family and her land. Another clip shows Israeli soldiers positioned nearby, sitting idly in their jeeps.
In 2021, Israel inaugurated “a monument in memory of those who fell among the South Lebanon Army and [awarded] campaign medals to members of the organization who fought alongside” it, the first time in Israel’s history such medals were given to fighters outside the IDF. The memorial replaced the original, built before 2000, within Lebanon’s borders, destroyed by Hezbollah after Lebanon’s liberation. At the ceremony in Israel, a special prayer was recited in Arabic (a diversity initiative for which multiple Israeli news outlets patted themselves on the back). The memorial bears an engraving, in both Arabic and English, that reads, “We will remember the soldiers of the Southern Lebanese Army who fell while defending the towns of southern Lebanon and northern Israel.”The Good Fence Memorial is located in a settlement called “Metula,” built atop al-Mtileh, which means “the lookout.” The Israeli name is taken from the Arabic. Al-Mtileh existed on both sides of the shifting border over the Mandate period. During the days of the Good Fence, SLA- supporting Lebanese passed through the village on their way to participate in the Zionist labor force. Metula has been evacuated since October 2023. At least a quarter of its inhabitants say they will not return, citing their government’s inability to guarantee their security.
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In a rare instance of self-reflection, the Jerusalem Post noted in a 2012 article that “the term ‘good fence’ is, of course, an oxymoron, since fences by definition separate and divide.” This insight proves short-lived, however, as the article undermines itself in the next breath: “[B]ut in the glory days of its ties with the Christians and the villages in South Lebanon, Israel had hoped to use the fence as a means towards co-existence.” Unless they mean “co-exist” literally—as in, I exist here and you exist there, even if we, like two parallel lines, never meet—I am not aware of a time when a fence imposed by colonizer onto colonized reflected the romantic’s affliction of too much hope. And, crucially, even the parallel lines metaphor is too generous, because Israel lacks the ideological capacity to accommodate anything around it as existing on the same plane—preferring, always, subjugation to parity. Supremacist to its core, as a matter of survival, Israel does not recognize equals in its vicinity.
Israel continues to insist that its side of the boundary with Lebanon should include Lebanese land, and that the south become a “demilitarized” zone. Israel reiterates the need, in the name of Peace, for this demilitarized zone, with the strained condescension of the only adult in the room. Of course, the disarmament can’t be bilateral: why should Israel relinquish its right to “defend” itself? After all, Israel’s enemies can’t be trusted to maintain Rabin’s “final peace.”
A recent essay in The New York Review of Books argues, correctly, that Israel’s policy of assassinating enemy leaders in foreign nations has not been successful, and that the policy’s ineffectiveness should prompt Israel to reconsider. Let’s set aside for a moment that the goal of assassination has, for at least a couple of decades, functioned more as a means of stoking Israelis’ feelings of dominance in the very immediate term, rather than materially undermining resistance movements. What is rarely asked is this: by what right does Israel continue to disregard the sovereignty of other countries?
Borders purport to do two things: demarcate sovereign territory and establish security. Israel has inverted this paradigm—before it can demarcate its territory, which is to say, boundaries past which its drones and fighter jets’ crossing should constitute aggression, it must have Security. Israel has no internationally recognized border with Lebanon, only an armistice line, called the “Blue Line” by the United Nations, indicated today by a thick concrete wall, heavily reinforced in the years since 2006. On Google Maps, dashed lines between Israel, and Gaza and the West Bank—the latter of which Israel calls by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria”— reinvent these lands as contested. And they are, literally, in the sense that Israel is working to seize them, following the logic of “might makes right.” Beyond Israel’s UN demarcation lines with the Palestinian territories, collectively called the “Green Line,” are concrete walls. So, border walls without borders. And the future hope that the walls will come down once a Security Zone is once again established, after the land is emptied of its people, for the sake of Peace.
Israel is an expansionist project, and, like all such projects, prefers an ever-expanding frontier to a wall—a limit to its aspirational horizons. Israel’s settlers, enabled and armed by the state, encroach on Palestinian neighborhoods in the West Bank and drive “the Arabs” into smaller and smaller pockets of land. A growing movement within the settler state today demands the realization of Greater Israel, a nation that in its maximalist form includes the land “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” This position is presented by Western media as a fringe view—never mind that Israel’s Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Givir, is among its proponents. The other, moderate iteration of Zionism, represented by Israeli leaders like the dovish Rabin, reserves the right for Israel to extend as far out as it needs to go, in the name of Security. These positions, and the supremacy that underlies them, are materially the same—one granted by God, the other by the State.
Israel’s unsettled borders reflect not a bug, something to resolve, but a feature of the Zionist state, and the source of its self-granted—and United States-ensured—impunity. For Israel, like other occupying nations, war suspends law. Because Israel exists in a constant state of war (and is itself, as I’ve written elsewhere, a state of aggression by its very nature) it is also in a state of perpetual lawlessness in the name of amorphous ends—namely, Security—whose means can only be scrutinized once Security is established, once Peace arrives.
From Israel’s point of view, its enemies are incapable of self-defense, and Israel is incapable of aggression. Because Israel views the very existence of Palestinian national consciousness as an existential threat, as aggression, Peace will only arrive once the Palestinians and those who support them are gone. “Security” for Israel remains a euphemism that grants Israel carte blanche to reinforce its foundational right to dominate, to massacre and dispossess, unimpeded. The continued assertion of this right is the Zionist state’s principal means of sustaining their strength.
The writer of the Jerusalem Post article that mentions the “Good Fence” also worries that “Israel is surrounding itself with fences—under pressure and with no thought or planning process.” In Israel, “the general consensus [is] that ‘they’ [their ‘neighbors’] should be the ones to fence themselves in, not ‘us.’” The walls that surround Israel, like the walls of their colonial benefactors, are imposed on the land and the native. Walls are not an effective vessel for denial. Israel’s reckoning with its fundamental issue with its neighbors, the issue being the Zionist colonization of Palestine, was for some time avoided in part by the technology of its smart fences.
October 7th permanently eliminated the viability of Israel’s calculated trade-off: temporary obstructions to the whole of what they consider their land, in exchange for keeping the native out, but still within Israel’s line of sight and the range of its weapons. Today, the development of its smart fence technology—the surveillance and remote-operated weapons infrastructure of its high-tech border wall—in Gaza informs its smart fence in southern Lebanon. Neither demarcates a secure border, or a border at all. Neither is able to erase a past, or a people that will neither forgive nor forget. Today, for the first time, the Lebanese have created a buffer zone inside Israel. All the same, the smart fence gets smarter, clumsily avoiding an impossible question.♦
