While Israel aims for land border deal with Lebanon, history weighs heavy
As the vivid greens of the Galilee hills roll by, Boaz Shapira, a researcher at the Alma Research and Education Center on northern security, points to areas under dispute in land border talks, which Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to restart last month.
...Borders are a relatively new arrival in the region, as the Ottoman Empire ruled the entire Levant for centuries, beginning in the early 1500s. Its Beirut administrative district ran from Syria’s coastal mountains in the north to the Samarian highlands in the south, where it met the Jerusalem sector.
...In the wild, lawless north of the 1920s, the newly finalized border existed only on paper. The four lone Jewish settlements in the Galilee panhandle — Metula, Hamra, Kfar Giladi and Tel Hai — carried on with little British or French military presence. Metula residents crossed the “border” to farm land they owned on the other side, even paying taxes to the Lebanese government.
The Jewish settlements found themselves occasionally caught up in a war between French authorities and Syrian nationalists, a conflict separate from the Jewish-Arab friction brewing farther south. In 1920, local Shiites and Bedouin, searching for French troops, attacked Tel Hai. Eight Jewish defenders, including commander Joseph Trumpeldor, were killed, marking a foundational moment in Zionist memory.