On 23 March 2026, Bezalel Smotrich told his Knesset faction that the Litani River should mark Israel’s northern boundary, setting out his vision alongside developments on other fronts, including Gaza and Syria. At the same time, air strikes were targeting bridges across the river, while evacuation orders and sustained military pressure on border villages were driving people from southern Lebanon.
The convergence of political rhetoric and military action raises a question: is Israel’s current presence in southern Lebanon a temporary consequence of war, or part of a longer history of ambitions centred on the Litani?
The river appeared in Zionist proposals for borders and access to resources in the early 20th century. It resurfaced in political correspondence in the 1950s, gave its name to an Israeli military operation in 1978 and remained central to later confrontations in the south. Across those episodes, Israeli leaders and planners repeatedly considered southern Lebanon in terms of security, water and borders. The Litani’s significance in that history has extended well beyond its course through Lebanon.
Before the border was drawn
In February 1919, Chaim Weizmann presented a map of the proposed “Jewish national home” to the Paris Peace Conference. Rather than confining it to what would become Mandatory Palestine, the map extended north into southern Lebanon and placed its boundary at the Litani River.
David Ben-Gurion stood beside Weizmann as the Zionist movement sought to establish its territorial claims within the emerging international order. The proposal did not become political reality, but the Litani remained part of later thinking about borders.
Ideas of the “Land of Israel” drew on differing readings of biblical texts. Some envisaged an expansive territory; others followed the borders of ancient kingdoms more closely. As Zionism became an organised political movement in the early 20th century, its leaders translated such ideas into maps and documents for international consideration.
In 1918, Ben-Gurion set out a detailed account of the borders he wanted for a future state. It placed the Litani at the northern boundary and described extensions towards the Awja Valley south of Damascus, Sinai and Transjordan. What had been a symbolic conception was being expressed in geographic terms.
At the Paris conference, Zionist representatives advanced demands encompassing Palestine and parts of the surrounding region. Their submissions linked the proposed borders to resources and economic needs, explicitly discussing control of water sources and including land south of the Litani within the area they sought.
The borders that emerged instead reflected British and French interests under the Sykes-Picot arrangements. Water sources including the Litani fell within the French sphere, while oil, railways and the balance between colonial powers influenced the allocation of other areas.
At Paris, the Zionist movement sought to change those arrangements with some British support. France maintained its position, and the mandates established a separation between Palestine and Lebanon. The resulting border reflected colonial bargaining rather than a single geographic or hydrological principle.
The Litani nevertheless retained a place in Zionist thinking for three overlapping reasons: historical and religious readings that connected northern Palestine with southern Lebanon; the importance assigned to northern water resources for the proposed state’s economy; and the river’s potential use as a natural line for managing a border.
Agreements ratified in 1920 and 1923 established the Lebanon-Palestine border in a legal framework that endured as the basis of the recognised boundary. They did not settle debate within the Zionist movement about the territory a future state might seek under different political conditions. In 1937, Ben-Gurion said that “a partial Jewish state is not the end but the beginning,” and that “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are a matter for the Jewish people, and no external factor will be able to restrict them.”
Why the Litani mattered
In December 1919, Weizmann wrote to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “The economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply, and this water supply has to be found in the north, in the Hermon, in the sources of the Jordan and in the Litani River.” He presented access to water as a practical condition for the territory he envisaged.
Why did the Litani retain such prominence in Zionist calculations, even as other water sources and, later, new methods of managing supply became available?
The river rises in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, west of Baalbek. It flows south before turning west to the Mediterranean, covering about 170 kilometres. Its basin spans roughly a fifth of Lebanon’s area, and the river contributes a substantial share of the country’s water flow. It also divides southern Lebanon into two areas. One lies beside the border with the occupied Palestinian territories and has a dense population and an established resistance infrastructure.
Lake Qaraoun, dams and hydroelectric stations form part of an economic system built around the river. Its water also serves an agricultural sector estimated to account for about 35 per cent of Lebanese agricultural output. The Litani is therefore important to both food and energy production. It contributes about 30 per cent of Lebanon’s total water flow, while its basin covers about 20 per cent of the country.
Israel’s water system operates in different conditions. Rainfall is uneven across its semi-arid territory, and supply depends on groundwater, the Jordan River and desalination, which has become a significant source. Desalination has reduced direct pressure on natural water resources, but water remains part of security planning amid population growth and the regional distribution of supplies.
In proposals to extend that system beyond Israel’s territory, the Litani has stood out as a nearby river that could be incorporated into wider water-management plans. Some estimates suggest that occupation of southern Lebanon and access to the river could add as much as 800 million cubic metres to Israel’s annual supply — equivalent to about 40 per cent of its current annual consumption. Those estimates help explain the river’s continued place in strategic calculations.
The idea has taken different forms over more than a century. In his early 20th-century utopian novel “Old New Land”, Theodor Herzl wrote about using the region’s waters for the proposed “state”. Later technical plans considered diverting water from the Litani and connecting it to the Jordan River system to support agriculture and generate power.
Subsequent regional water proposals also envisaged incorporating the Litani into a wider network. After Israel occupied further territory in 1967, estimates linking consumption of the available water resources to a medium-term need for additional supplies again drew attention to the river.
These proposals combined three considerations: historical claims linking northern Palestine to southern Lebanon, water supplies for agricultural and population growth, and the Litani’s possible use as a geographic and security boundary.
Desalination complicates that calculation today. It has enabled Israel to reach much higher levels of self-sufficiency, reducing the need to view the Litani solely as a source of drinking or irrigation water. The river can still figure in proposals for managing regional resources, however, and control over it could provide leverage in future arrangements.
From proposed borders to military plans
In October 1948, during military operations accompanying the Nakba and Israel’s establishment, Israeli forces entered Lebanon, took several border villages and reached the banks of the Litani. Israeli commanders considered advancing towards Beirut, believing they could do so quickly. They instead decided to establish a defensive line at the river, before later withdrawing under the armistice arrangements.
The episode brought Israeli forces into direct contact with an area that had previously featured in maps and territorial proposals. The Litani subsequently appeared in more detailed discussions among Israeli leaders.
Moshe Sharett’s diaries, published years later, provide an account of disagreements within that leadership over expansion, the management of conflict and the use of force. Sharett had held senior decision-making roles since the 1930s.
The diaries include a 1954 letter from Ben-Gurion describing Lebanon as the “weakest link in the Arab League”. He envisaged supporting a separate political entity there and redrawing the border to permit the annexation of southern Lebanon up to the Litani. In this proposal, intervention in Lebanon would serve a wider effort to alter the regional balance, not simply an immediate military objective.
Sharett also recorded discussion of a plan by Moshe Dayan to exploit Lebanon’s internal divisions. It envisaged creating a pretext for Israeli military intervention, installing an allied government and gaining control of the south, including the annexation of territory below the Litani.
The plan set out a sequence: secure the loyalty of a Lebanese officer, have him call for Israeli intervention, then annex the south and install an allied government in Beirut. Its treatment of annexation as a practical step was captured in the words: “And then everything will be all right.”
Sharett disagreed with the assessment behind such proposals. He doubted that Lebanon’s internal conditions would make them easy to carry out and warned that intervention could lead to consequences difficult to control. His objections did not remove the proposals from wider Israeli discussion.
In the mid-1950s, southern Lebanon appeared again in arguments about partitioning existing states and redrawing regional borders. These ideas circulated during the complex international and regional confrontation surrounding the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt.
In the early 1960s, Yitzhak Rabin, then deputy chief of staff, presented Prime Minister Levi Eshkol with his view of Israel’s ideal borders: the Litani to the north, the Jordan River to the east and the Suez Canal to the south and west. They matched the full borders Ben-Gurion had outlined in 1918, 45 years earlier.
Across successive generations of Israeli leaders, the Litani thus appeared first on proposed maps and later in political and military scenarios. Those ranged from intervention through local allies to direct control of territory.
Advances that proved hard to sustain
When Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in the spring of 2000, residents returned to their villages faster than expected. Within hours, the area was coming back to life after 18 years of Israeli military presence.
The withdrawal ended one phase in a much longer series of attempts to impose control in the south, many of them connected to plans to reach the Litani or establish lasting influence over the area.
In March 1978, Israel launched a large-scale operation named “Litani”. Its forces advanced to the river after a major mobilisation and occupied extensive areas of southern Lebanon.
On 19 March, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 425, calling for an immediate Israeli withdrawal and the establishment of UNIFIL. Israel withdrew in June 1978, but transferred its positions to the South Lebanon Army under Saad Haddad. The result resembled one element of Dayan’s earlier proposal: a Lebanese force aligned with Israel administered a buffer zone that remained, in practice, an extension of the occupation.
Indirect control allowed Israel to maintain a presence through a local ally without the same degree of prolonged direct deployment.
The 1982 invasion marked a different phase. Israeli forces reached Beirut in an operation whose aims included changing Lebanon’s political order as well as achieving military objectives. The advance was accompanied by an attempt to establish a local political partner who could sustain that change, recalling plans discussed in earlier decades.
Events on the ground and in Lebanese politics proved more complicated than those initial calculations. Israeli forces subsequently repositioned to the south, concentrating on a smaller area along the border.
Over the following years, the “security belt” combined Israeli military presence with support for local forces in a buffer zone. Resistance movements developed into more organised forces and became central to the conflict in southern Lebanon.
Their operations subjected Israel’s presence to sustained attrition, bringing military costs and domestic political pressure. Israel’s withdrawal in 2000 ended its direct presence without producing a stable political settlement.
War returned in 2006. Israel used extensive military force and launched a ground operation in the south, but did not achieve all its declared aims. The resistance’s military structure remained intact, and a new balance of deterrence emerged.
Taken together, these episodes show a recurring difficulty for Israel: its forces have advanced into southern Lebanon and established varying degrees of control, but the costs of maintaining that control have risen over time. Local resistance has been able to reconstitute itself; Lebanon’s internal complexity has made it difficult to establish a stable allied authority; and international pressure has constrained prolonged operations.
Israel has been able to invade the south. Turning an advance into durable control has proved far harder. The central question has therefore been less whether its forces can reach the Litani than what happens once they do, when military plans encounter the region’s social and political realities.
Testing the equation again, 2024–2026
In February 2025, a small group of Israeli settlers crossed the border fence near Yaroun in southern Lebanon. They were linked to “Uri Tzafon”, a settler movement that presents northward expansion as a natural extension of the Zionist project. The Israeli army acknowledged the crossing. Limited as it was, the incident showed how an idea promoted in political rhetoric could also prompt action at the border.
What, then, might make the present moment different from earlier Israeli attempts to establish control in southern Lebanon?
For the Zionist right, one apparent opportunity lies in Hezbollah’s condition after the latest rounds of fighting. Strikes in 2023 and 2024 weakened its leadership and military organisation, targeting senior figures and operational resources and including what became known as the “pager attack”. Israeli assessments indicated that Hezbollah retained some missile capability, enough to remain a threat, but also suggested that the deterrence it had exercised in earlier confrontations had eroded.
Israel’s governing coalition has also changed. Religious-nationalist groups now hold influential positions and are better placed to turn expansionist demands into government policy. Smotrich’s public proposal to make the Litani Israel’s northern boundary gave explicit political expression to an idea long discussed in other settings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier revived the idea of “Greater Israel” in the Zionist imagination.
The international setting is different too. The US is providing direct political and military support in a wider regional conflict, has embraced Israeli proposals for a new Middle East and is practically engaged in a joint war against Iran. The article’s argument is that these conditions reduce pressures that constrained Israeli operations in earlier periods and give Israel greater room for military action.
Displacement has become another part of the conflict. Military operations have driven residents from southern Lebanon, while proposals for their return have been tied to new security arrangements. Such an approach treats control of territory and the movement of its population as connected questions, with implications beyond the immediate conduct of military operations.
Settler movements have also gained political influence. Demands once largely confined to the margins now have a stronger presence in public debate and a greater prospect of reaching decision-makers.
Other constraints remain. Resistance to Israeli forces and incursions continues in southern Lebanon, while international actors have called for operations not to expand. Lebanon’s internal conditions have not ceased to matter simply because the military and political balance has changed.
The present moment therefore brings new opportunities for Israel to impose changes on the ground, alongside familiar obstacles to maintaining them.
An ambition that has endured, and its limits
In the autumn of 1954, Sharett recorded in his diaries his view that plans for Lebanon amounted to a gamble with potentially high human and political costs. Seven decades later, Israeli political discourse presents the current military and regional circumstances as another opportunity to address the question of southern Lebanon.
The intervening history shows how persistently the Litani has appeared in Zionist territorial thinking. It featured in proposals presented at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, in the correspondence and plans of the 1950s, in successive military operations and in present-day political speeches. The methods and justifications have changed; the river’s place in these ambitions has endured. Ideas once discussed within leadership circles are now being stated publicly.
Military experience, however, has exposed a recurring limit. Israeli forces can advance into southern Lebanon, but the cost of remaining there rises and the prospect of consolidating lasting control diminishes.
Across different periods, Israeli aggression and expansionist ambitions have been met by resistance that has taken different organisational forms, from the Lebanese National Resistance Front to Hezbollah. That history shows how occupation has generated movements seeking to raise its costs and assert the claims of the people who live on the land.
Southern Lebanon remains the place where these ambitions meet their practical limits. The Litani recurs in plans as a desired boundary, but reaching it has never settled the question of control. Between the map presented in Paris more than a century ago and Smotrich’s speech today stand the land’s inhabitants, their resistance and their determination to remain and live freely.