Short & Sharp: One Concept a Day. Today: The Border Between Israel and Lebanon

Nir Topper
Apr 17
3 min read

The border between Israel and Lebanon, as we know it today, is not the result of direct agreements between two sovereign nations, but rather a legacy of imperial arrangements formed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.

The process began at the San Remo Conference in 1920, where the victorious powers of World War I divided spheres of influence in the Middle East. Great Britain received the Mandate for Palestine (on both sides of the Jordan River) and Iraq, while France received the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

The need to mark a precise boundary between these two administrative zones led to the signing of the Paulet-Newcombe Agreement in 1923, named after the officers who headed the joint boundary commission: British Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Newcombe and French Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Paulet. Their work was not merely technical; it was shaped by power struggles over water resources and the insistence of the Zionist movement to include northern Jewish settlements—such as Metula and Tel Hai—and the sources of the Jordan River within the British Mandate. Consequently, the border was pushed further north than originally planned, creating what is known as the "Galilee Panhandle."

The significance of this line intensified at the end of the War of Independence. In 1949, as part of the Armistice Agreements signed at Rosh Hanikra, Israel and Lebanon agreed that the armistice line would follow the exact path of the 1923 international border. This step transformed the old mandatory boundary into the closest thing to an official border recognized by two sovereign states, even though it is technically only a mutually agreed-upon ceasefire line.

In 2000, following the IDF's withdrawal from the security zone in Southern Lebanon, the UN demarcated the "Blue Line" and confirmed that Israel had indeed withdrawn behind the border path. This provided the 1923 line with further international recognition as the de facto border between the two countries. This recognition still left a dispute regarding the "Shebaa Farms" (Har Dov)—an area that the UN and Israel view as part of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, though Hezbollah insists on framing it as a Lebanese-Israeli conflict.

Following the Maritime Border Agreement signed between Israel and Lebanon in 2022, the territorial dispute between the two countries was significantly narrowed. On the land border, only a few minor points of friction remain. These are so small in scope that when the time comes for both sides to seek a peace agreement, the border line itself is not expected to be a barrier or an obstacle.

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Image 1: The Middle East according to the original map of the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916). The line drawn between Kirkuk in the east and Acre in the west divided Ottoman territories into a British sphere of influence to the south and a French sphere to the north. Within these spheres, specific zones were marked where Britain (red) and France (blue) could establish full control. The yellow area—the heart of what would become Mandatory Palestine—was intended to be under joint international administration. Source: Royal Geographical Society (Map), Mark Sykes & François Georges-Picot (Annotations), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Image 2: The northern border of the Upper Galilee at two points in time: 1916 (Sykes–Picot Agreement) and 1923 (Paulet-Newcombe Agreement). The Sykes–Picot agreement (green line) designated the renewing Jewish settlements in the northern Upper Galilee and much of the Lower Galilee to be under French control. In practice, after British forces withdrew in 1919, the French did not maintain a constant military presence, while Syrian nationalists and local tribes vied for control. The area remained a disputed "no-man's land" until the final demarcation in the Paulet-Newcombe Agreement (blue line), which became the international border between Israel, Syria, and Lebanon. Source: Costello, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.