essays

In 1956, at a French villa in Sèvres, Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion outlined what he called a “fantastic” plan. Lebanon, he said, had a large Muslim population concentrated in the south—which he took to be a problem with a solution: expand Israel’s northern border to the Litani River, leaving behind a compact, manageable Christian state. “It would be possible to establish a Christian state there,” he declared, “and the southern border of Lebanon should be the Litani River.”