© Middle East Institute. This article is for personal research only and may not be copied or
distributed in any form without the permission of The Middle East Journal.
“Let Sleeping Dogs Lie:”
On Ghajar and Other Anomalies in the
Syria-Lebanon-Israel Tri-Border Region
Asher Kaufman
This article argues that the partition of the village of Ghajar between Israel and
Lebanon by the Israeli Line of Withdrawal, as determined by the United Nations
in 2000, was based on historical and cartographical errors. It demonstrates that
the entire village was controlled by Syria until the June 1967 war when Israel occupied it along with the Golan Heights. The article shows that the entire pre-1967
tri-border region of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel suffered from border irregularities
that remained dormant until 2000. Finally, the article argues that Ghajar should
remain united, pending a Syrian-Israeli peace deal that theoretically would return the Golan Heights to Syria and include Ghajar in its entirety.
There are a few places that encapsulate the essence of the political history of the
modern Middle East. The village of Ghajar is one such locale. Situated at the pre-1967
tri-border region of Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, the contemporary fate of Ghajar was
shaped by the colonial legacy of the Middle East and inter-Arab state dynamics, as
well as those of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since the Israeli withdrawal from southern
Lebanon in May 2000 the village has been split by the Blue Line — the Israeli Line
of Withdrawal — its southern third under Israeli control while its northern two-thirds
remain in Lebanon. In the July 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, Israel occupied the northern part of Ghajar, which for six years was the only open section in an
otherwise firmly sealed Israeli-Lebanese boundary. Since then, Ghajar in its entirety
has been effectively controlled by Israel, despite repeated calls by Lebanon and the
international community for an Israeli withdrawal in compliance with UN Resolution
1701, which put an end to the 2006 war. The United Nations has proposed that UNIFIL,
the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, assume control over the northern part of
the village so as to address Israeli security concerns while at the same time bringing
this part of Ghajar under Lebanese sovereignty. In May 2009, media reports stated
that Israel approved of the UN plan and would soon pull out from the Lebanese part
of Ghajar.1 On August 5, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, who
Asher Kaufman is Assistant Professor of History and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His
recent publications include “Forgetting the Lebanon War? On Silence, Denial and Selective Remembrance
in Israel of the First Lebanon War,” in Efrat Ben Ze’ev, Jay Winter, and Ruth Ginio, eds., Shadows of War:
The Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2010);
“From the Litani to Beirut: Israel’s Invasions of Lebanon, 1978-1985: Causes and Consequences,” in Clive
Jones and Sergio Catignani, eds., Israel and Lebanon 1976-2006: An Interstate and Asymmetric Conflict in
Perspective (Routledge, 2009). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the Syria-Lebanon-Israel
tri-border region.
1. Barak Ravid and Amos Harel, “Netanyahu will announce the transfer of Ghajar to Lebanon’s
control,” Haaretz, May 3, 2009; Barak Ravid, “The decision over the withdrawal from Ghajar — before Netanyahu’s trip to the USA,” Haaretz, May 8, 2009.
MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL M Volume 63, No. 4, autumn 2009
DOI: 10.3751/63.4.11
540 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
was assigned by the Israeli Prime Minister to be in charge of the Ghajar case, made a
much-publicized visit to the village. Israeli media reported that Lieberman’s plan for
resolving the Ghajar problem was to build a separation barrier between the two sides
of the village. The residents of the northern part of the village would be evacuated into
the Israeli side of Ghajar, and those who wish to stay in their homes would lose their
Israeli citizenship.2 All things considered, it seems, Israel makes no claim over the
northern part of Ghajar and it is only a question of time before it would withdraw from
it, provided that its security concerns are addressed.
In this article I will make three related arguments. First, as in the area of the Sheb‘a
Farms, there has never been an agreement over the exact location of the boundary in
Ghajar and its vicinity. Furthermore, unlike the Sheb‘a Farms, which most maps placed
within Syrian sovereignty — even if in practice locals perceived the region to be under
Lebanese control — in the case of Ghajar even maps produced prior to 1967 have been
extremely inconsistent, placing the village occasionally in Syria, at different times in
Lebanon, and, less frequently, divided between the two states. Therefore, any attempt to
determine where the boundary line lies between Syria and Lebanon in the area of Ghajar
is, in essence, arbitrary. Second, Ghajar, under full Syrian control before 1967, extended
to include both sections of the village that were divided by the Blue Line in 2000. This
is clearly seen in reports of and sketches made by the US Embassy in Beirut, which
tried to decipher the problems of sovereignty in the tri-border region during the “Water
Wars” between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the early 1960s. Third, and related to
the last point, the village has been divided into two “neighborhoods” that in 2000 were
mistakenly thought to be two different villages: Ghajar in the south and al-Wazzani in
the north. In fact, the village of al-Wazzani, the supposedly northern village that, as of
July 2000, lay within Lebanon, has never really existed. As I demonstrate, there is a
small community called al-Wazzani, more often known as ‘Arab al-Luwayza, but it is
located west of the Hasbani River across from Ghajar. Therefore, based on these three
arguments, the division of Ghajar in 2000 was a mistake that should be amended.
Some Historical and Geographical Notes on Ghajar
Ghajar is located on the eastern, left, bank of the Hasbani River, just above the
Wazzani Springs, and is 310 meters above sea level. Merely three kilometers north of
the pre-1967 tri-border junction, the village easily could have found itself within any
one of the political entities that were created following the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. It would not have taken
much for the British or the pre-state Zionists to apply pressure to include Ghajar within
Palestine, given the fact that the village is only three kilometers east of Metulla — the
northern Jewish community that was responsible for the creation of the shape of the
Galilee panhandle — and that the Wazzani Springs are the most important source of
the Hasbani River. Indeed, later, some Israeli writers lamented the fact that at the time
when the Palestine boundary was determined, Zionist activists, who tirelessly worked
2. Barak Ravid, “Lieberman suggests: a fence will divide Ghajar, its northern half will become
Lebanese,” Haaretz, August 5, 2009; Eli Ashkenazi, “Lieberman in Ghajar village,” Haaretz, August
6, 2009.
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 541
to extend the Palestine boundary as far north as possible, were not aware of the fact
that the Wazzani is the most important tributary of the Hasbani. Had they known, they
certainly would have lobbied to include it within Palestine.3
As for Syria and Lebanon, cartographically the village has been a seesaw border
community, to paraphrase a term of a Lebanese journalist,4 sometimes marked in Lebanon,
and other times in Syria. And though its residents always have seen themselves as Syrians,
they have literally lived a tri-border experience. Their agricultural lands have been divided
between the three states and historically they have made a living by using their location at
this important geopolitical junction, operating as a kind of border entrepreneurs.
It is not easy to reconstruct the history of the village prior to 1967, for the accessible
records at our disposal are sparse. As an ‘Alawi village in the midst of one of the region’s
most heterogeneous regions and hotspots, Ghajar was left on the margins of high politics
until the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, when at once it was put in the spotlight. According to Ahmad and Jamal Khatib, residents of the village who, to the best of
my knowledge, produced the only book on Ghajar, the village, originally named Taranje,
was first settled by Kurds who changed its name to Ghajar, meaning “gypsy” in Arabic.
It was in the 16th century, with the Ottoman occupation of the region, that, according to
the Khatibs, ‘Alawis first arrived in this area, establishing three villages: Za‘ura, ‘Ayn Fit,
and Ghajar. The first two were established about 15 kilometers southeast of Ghajar, on
the slopes of the Golan Heights on the Banias-Qunaytra road.5 Adib Bagh, whose 1958
book, La Région de Djolan, is one of the most reliable sources at our disposal on the Golan Heights before 1960, also hypothesized that ‘Alawis first arrived in the Golan Heights
with the Ottoman occupation of the region. His attention to the ‘Alawis in this book is
minimal, reflecting their marginality, but he provides population figures of the three villages. According to his field survey, conducted in the late 1950s, 1,998 residents lived in
‘Ain Fit, 1,811 in Za‘ura, and 674 in Ghajar, bringing the total size of the ‘Alawi community of the Golan Heights to 4,483. The Syrian population census of 1960, however,
provides smaller figures, totaling the general ‘Alawi population in the Golan Heights at
3,285, divided by Za‘ura (1,133), ‘Ayn Fit (1,532), and Ghajar (620).6
While Za‘ura and ‘Ayn Fit had a larger population than Ghajar, their residents
were vassals of the largest landowner in the Golan Heights, Amir al-Fa‘ur, leader of the
‘Arab al-Fadl tribe.7 Ghajar residents, on the other hand, owned their own land around
their village, which bordered the agricultural fields of other Lebanese (al-Majidiyya,
al-Mari), Syrian (Mughr al-Sheba‘a), and Palestinian (Shuqa al-Fuqa and as of 1948
Dan and Daphna) villages. Two thousand five hundred meters southeast of Ghajar was
Nukhayleh, which since 2000 also has been at the center of the territorial conflict be3. Micha Livneh, “Le-Eizo Medina Shayach ha-Kfar hs-Shi‘i shel Yisrael?” [“To Which State
Does the Israeli Shi‘i Village Belong?”], Teva ve-Aretz, Vol. 30, No. 7 (1988), pp. 49-50.
4. ‘Assaf Abu Rahhal, Shu’un Janubiyya [Southern Affairs], May 4, 2008, http://www.janoubiaonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2332.
5. Local rumors go that Ghajar was established slightly away from ‘Ayn Fit and Za‘ura because of
some historic blood revenge case that forced the founders of the village to keep some distance from
the other two villages.
6. Al-Ta‘addud al-‘Amm Lil-Sukkan, 1960 [General Population Census, 1960] (Damascus: Wizarat al-Takhtit, 1960), p. 229.
7. Yosef Braslavsky, Ha-Yada‘ta et Ha-aretz? [Do You Know Your Country?] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz
Ha-Meuhad, 1946), p. 172.
542 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
tween Israel and Lebanon. Hizbullah, followed by the Lebanese government, tied the
Sheb‘a Farms to Nukhayleh, claiming that both are Lebanese territories and demanding
Israeli withdrawal from them.
Given the fact that Ghajar, ‘Ayn Fit, and Za‘ura were the only three ‘Alawi villages
in the region and that the Ansariyya Mountains in northern Syria, the territorial and political center of the ‘Alawi sect, were hundreds of kilometers away, the three villages were
culturally and politically connected. Intermarriage was common and the shrine in Ghajar,
Maqam al-Arba‘in, frequently was visited by villagers of the other two communities.
Administratively, the three villages belonged to the district (muhafaza) of Qunaytra and
to the sub-district (nahiya) of Mas‘ada in the Golan Heights. Foreign travelers and Jewish
residents of Palestine who visited the villages depicted them as extremely impoverished
communities.8 The villages were not connected to any electrical grid and had no formal
educational facilities at least until the 1950s, when, for the first time, a teacher was sent
from Damascus to teach basic reading skills. Acquiring education higher than this required traveling to Qunaytra, some 30 kilometers away. A bus line which connected Marj
‘Ayun in Lebanon with Qunaytra in Syria passed by the village and provided the only
motorized connection between Ghajar and the surrounding area.
Ghajar and the Mapping of the Syria-Lebanon Boundary
It has been a long established fact that the Syria-Lebanon boundary has never been
officially determined. No legally binding boundary treaty exists and, in fact, there has
never been a comprehensive process of boundary making that included the three stages
of allocation, delimitation, and demarcation. According to one reliable Lebanese count,
there are at least 36 contested spots along the 375-kilometer long boundary between Syria and Lebanon.9 During the French Mandate, French officials did produce maps where
the Syria-Lebanon boundary was delineated. But these maps were either too primitive
or produced at too small of a scale to be used for modern boundary delineation.10 Even
when better maps were developed, they were never used for a boundary demarcation
process which included surveying the boundary line and marking it on the ground.
Take, for example, one of the most famous maps of Lebanon. The 1862 map of
the French military expedition, the Corps Expéditionnaire de Syrie, which arrived in
Mount Lebanon to put an end to the civil war between the Maronites and the Druze, is
a case in point. The French, as in other colonial ventures, brought with them not only
military forces to quell the violence but also a group of scientists, headed by Ernest Renan, who surveyed Mount Lebanon and later published the first comprehensive modern
scientific study of the region.11 This venture also produced the first modern map of
8. G. Gavriel, Be’eretz Mekorot Ha-Yarden [In the Land of the Jordan’s Sources] (Tel-Aviv:
Omanut, 1930).
9. Issam Khalifeh, al-Hudud al-Lubnaniyya — al-Suriyya [The Boundaries of Syria and Lebanon]
(Beirut: 2006). See also the report of NOW LEBANON, http://www.nowlebanon.com/Library/Files/
EnglishDocumentation/Other%20Documents/Border%20Report%20NOW.pdf.
10. Asher Kaufman, “Who Owns the Shebaa Farms? Chronicles of a Territorial Dispute,” The
Middle East Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Autumn 2001), pp. 576-596.
�����������������
. Ernest Renan, Mission de Phénicie [Mission of Phonecia] (Paris: Imprimerie impériale,
1864).
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 543
Lebanon, which, although it fell short of being an exact map, was, at the time, still the
best available map of the region. This map was reprinted twice, in 1913 and 1915, to
serve the military needs of both Germany and France during World War I. In 1919, the
Lebanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference used this map as evidence of the
existence of “Greater Lebanon” and demanded its establishment within its “natural
borders.”12 Interestingly, Ghajar (spelled al-Ghadjar) appears prominently on this map
(as well as ‘Ayn Fit and Za‘ura), a fact that cannot be taken lightly given the map’s
general inaccuracies and misspellings of other locales.13 It is also important to note
that a site called Loueizeh northwest of Ghajar on the other side of the Hasbani River
is marked on the map. We shall return below to this location, because it will help us
explain important cartographic developments that led to Ghajar’s partition in 2000.
Despite its limitations, it was this map that the French High Commission used
to delineate the boundaries of the newly created entity of Grand Liban by attaching it
as an appendix to Edict 318, which declared its establishment.14 However, when Edict
318 was issued on August 31, 1920, the southern boundary of Lebanon had not yet
been determined, as its course was still being negotiated between France and Britain.
Indeed, Edict 318 stipulated that in the south, Lebanon would extend to the Palestine
boundary, “as it will be determined by international accords.”15 The copy of the map
found in the French Diplomatic Archives in Nantes contains a complete boundary line
for Lebanon, including its southern boundary with Palestine and must, therefore, have
been appended to Edict 318 only after February 1923, following the conclusion of the
work of the Paulet-Newcombe Commission, which demarcated the boundary between
the British Mandate over Palestine and the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon.
Thus, despite the fact that Lebanon did not have a clear southern boundary when Edict
318 was issued, the map anachronistically includes a red line depicting its limits with
Palestine as “fixed by Edict 318 of August 31, 1920.” In addition, the map shows in a
blue line the boundary between Syria and Lebanon, arguably making it the first official
illustration of the tri-border region between Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. The SyrianLebanese boundary in this map follows the watershed along the Anti-Lebanon and the
Hermon Mountain ranges, descends southwest and reaches the Hasbani River where
it forms a shape of a “bend” or a “knee,” and from here follows the river southward
until it meets the Palestine boundary. This “bend” would be reproduced in almost every
single map thereafter, becoming a marker of the boundary. The “bend” also makes it
easier to locate the area of the Sheb‘a Farms, as practically all maps with the “bend”
inevitably place the southwestern slopes of the Hermon, including the Farms, within
the Syrian Golan Heights. It is important to note that this borderline was not drawn onsite, but probably in an office of the French High Commission in Beirut, and it was not
12. On this map see, Asher Kaufman, “Henri Lammens and Syrian Nationalism,” in Adel Beshara,
ed., Syria for the Syrians: The History of an Idea and its Pioneers (Ithaca Press, forthcoming, 2010).
13. Ghajar appears prominently on other maps from the same time period. See,
������������������������
for example, Henri
Kiepert, Carte de la Syrie Méridionale [Map of Southern Syria] (Berlin: 1860).
14. See a copy of the map in Archives Diplomatiques Nantes (henceforth AD Nantes), Carton
338.
���.Recueil des actes administratifs de Haut-commissariat de la République Française en Syrie et
au Liban [Collection of Administrative Acts of the High Commission of the French Republic in Syria
and Lebanon], Vol. 1 (Beirut:1919–1920), pp. 132–134.
544 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
a result of a process of border demarcation or even delimitation. Moreover, the width
of the borderline drawn in the map is 4 millimeters, covering roughly 800 meters on the
ground according to the map’s scale.
As for Ghajar, according to this map the ‘Alawi village is the tri-border meeting
point. Accordingly, the map places the actual tri-border spot just 100 meters south of
Jisr al-Ghajar, the ancient Roman Bridge (an important local landmark), inside Syrian
territory, three kilometers to the south. Ghajar itself is placed in Syria, given the fact
that the (thick) borderline runs on the western, right, bank of the Hasbani River. The
“bend” is clearly marked on the map, but it is drawn some five kilometers north of the
village of Ghajar along the Hasbani River. There was something prophetic in this map,
given the fact that since its foundation, Lebanon has evolved to be an unstable political
entity. It appears that not only the “inside” of the state has been unstable, but even its
boundaries are based on shaky foundations.
Despite the fact that this map placed Ghajar as the site of the tri-border junction,
no other map of Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine picked up this inaccuracy and perpetuated
it in later maps. It is, nevertheless, worth noting that as far as the residents of Ghajar
themselves were concerned, they did develop a particular identity of “tri-borderlanders” as suggested by the account of Ahmad and Jamal Khatib, who write that just before 1967, the village, together with Syrian authorities, considered changing the name
of their village to al-Muthalath, “the triangle” in Arabic.16
Be that as it may, cartographic inconsistencies continued to dominate the region
from 1920 until 1967 and beyond and could be found in French, British, and, as of
1945, Syrian and Lebanese maps. Some examples from the Mandate years will be
sufficient to demonstrate this point. A 1:20,000 scale map from 1941 of the “Survey
of Palestine,” the British cartographic project, puts Ghajar within Lebanon.17 But the
same map in its 1945 edition places it within Syria.18 A detailed 1944 French map of
1:50,000 scale of the Merjayoun region, produced by the Forces françaises du Levant,
places the village in Lebanon,19 while the 1945 1:200,000 scale French mapping venture of Syria and Lebanon, the last of its kind before France departed from these two
states, places Ghajar within Syria. This map is particularly important because it served
as the basis for most cartographic projects of Syria and Lebanon after they attained independence. This 1945 map also includes an alphabetized list of all names of inhabited
places in Syria (some of the Sheb‘a Farms are listed there as well). For a reason I could
not determine, Ghajar is divided between upper and lower Ghajar in this list. (Ghajar
al-Fuqa and Ghajar al-Tahta).20 Given the fact that Ghajar was split in 2000, it raises
some questions about the historical roots of the partition of the village.
16. Ahmad and Jamal Khatib, Qaryati wa al-Ayam [My Village and the Ages] (Nazareth, 1990),
p. 9.
17. Palestine, Metulla, 1:20,000 series, sheet 20-29, 21-29 Composite. The Survey of Palestine
1941.
18. Palestine, Metulla, 1:20,000 series, sheet 20-29, 21-29 Composite. The Survey of Palestine
1945, corrected with aerial photos in 1945.
19. Marjayoûn, Levant 1:50,000 NI-36-XII-2 c. Map drawn and printed by the Sécurité générale
of the forces française du Levant, April 1944.
���. Syrie. Répertoire alphabétique des noms des lieux habités [Syria: Alphabetical Listing of the
Names of Inhabited Places], Dressé et publié par le Service géographique des forces françaises du
Levant, August 1945 (3rd edition), p. 163.
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 545
A third version of the boundary which, to the best of my knowledge, began to appear in 1963, divided Ghajar into two sections, leaving the southern part of the village
in Syria and placing the northern section in Lebanon. This version for the first time
named the “Lebanese” part of the village as al-Wazzani, thus giving the impression
that Ghajar and al-Wazzani were two entirely different villages.21 This 1963 map is of
critical importance, as it served as the basis for the UN decision to partition Ghajar in
2000.
Finally, another cartographic inconsistency is the course of the shared LebaneseSyrian boundary from the area of Ghajar to the point where it meets Palestine, about
100 meters south of the Roman Bridge. While some maps follow the Hasbani riverbed
as the course of this line, other maps show a banana shaped line on the western side of
the river from the area of Ghajar to the tri-border junction, thus including within Syria
a relatively substantial territory west of the Hasbani.
Had there been a border demarcation venture between Syria and Lebanon similar
to the one performed by the Paulet-Newcombe Commission, no doubt the border surveyors would have been strongly inclined to place Ghajar in Syria. It was natural to include it within a larger ‘Alawi community rather than to leave it in isolation in Lebanon
(or Palestine, for that matter) where it would have been the only ‘Alawi village in an
overwhelmingly Shi‘a, Sunni, and Christian region. This was in part the logic that dictated the work of Paulet and Newcombe, and there is no reason to doubt that it would
have guided a hypothetical Syrian-Lebanese demarcation commission.22 Indeed, no
matter what maps indicated, as far as the villagers and their neighbors were concerned,
the village was Syrian, if only due to the fact that its residents were ‘Alawis. To be sure,
it was not only a matter of “sentiments” that tied Ghajar to Syria, but also bureaucracy,
as the village appears in all official Syrian and Lebanese documents (except for maps)
as being part of the former and not the latter.
On Ghajar and the Sheb‘a Farms
Placing Ghajar in Syria inevitably creates a spatial difficulty in the Sheb‘a Farms
— the southwestern slopes of Mount Hermon — if one insists on including this area in
Lebanon. This problem was noted as early as the 1930s by French officers who served
in the region and reported on the cartographic anomaly in the Sheb‘a Farms,23 where
the boundary line as drawn in French maps did not follow the de facto practice of the
residents. While maps, they reported, followed the watershed along the southwestern
slopes of Mount Hermon as the boundary between Syria and Lebanon, the local population as well as French officers themselves treated Wadi al-‘Assal as the line separating
�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
. Liban, Tyre-Nabatiya, 1:50,000 series, Service géographique de l’armée, 1963. I����������������
would like to
thank Ray Milefsky for bringing this map to my attention.
22. See, for example, the debate about splitting the Shi‘ite community between Palestine and Lebanon
in Asher Kaufman, “Between Palestine and Lebanon: Seven Shi‘i Villages as a Case Study of Boundaries,
Identities and Conflict,” The Middle East Journal, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Autumn 2006), pp. 686-706.
23. See Note 8. Also Frederic Hof, “A Practical Line: The Line of Withdrawal from Lebanon and
its Potential Applicability to the Golan Heights,” The Middle East Journal, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter
2001), pp. 33-35. These French officers obviously did not use this appellation then. The term “Sheb‘a
Farms” began to appear in Lebanese media in the early 1980s.
546 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
the two states. These officers also noted that if one were to regard Wadi al-‘Assal as
the boundary separating Syria and Lebanon, then keeping the lowland in Syria, at the
area of Ghajar, would become a territorial challenge, for only a thin strip of land would
contiguously connect this area to the Syrian Golan Heights. Adding another layer of
complexity, they argued that Nukhayleh, on the lowland, southeast of Ghajar, was considered by all as a Lebanese enclave inside Syrian territory. They also urged the High
Commission to conduct a full boundary demarcation project to amend these problems.
No such project was ever carried out to date, and the entanglement that was discovered
in the 1930s remained intact in 2000 when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Only this time Israel, on the one hand, and Hizbullah, on the other hand, were players
in this geopolitical predicament, making a clear recipe for conflict.
Since these French documents from the diplomatic archives in Nantes and other
evidence were disclosed, the UN has attempted to re-address the problem of the Sheb‘a
Farms, particularly after the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah. It has
been projected that if the conflict over the Sheb‘a Farms is resolved, Hizbullah would
lose its pretext to maintain its armed wing and that in this way the moderate forces in
Lebanon would be strengthened. UN geographer Miklos Pinther, who was in charge of
demarcating the Blue Line, was recalled from his retirement to resolve the dispute over
the area. This would be the first step before readdressing the question of sovereignty
over this area. Pinther, however, could not square the circle. While he was able to geographically define the territorial extent of the Farms along the southwestern slopes of
Mount Hermon, following in essence the French reports from the 1930s, he was unable — perhaps unwilling — to deal with the lowland, where Nukhayleh and Ghajar
are located, leaving them out of his report. And so, the Sheb‘a Farms dispute remains
open. Syria and Lebanon would not demarcate their shared boundary in the region (and
elsewhere), Israel would not “return” this undefined region to Lebanon, and the UN,
despite its offer to manage this region until a peace accord is reached, could not move
forward with this proposal so long as the three players — or four, if one counts Hizbullah — would not budge from their positions.
Ghajar, Nukhayleh, and the War over Waters
The proximity of Ghajar and Nukhayleh to the sources of the Jordan River and
to the northern demilitarized zone along the 1949 Syrian-Israeli armistice line placed
them at the center of border skirmishes between the two states. As mentioned, al-Wazzani Springs are literally below Ghajar, whereas Nukhayleh is only 800 meters north of
the Dan Springs, the largest source of the Jordan River24 inside Israeli territory, which
virtually scraped the contested boundary line with Syria. Additionally, the demilitarized zones have been at the center of border tensions since 1949. Following the SyrianIsraeli armistice agreement, the three non-contiguous areas that were occupied by Syria
inside Palestine/Israel during the 1948 war were demilitarized, and sovereignty over
them remained unsettled pending a peace agreement between the two states. Israel,
however, made every possible effort to impose its sovereignty over them, instigating
24. Arnon Medzini, The River Jordan: Frontiers and Water (London: SOAS Water Research
Group of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2001), p. 8.
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 547
many of the clashes along its border with Syria. The smallest demilitarized zone (4,423
dunams; one dunam equals 1,000 square meters) was at the northeast tip of Israel,
about two kilometers southeast of Nukhayleh.
This is not the place to recount the chronicles of the “Water Wars” and the conflicts over the demilitarized zones.25 Rather, I am interested here only in their relevance
to questions of sovereignty and land ownership in the area that concerns us. In this
context, I will briefly discuss two linked border incidents that serve our purpose, one
related primarily to Ghajar and the Wazzani Springs and the other to Nukhayleh and the
Dan Springs. In June 1964, after five years of construction, Israel inaugurated its National Water Carrier and began transferring water from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev.
The Arab states had been anxious about this project since the early 1950s, viewing it as
a strategic threat to their own power and interests. Arab leadership decided to divert the
sources of the Jordan River that were within their sovereign territories, so as to prevent
their waters from flowing into Israel. A diversion plan began to be explored by the Arab
League as early as 1960, and in January 1964, at the first Arab Summit in Cairo, it took
a final operational turn.
Since the early 1950s, the United States had been closely involved in efforts to
reach a regional water sharing program between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in what
came to be known as the Unified Plan, or more popularly as the Johnston Plan, after Eric Johnston, US Special Envoy to the region. The State Department, therefore,
closely monitored the escalation in the 1960s, particularly with regards to Israel’s
water plans and consequent Arab responses. Indeed, US national archives are filled
with reports from US diplomats and intelligence agents about border skirmishes and
water-related conflicts during the 1950s and 60s. One of these reports, dispatched to the
State Department from February to April 1963, is a case in point.26 US Ambassador to
Lebanon Armin H. Meyer (1961-1965), reported to Washington on the construction of
a dam and a tunnel from the Hasbani River, at the Wazzani Springs just below Ghajar,
intended to reach Nukhayleh and irrigate 7,500-8,000 dunams that mostly belonged to
Ghajar villagers. This project was part of the diversion plan of the Jordan River, first
proposed at the Arab League Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Baghdad in February
1961. Lebanon’s share in this project was to divert the waters of the Hasbani River by
building a set of storage dams, a diversion tunnel from the Hasbani to the Litani, and a
pumping station above al-Wazzani Springs.27
The Ambassador began his final report by making the following statement: “Lebanon’s border with Syria in the region of the Hasbani River has never been clearly determined bilaterally and has never been properly demarcated. As a result, the boundaries
shown on Syrian and Lebanese maps of the area do not coincide.” The report then contains
a detailed explanation of an extremely convoluted cartographic and territorial reality, ap-
25. On the water wars and the demilitarized zones see Miriam R. Lowi, Water and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Ami Gluska, The Israeli Military and the Origins of the
1967 War (London: Routledge, 2007).
26. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 59, Armin H. Meyer to Department of State, Box 3972, Airgram A-753, February 12, 1963; Airgram A-847, February 26, 1963;
Airgram A-862, March 1, 1963; Airgram no. A-1057, April 24, 1963.
27. NARA, RG 59, Records relating to refugee matters and Jordan Waters, 1957-1966, Box 9,
“Arab League Consideration of Israel’s Planned Diversion of Jordan Waters,” no date.
548 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
pended with a sketch. First, according to the Ambassador, Syria exercised sovereignty
over Ghajar as well as over a stretch of territory north of the village (marked on the sketch
in slanted lines). “Lebanon,” Meyer continued, “has acquiesced to this situation and has
shown no inclination to pursue its cartographic claim.” Furthermore, to get clarifications
from Lebanon, the American Embassy approached the Lebanese Direction des Affaires
Géographiques et Géodésiques (DAGG) but received a casual and vague sketch of the
border. Meyer concluded that the de facto reality was that Syria controlled this area and
that consequently the dam that had just been started to be built was divided between
Syria and Lebanon. The western side of the dam (west of the Hasbani) was in Lebanese
territory, whereas the eastern side of the dam was de facto in Syria, while the canal
(marked on the sketch as a series of circled links) was exclusively in Syria.
Sketch 1
In his report, Meyer alluded to two additional ambiguous areas. One was the area
indicated in the sketch by vertical shading which was claimed by both states but controlled by Lebanon with Syria’s tacit consent. The second ambiguous area, indicated
by horizontal shading, runs west of the Hasbani River along its right bank, roughly
from Ghajar to the tri-border meeting spot, 100 meters south of Jisr al-Ghajar, or the
Roman Bridge. While maps of both Syria and Lebanon place this region within Syria,
explained the Ambassador, Lebanon was in de facto control of it, with Syria’s consent.
Meyer concluded this section of his report with the following statement:
In conclusion, it appears that both governments have tacitly accepted the HasbaniWazzani River as the ‘natural’ boundary between Syria and Lebanon from a point
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 549
slightly north of the Wazzani spring [emphasis added] and the new diversion dam to
the Israeli frontier. It is equally clear that neither government wishes to raise the issue of possibly conflicting claims in this region, or to formal boundary adjustments.
On the contrary, both appear anxious to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’
We shall return to the issue of “slightly north of the Wazzani spring” in the article’s
conclusion. But for now, let us stay in the 1960s, for Meyer’s report adds another important factor into the picture that sheds further light on the cartographic entanglement
of this region. On several occasions in his report, the Ambassador mentions Tapline,
the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, as an important source of information for this region.28 In
fact, part of the information in the Ambassador’s report was taken from the Beirut office of Tapline, which had been in close contact with the American Embassy. After all,
the uninterrupted flow of Saudi oil was a prime American interest then as much as it
is now. Tapline, at the time the longest oil pipeline stretching from Saudi Arabia to the
Zahrani port in Lebanon, passed through the Golan Heights and crossed the Nukhayleh
Plateau, passing just below Ghajar before crossing the border into Lebanon. After its
construction in 1950, the Tapline company signed agreements with the governments of
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, which the pipeline traversed, and also paid
compensations to the landowners where the pipe was laid. As a result, the Tapline company had invaluable information on land ownership and issues of sovereignty along the
1,213 kilometer pipeline.
Tapline appears in another US report about yet another border conflict, the November 1964 “Tel Dan [Tel al-Qadi] incident.”29 In January 1964, Egyptian President
Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser initiated the first gathering of all Arab heads of states to discuss
inter-Arab issues, including Israel’s water project and the consequent Arab response.
In this Arab summit and the following one, convened in September 1964, Arab heads
of state decided to actively pursue a diversion plan of the sources of the Jordan River.
It was agreed that Syria would divert the waters of the Banias Springs, Lebanon the
waters of the Wazzani Springs, and Jordan those of the Yarmuk River. There was no
question that a confrontation between Israel and its Arab neighbors would ensue.
In response to this challenge, Israel Defense Force (IDF) Chief of Staff Yitzhak
Rabin proposed that the Israeli government pave a patrol road just north of Tel alQadi, firstly to assert Israel’s sovereignty over Dan, the only source of the Jordan River
under Israeli control, and second, to toughen Israel’s stand vis à vis these challenges.
Moreover, Dan was located exactly between the two diversion projects of al-Wazzani
and Banias and a diversion tunnel was begun just above Mughr al-Sheb‘a, the lowest
“Sheb‘a Farm” on the southwestern slopes of the Hermon and no more than 1,500 meters northeast of Dan. Rabin explained at a government meeting that the Syrians had
expressed reservations as to the exact location of the border line north of Tel Dan/Tel
al-Qadi, claiming that a section of the patrol path passed through their territory. If Israel
28. For more information on Tapline see Douglas Little, “Pipeline Politics: America, TAPLINE,
and the Arabs,” The Business History Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 255–285.
29. See N. Bar-Yaacov, The Israel-Syrian Armistice (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1967), pp. 243–
262; Medzini, The River Jordan: Frontiers and Water, pp. 131–135. Gluska, The Israeli Military, pp.
48-58.
550 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
did not exercise its authority there, he argued, it might lose it altogether.30
In fact, this patrol path had been at the center of border tensions between Syria and
Israel since 1961. In order to secure Israeli sovereignty over the region, in October 1961
and again in May 1962, Israel began construction of a “patrol road” just north of the Dan
Springs, scraping the Israel-Syria boundary. This provoked Syrian protests and claims
that Israel had breached the armistice demarcation line and violated Syrian sovereignty.
The United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) that had been monitoring
the Israeli-Syrian armistice line through the Israel-Syria Armistice Committee (ISMAC)
attempted to mitigate the tension by trying to demarcate the Israel-Lebanon boundary
line from Metulla to the tri-border spot just south of the Roman Bridge31 and the SyriaIsrael boundary line from the bridge to Banias. UNTSO officials hoped that reducing
ambiguity as to the exact course of the armistice line also would reduce the possibility of
breaching the line and could put an end to Syrian-Israeli fighting.32 From October 1962
to March 1963, a UN surveying team attempted to survey and demarcate the line to no
avail, due mainly to the lack of cooperation of Israel, but also of Syria. The need to resolve this issue resurfaced in October 1964 when Israel, following the recommendation
of Rabin, announced its plans to extend the patrol path in Tel Dan so as to reach the north
section of the Dan Springs and pools. The need crystallized in early November when
actual work began. In a telegram to the Department of State, the American Consul in
Jerusalem astutely defined this incident as “the war of centimeters,” where Israel made
an effort to exercise its sovereignty up to the last possible grain of sand and even beyond.
He rightly forecast continued violence with such an approach.33
Major border skirmishes erupted between the two sides when Syria used its military
positions in Nukhayleh, only 800 meters north of Tel Dan, to pound the Israeli work site
at Tel Dan and the Jewish settlements in the region, while Israel answered in kind, using
its air force extensively for the first time since the early 1950s in a border skirmish against
Syria. Yet again UNTSO pressed to define the armistice line in this area to no avail. Yet
again the American Embassy in Lebanon sent a report to the State Department attempting
to explain the unfolding violent events, and yet again Tapline was used to clarify questions of sovereignty and land ownership in this region.34 The writer of the report explained
that the lack of a definite boundary had hampered UNTSO efforts to prevent the growing
tension along the frontier between Dan and Nukhayleh. Furthermore, he reported that
“Tapline officials state that a small area surrounding Noukhaile [sic] village and extending to the old Palestine border near Dan was a Lebanese enclave during mandate days and
was so shown on detailed maps of the that time.” He also added that “Lebanese cadastral
30. Gluska, The Israeli Military, p. 44. See also Yitzhak Rabin’s version of the events in his Pinkas
Sherut [Service Notebook], Vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: Maariv, 1979), pp. 121-122.
31. This was the only contested section of the Israel-Lebanon boundary line, from Border Pillar 38
to the Roman Bridge, as indicated in the 1949 Israel-Lebanon armistice agreement. See Rosalyn Higgins, United Nations Peacekeeping: Documents and Commentary, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1989–1981), p. 177.
32. See my manuscript (in process), Contested Frontiers: A History of the Syria, Lebanon, Israel
Tri-Border Region.
33. NARA, RG 59, Box 2354, US Consul in Jerusalem to Department of State, November 5,
1964.
34. NARA, RG 59, Box 2354, Theodore A. Wahl, First Secretary of US Embassy in Beirut to
Department of State, November 5, 1964.
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 551
maps reportedly also include lands in the enclave.” The report continues:
According to Tapline experts, the Lebanese mandate government administered the
Noukhaile enclave up to World War II. Since 1945, the area has been administered
by Syria. The Lebanese-Syrian Border Commission, which meets sporadically on
border delineation problems, is understood to have the Noukhaile enclave on its
agenda … Despite the unresolved differences, the Hasbani River has since 1945
been tacitly accepted by both countries as their natural border from a point above
the Wazzani Springs [emphasis added] to the Israel frontier.
Several interesting conclusions can be drawn from this report. First, it indicates that
Nukhayleh was a Lebanese enclave inside Syrian territory, very similarly to the French
reports from the 1930s. Yet, according to this report, the enclave stretched all the way to
the Palestine boundary. Indeed, given the fact that only 800 meters separated Nukhayleh
from Tel Dan in Israel, this enclave must have been located in a very narrow space, brushing the Tel Dan area. Second, as this document suggests, the boundary line between Syria
and Lebanon ran along the Hasbani from a point north of the Wazzani until the tri-border
meeting spot. I will return to this point in the conclusion, but for now it is sufficient
to note that as a result of the delineation of the Blue Line in 2000 and the partition of
Ghajar, the Lebanon-Syria boundary (under Israeli occupation) along the Hasbani starts
about 500 meters south of al-Wazzani Springs, thus leaving the northern part of Ghajar
inside Lebanon. Third, although Ghajar is not mentioned in this report, it is practically
impossible to separate its fate from that of Nukhayleh and, in fact, the entire Ghajar/
Nukhayleh Plateau. Ghajar’s agricultural lands circled Nukhayleh, and because the latter
is south of the former, it is basically unfeasible to sort out the sovereignty problem in the
region by placing Ghajar in Syria and leaving Nukhayleh in Lebanon. This spatial reality was possible before June 1967 simply because the non-existing boundary line was
entirely porous and neither Syria nor Lebanon cared much about this reality, preferring
instead to “let sleeping dogs lie.” However, Israel would change this status quo.
Israel Enters
It was four weeks after the end of the June 1967 war before Israel assumed control
over Ghajar. IDF units entered Ghajar on the afternoon of June 10,35 causing the flight
of about half of its population. But, given the fact that on Israeli maps the ‘Alawi village was placed in Lebanon, the IDF left it soon thereafter, thinking that the village was
inside Lebanese territory. It was only after Ghajar villagers appealed for assistance in
Marj ‘Ayun and were rejected, since Lebanese authorities saw them as Syrians, that they
approached Israel and asked to be occupied together with the rest of the Syrian Golan
Heights.36 The first census conducted by Israel of the Syrian population in the occupied
Golan Heights on August 10, 1967, registered 385 residents in Ghajar.37 The some 300
35. Matitiyahu Mayzel, Ha-Ma‘aracha ‘al Ha-Golan [The Golan Heights Campaign] (Tel Aviv:
Ma‘arachot, 2001), p. 349.
36. Khatib, Qaryati wa al-Ayam, p. 19; Livneh, “Le-Eizo Medina,” p. 50.
37. Ha-Gadah ha-Ma‘aravit shel ha-Yarden, Retsu‘at ‘Azah u-Tsefon Sinai, Ramat ha-Golan:
Netunim Meha-Pekidah ha-Kelalit [The West Bank of the Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Northern Sinai,
[Continued on next page]
552 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
additional residents who fled on June 10 never returned to the village and settled in the
Masakin Birzah neighborhood in Damascus, where many of them still live today.
Israeli maps of Ghajar before and after the 1967 war tell us a great deal about the
village and its vicinity. As noted, prior to the June 1967 war, Israeli maps placed Ghajar
in Lebanon. This was true also for a detailed 1:50,000 scale Israeli map from April 1967
of the area of Metulla, which I will use here to demonstrate several important points.38
First, according to this map, the built-up part of Ghajar extends from latitude coordinate
29720 to latitude coordinate 28000 (Israel Grid). Second, the village is divided into a
southern and a northern section, reminiscent of the same division that exists today due
to Ghajar’s partition by the Blue Line in 2000. Third, the map marks a tiny community
named ‘Arab al-Luweiza on the western, right bank of the Hasbani, exactly across from
Ghajar and west of the Wazzani Springs. This was the small Bedouin community that
first appeared on the 1862 French map as Loueizeh, mentioned earlier in the article. Indeed, since this map was published some 150 years ago, most other maps that followed
— French, British, Lebanese, Syrian, or Israeli — marked this community in different
spellings and forms west of Ghajar, across the Hasbani River.
Within a month after the end of the June 1967 war, Israeli cartographers were
already diligently producing maps of Israel which included the territories occupied during the war. Thus, a July 1967 map, a new edition of the abovementioned April 1967
map with only “minor” corrections, places Ghajar inside the area occupied by Israel
in the Syrian Golan Heights by moving the Lebanon-Syria boundary line (now under
Israeli control) further north.39 However, this line does not go further north enough, as
it runs straight between the southern and northern built-up sections of what, according
to the April 1967 map, was one Ghajar village, but in Lebanon. Additionally, the Israeli
cartographers who drew this map adopted the version of the 1963 Lebanese map that
not only divided Ghajar between Syria and Lebanon but also named the northern part of
the built-up area of the village al-Wazzani (at the same time they left ‘Arab al-Luwayza
in its place, on the western bank of the Hasbani, roughly west of Ghajar). Thus, as of
July 1967, Israeli maps clearly separated what were now distinctively two villages:
Ghajar in the south under Israeli control and al-Wazzani in the north, supposedly inside
Lebanon. Since the boundary in this region was never determined, this line drawn in Israeli maps was as arbitrary as any other line. Furthermore, it was only in the early 1970s
that Israel constructed a security fence separating its areas of control from Lebanon.
Therefore, although the post-1967 Israeli maps distinguished between the northern and
southern parts of the built-up area, naming the former al-Wazzani and the latter Ghajar,
this had no impact on the lives of the residents of this one village — or two — who
continued to regard their living space as one. And even when the security fence along
the Israel-Lebanon boundary was built, it did not run through Ghajar and the newly
born al-Wazzani, but rather encircled the entire built-up area from the north.
[Continued from previous page]
the Golan Heights: First Data from General Census] (Israel: Lishkah ha-merkazit li-statistikah,
1967), p. 203. The residents of ‘Ain Fit and Za‘ura, however, fled the Golan Heights together with the
majority of the Arab Syrian population.
38. Israel Grid, Metulla, 1:50,000, Sheet II-2, April 1967. See also Israel Grid, Metulla, 1:50,000,
Sheet 2-II, March, 1960; December 1965; Israel Grid, Safad, 1:100,000, March 1960.
39. Israel Grid, Safad, 1:100,000, January 1968; Metulla, 1:50,000, August 1969.
In the April 1967 map the two neighborhoods of Ghajar are seen. ‘Arab al-Luwayza, west of Ghajar, is marked as well. 2009 © All Rights
Reserved by the Survey of Israel.
April 1967 Map
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 553
554 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
July 1967 Map
In the July 1967 map, made following the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights,
the two neighborhoods became two different villages — Ghajar in the south and alWazzani in the north — and the boundary line passes right through them. 2009 © All
Rights Reserved by the Survey of Israel.
Was al-Wazzani a real village that gradually merged with Ghajar or was it a figment of a cartographer’s imagination? As stated, the earliest Lebanese map that mentions
al-Wazzani as a village north of Ghajar is from 1963. All French maps from the Mandate
years, including post-independence maps, make no mention of a village north of Ghajar.40
Neither does al-Wazzani appear in the most authoritative encyclopedia of Lebanese cities
and villages, Anis Furayha’s Mu‘ajam Asma’ al-Mudun wa al-Qura al-Lubnaniyya waTafsir Ma‘aniha.41 But, a certain al-Wazzani is mentioned in a guide of southern Leba40. Even some Lebanese maps from after 1963 do not place al-Wazzani as a village north of Ghajar.
See, for example, Liban, 1:250,000. Map produced by Direction des affaires géographiques, 1967.
41. Anis Furayha, Mu‘ajam Asma’ al-Mudun wa al-Qura al-Lubnaniyya wa-Tafsir Ma‘aniha [Dictionary of Names of Lebanese Cities and Villages and an Explanation of Their Meaning] (Beirut:
Maktabat Lubnan, 1972).
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 555
non’s cities and villages as a community that in the 1940s was settled by nomads and that
had been since called ‘Arab al-Wazzan, after the Wazzani Springs that are located east
of the village.42 One al-Wazzani village also appears in Lebanese histories of the Israeli
occupation of southern Lebanon as a small and impoverished Bedouin community that
suffered from Israeli incursions. But these accounts do not place this community north of
Ghajar but rather on the western bank of the Hasbani, west of the ‘Alawi village.43
Clearly, this al-Wazzani village is not the one that was “born” north of al-Ghajar
in the early 1960s. The answer to this puzzle lies in ‘Arab al-Luwayza, which, it seems,
is the same ‘Arab al-Wazzani west of the Hasbani. In fact, this small hamlet has two
names, but while on maps it mostly appears as ‘Arab al-Luweiza (or Loueizeh, Loueize),
in books and journalistic accounts on southern Lebanon it shows — if at all — as ‘Arab
al-Wazzan(i), or just as al-Wazzani. It is possible that the name of al-Wazzani Spring
“travelled” about 100 meters eastward and was “pasted” on the northern neighborhood
of Ghajar. Such a mistake could easily occur if no on-site survey took place when the
map was produced. Whatever the case might be, in 1963 Lebanese cartographers,44
followed in July 1967 by their Israeli colleagues, named the northern “neighborhood”
al-Wazzani, after the spring itself or after the village that exists west of Ghajar.
As of July 1967, this error began to appear frequently. Most but not all Lebanese
maps showed two villages — Ghajar in the south and al-Wazzani in the north — divided by the Syria-Lebanon boundary, while keeping ‘Arab al-Luwayza in its place. 45 This
was true for US maps46 as well as for UN maps, particularly the maps that determined
the territorial mandates of UNDOF in the Golan Heights (as of 1974) and UNIFIL in
southern Lebanon (as of 1978).
Ahmad and Jamal Khatib, who published their book on Ghajar in 1990, when the
partition of the village between Israeli controlled territory and Lebanon was not even
a conceivable act, wrote that there had never been a village called al-Wazzani north of
Ghajar. They also explained that the village always had been composed of a southern
and a northern neighborhood. The Khatibs state that construction in the northern part of
the village began in 1956 and that by 1967, 29 houses were built. According to them, by
42. Muhammad Qubaysi, Janub Lubnan: Dalil ‘Amm li-Mudunihi wa Qurah [South Lebanon: A
General Guide of Its Cities and Villages] (Lebanon, 1995), p. 572.
43. See for example, Yusuf Dib, Al-Janub Taht al-Ihtilal [The South under Occupation], Vol. 2
(Beirut: Harakat Amal, 1983), p. 81. See also references to al-Wazzani village in Mundhir Muhmud
Jabir, Al-Sharit al-Lubnani al-Muhtall [The Occupied Lebanese Strip] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine
Studies, 1999).
44. It is worth noting that 1963 was an important year in the history of Lebanese cartography. A
year earlier the Direction des Affaires Géodésique et Géographiques (DAGG) was established, replacing the not-too-competent Service Géographique de l’Armée Libanaise. A year after its establishment,
DAGG began producing relatively high quality maps of 1:50,000 scale, of which the Marjayoun sheet
that concerns us is part. The political context is also relevant. Since 1960, Lebanon and Syria engaged
halfheartedly and sluggishly in a dialogue on settling their disputes over their shared boundary. The
establishment of DAGG in 1963 was no doubt related to this fact. See Jacques Besancon, “Inventaire
de la documentation géographique: les cartes de Liban” [“Inventory of Geographic Documentation:
The Maps of Lebanon”], Vol. 1, Hannon (1966), p. 110.
��������������������������������������������������������������������������������
. See, for example, Carte du Liban, 1:100,000 series, Rachaya, Feuille 6, 1970.
������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
. See especially the CIA series “Southern Leb��������������������������������������������
anon Border Area” and “Southern Lebanon and
Vicinity” that began to be produced in the mid-1970s and have been reprinted several times since.
556 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
1990, 135 houses were erected in the northern neighborhood. Today, about 150 houses
are in the northern neighborhood based on an imprecise count in a 2008 satellite map
on Google Earth.47 This urban growth is only natural given the economic development
that the village has experienced since 1967. Its residents have worked in a variety of
jobs inside Israel: from assistance in the archeological excavations of Tel Dan to working in the regional factories to state employment in their own educational system and
regional council. In 1981, when Israel imposed its legal and administrative system on
the Golan Heights and offered citizenship to its Arab residents, the village took Israeli
citizenship en masse (unlike most of the Druze in the Golan Heights), further strengthening its ties with the state and improving its economic lot.
The 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War facilitated ties between Ghajar and Lebanon.
From 1978 until 2000, Israel maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon, making
the boundary between the two states irrelevant. For Ghajar that meant easy access to
Lebanon, which some of the villagers must have used for their own economic advantage.
Indeed, some Ghajar residents became border entrepreneurs, particularly after 1975, and
engaged in smuggling of all sorts, including drugs, as reported numerous times in the
Israeli press. But the question still remains if during those years Ghajar expanded into
Lebanon simply because it was possible for its residents to build on their privately-owned
land but within Lebanese sovereign territory, or was this expansion within Syrian territory, occupied since 1967 by Israel? To answer this question one needs to know where the
boundary between Lebanon and Syria lies, which brings us back to the initial issue.
Waking Sleeping Dogs: The Creation of the Blue Line and
the Partition of the Village
In April 2000, after 18 years of occupation, Israel announced its intention to withdraw from southern Lebanon. The UN then embarked on a cartographic project of
defining the Israeli line of withdrawal. Several contested points arose, of which the
Sheb‘a Farms have become the most volatile. In creating the Blue Line, the UN team
decided to partition Ghajar, leaving its “southern neighborhood” within the Israeli controlled area and placing its “northern neighborhood” within Lebanon.
Since the UN had no Syria-Lebanon boundary treaty to work with, its cartographic team, headed by Miklos Pinther, had to resort to maps from the pre-1967 tri-border
meeting point at the Roman Bridge to the post 1967 spot on Mount Hermon in defining the Israeli line of withdrawal. And maps, as we already have seen, placed Ghajar
at times in Lebanon, and at other times in Syria, and yet other times divided between
the two states. In a phone interview and subsequent emails with Miklos Pinther, he
explained why the UN team decided to partition Ghajar:48
The line across the Al Wazzani-Al Ghajar village(s) was problematic from the very
beginning. This segment of the Withdrawal Line, of course, was neither part of the
1923 Anglo-French Agreement, nor the 1950 Armistice Demarcation, which were
the accepted basis for our work. Moreover, the adjacent villages shown on numer47. Google Earth coordinates: 33°16’ 22” N 35°37’ 23” E / 33.27278°N 35.62306°E / 33.27278;
35.62306.
48. Phone interview by author with Miklos Pinther, April 30, 2009.
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 557
ous maps we have consulted were functioning as one settlement in 2000. … After
much consideration we decided that the alignment of the Withdrawal Line shall be
in conformity with the boundary shown on the 1974 UNDOF disengagement map. This was the most recent map which Syria and Israel had signed together, thus,
in fact, accepting the contours of its delineated boundary.49 Pinther explained that the
UN team had long sessions with the Lebanese and Israeli teams debating the potential
partition of the village. The Israeli team strongly argued against partition and offered
alternatives, but none of the plans seemed workable. Pinther noted three issues that
finally determined the fate of the village:
(a) our mandate was to find a withdrawal line that best approximates the ‘internationally recognized boundaries;’ (b) we were not delimiting or demarcating a
boundary; (c) and it was not possible for us to enter the village complex. The last point is particularly interesting. The situation along the Israel-Lebanon
boundary was tense when the UN set out to determine the Line of Withdrawal. Hizbullah took over the territory vacated by Israel, and Israeli soldiers, re-deployed out of
Lebanon, were extremely nervous at the prospects of a flare-up with the militant group.
Pinther recounted how an edgy Israeli soldier shot at an inspection tour of General James
Sreenan, Deputy Force Commander of UNIFIL, which was led by Vladimir Bessarabov,
a member of their cartographic team. The bottom line was that while the UN team flew
in a helicopter around Ghajar and also observed the village on the ground from the west
bank of the Hasbani, it did not enter Ghajar to view on-site the prospects and outcome
of its partition. Examining Ghajar from the west bank of the Hasbani, they saw the two
“neighborhoods” and were confident that these were in fact two separate villages.
The Lebanese team, headed by Amin al-Hutayt, strongly pushed for the partition of
the village and refused to accept any compromise on the matter. In his book, Hutayt explained that over time, Ghajar expanded to the north and its residents built houses on land
owned by them but inside Lebanon’s sovereign territory. Knowing the geographic reality
of the region better than the UN team, Hutayt makes no mention of a Lebanese village
in the north that merged with Ghajar in the south. Thus, according to him, the Lebanese
team insisted on following “maps and the international border treaties” and demanded
the partition of the village into a southern two-fifths under Israeli control and a northern
three-fifths under Lebanon’s sovereignty. Al-Hutayt does not specify the international
boundary treaties to which he is referring.50 To be sure, had there been a boundary treaty,
the UN mission of determining the Line of Withdrawal would have been much simpler.
As for maps, one assumes al-Hutayt referred to the UNDOF and UNIFIL maps that
indeed showed Ghajar and al-Wazzani divided between Syria and Lebanon. It is worth
noting that these same maps that Lebanon accepted in the Ghajar case were rejected by it
in the area of the Sheb‘a Farms, for they placed this area within the Syrian Golan Heights.
49. The same map, and the map of UNIFIL, the UN force in southern Lebanon, served the UN as
the final evidence that the southwestern slopes of Mount Hermon — the Sheb‘a Farms — are within
the Syrian Golan Heights.
50. Amin Muhammad Huteit, Sira‘ ‘ala ‘Ard Lubnan [Struggle over the Land of Lebanon] (Beirut:
Dar al-Amir, 2004), pp. 197-200.
558 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
During the entire ordeal the villagers were not consulted once. They protested loudly, but
in the grand game of the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon they were less than
pawns. Who would listen to a group of ‘Alawis with no political leverage? No one.
And so, since the summer of 2000, Ghajar has been divided between Israel and
Lebanon. Its residents live in an impossible reality where, although they hold Israeli
citizenship, they are de facto disconnected from the state. Passage in and out of the
village, which is a closed military zone, is restricted to residents of the village. The
village also has become a focus of intense fighting between Israel and Hizbullah. On
November 21, 2005, Hizbullah attempted to abduct Israeli soldiers stationed on the
“Israeli” side of the village and in the summer war of 2006 the village was a center of
major combat. During this war Israel re-occupied the northern section of the village,
easing some of the day to day difficulties of living in a divided community. Since then,
Ghajar has been at the center of international bickering over its fate. UN Resolution
1701, which put an end to the 2006 war, obliged Israel to withdraw from the northern
section of Ghajar, but Israel declined to do so, due to security considerations. Instead,
the UN offered to assume control of the “Lebanese” part of Ghajar. With President Barack Obama’s attempt to reboot peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the
US administration has pressured Israel to withdraw from northern Ghajar as a sign of
goodwill to the pro-Western camp in Lebanon and in an effort to weaken Hizbullah’s
stature in the country. An Israeli withdrawal from Ghajar could be an easy way to appease the Obama Administration in an otherwise strained relationship between Israel’s
right-wing government and the US President. Israel’s Foreign Minister’s plan to build
an impenetrable fence along the Blue Line in Ghajar and evacuate the residents living
north of it indicates that it might be only a question of time before Israel pulls out of
northern Ghajar. This plan also indicates that Israel does not trust the ability of UNIFIL
to control northern Ghajar effectively and prefers instead to seal off entirely its boundary with Lebanon. To achieve that, Ghajar would only be a small price to pay.
Conclusions
Ghajar is no different from other contested sections of the Syria-Lebanon border.
With the absence of a border treaty and with so many maps showing alternative routes,
any border would be arbitrary so long as Syria and Lebanon fail to conclude a comprehensive boundary demarcation venture finalized by a formal treaty. But the case of
Ghajar is unique for its human dimension. Unlike the Sheb‘a Farms, which are in an
uninhabited area, the Blue Line created a human tragedy for the residents of Ghajar by
splitting their village. It also has produced a major security problem for Israel and has
not brought any conceivable gains for Lebanon, which always has recognized that the
villagers are Syrians, even if in 2000 it claimed the northern section of the village to be
within its sovereign territory.
Until the 1967 war, there were two clear interpretations of the boundary line in
the Ghajar area. One placed the entire village in Lebanon, while the other placed it
entirely in Syria. The latter interpretation was the de facto practice, accepted by both
Syria and Lebanon, as indicated by all official documents of the two states. Furthermore, the American reports from 1963-1964 clearly indicate that the interpretation that
put Ghajar in Syria also included a stretch of land north of the village within Syrian
ghajar and other anomalies in the tri-border region M 559
territory. The US sketch does not contain exact coordinates, but it gives us a clue as to
the course of the boundary by indicating that the Hasbani riverbed, from a point north
of the Wazzani springs until the Israel boundary, serves as the boundary between Syria
and Lebanon. Juxtaposing the US sketch with the map of the Blue Line clearly shows
that the Syrian version of the boundary included the space of both “neighborhoods” of
the village as within Syria. It is also reasonable to assume that had there been a different
village north of Ghajar, the sketch and the written reports would have mentioned it, for
the contested boundary would have passed just north or south of it.
The Blue Line51 The 1963 Sketch
Giving a name — al-Wazzani — to the northern neighborhood of Ghajar was a
cartographic error and one of the prime reasons for the decision to partition the village in 2000. But the only Wazzani village in the region is the small hamlet west of
the Hasbani River that maps identify as ‘Arab al-Luweiza/Loueiseh.52 This is the small
Bedouin community that, as of 2001, became the focus of Israeli-Lebanese bickering
over Lebanon’s plans to build a pumping station in it that would take water from the
Wazzani Springs and supply it to the village and to a few other communities in its
vicinity.53
51. I would like to thank Miklos Pinther for providing me with this map. One can still see on this
map, when superimposed on the American sketch, the old Marj ‘Ayun-Banias road and the turnoff to
Ghajar. This helps to place the village in relation to the boundary line(s).
52. ‘Assaf Abu Rahhal, “Hayat ‘Arab al-Wazzani Kama Turawiha Nisa’uha” [“The Life of Arab
al-Wazzani As Told by Their Women”], al-Akhbar, February 28, 2009.
53. Hussein Amery, “Water Wars in the Middle East: A Looming Threat,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 168, No. 4 (December 2002), pp. 313-323. For an EU attempt to resolve this water conflict
see EU Rapid Reaction Mechanism, Lebanon/Israel Wazzani Springs Dispute (January 2004), http://
www.medea.be/files/Repport_EU_Com_Water_Israel_Lebanon_Wazzani.pdf.
560 M MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
While Israeli maps before 1967 placed Ghajar in Lebanon, they also provide us
with a very clear depiction of the built-up area of the village. Thus, according to the
April 1967 map, the village already was composed of two neighborhoods, and the
northern neighborhood touched latitude line 29800 (Israel Grid). True, Ghajar today
goes beyond this line, but only as far as 29810, which indicates that the expansion of
the village into Lebanon did not exceed 100 meters. It is difficult to determine decisively when the northern part of the village began to be built. While Ahmad and Jamal
Khatib argue that the northern neighborhood started to be built in the 1950s, the 1945
list of Syrian towns and villages that partitioned Ghajar into a lower and an upper part
suggests that the village already then may have been composed of two sections.54
The UN was under great pressure to complete the delineation of the Israeli Line
of Withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and in this process Ghajar was partitioned.
To be sure, UN cartographers did not have at their disposal all the information that is
laid out in this article. Can and should the partition be undone? With the belligerent
atmosphere between Israel and Lebanon, it will take much effort on Lebanon’s part to
“give up” territory that was “liberated” — to use Lebanon’s terminology — and return
it to Israeli control. Had Israel shown willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights,
things would be different, because Ghajar (and the Sheb‘a Farms) would have been
given back to Syria and these border anomalies would evolve into a Syrian-Lebanese
matter. But the current Israeli government already has vowed not to withdraw from the
Golan Heights, reducing the chance for a Syria-Israel peace deal. Nevertheless, given
the human dimension of the Ghajar predicament, which is supported by a host of evidence that the partition was not inevitable, one hopes that Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian
politicians would be able to go beyond their narrow-minded political perspectives and
re-unite the village. The time will come when Syria and Israel reach a peace accord
that involves Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Then, hopefully, the residents
of Ghajar will be able to take the revived bus line from Marj ‘Ayun in Lebanon to
Qunaytra in Syria, boarding the bus at the “historic” stop right out of their village. Perhaps another line would connect Ghajar to Kiryat Shmona in Israel. And who knows,
Ghajar residents might then consider changing the name of their village to muthallath
al-salam, or “the peace triangle.”
54. Syrie. Répertoire alphabétique des noms des lieux habités.