In September 2024, the Israeli military attacks across its northern border that had begun the previous fall escalated into a war on Lebanon. By the time a tenuous ceasefire began on November 27, 2024, Israeli attacks had killed nearly 4,000 people, injured over 16,000, and displaced over 1 million. Depending on one’s definition of “war,” this was the fourth, fifth, seventh, or nth Israeli war on Lebanon. Scholars and officials alike agree that the Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982 constitute wars and concur as well on the July 2006 war during which Israeli airstrikes, naval attacks, and a ground invasion killed 1,191 people in Lebanon, wounded thousands and displaced half a million. But does the 1969 Israeli attack on the Lebanese airport count? What about 1993, when Israeli planes killed over 100 civilians in the span of a week? Or 1996, when Israeli forces bombed a United Nations bunker where 800 civilians had taken refuge, killing 106 Lebanese civilians and injuring 116 Lebanese and 4 Fijian UNIFIL soldiers? And what about the Nakba? No matter how one names these incidences of mass violence, the 2023–24 Israeli assault on Lebanon is the latest in a nearly century-long history of Zionist and Israeli attacks that began in 1948.

This connection to the Nakba reminds us that we can only understand the regular Israeli violence on Lebanon—as well as the messy entanglements of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation and colonialism which are beyond the scope of this essay—within the context of Zionist settler-colonialism. Depicting this violence as the product of wars between sovereign states elides not only this history but also the shared histories and geographies that connect Lebanon and Palestine, shared contexts that persist despite efforts to sever them by both European mandate–colonial and Zionist settler­–colonial authorities (Khayyat 2022).

The border between Lebanon and Palestine has been troubled and troubling since its inception. Rather than contiguous places, southern Lebanon and northern Palestine are part of a continuous space of history, topography, waterways, religious sites, networks of agricultural labor and merchant trade, dialects, kinship circles, and struggles for liberation, as well as Ottoman Empire territorial delineations. When European imperial powers drew the borders of the Mandates (which they carved from the Ottoman Empire after World War I) European Jewish Zionist leaders lobbied them, unsuccessfully, to include the Litani River, today in south Lebanon, within the British Mandate for Palestine, coveting its waters for their future settler-colonial state. As European forces imposed colonial boundaries, the area’s Indigenous Arab population resisted efforts to separate them from people and places important to their lives for generations. The Palestinian pound initially remained a key form of currency in south Lebanon. Residents of seven villages in the Palestine Mandate are registered as Lebanese citizens. Palestinians rebelling against the British in 1936 bought arms in south Lebanon, where a parallel anti-colonial resistance movement thrived.

During the 1947–48 phase of the Nakba, as European Jewish militias ethnically cleansed over 500 Palestinian villages, Zionist desires for land and water extended those attacks north of the mandate border. After the Israeli state’s unilateral establishment, its troops massacred civilians across northern Palestine and southern Lebanon. When armistice negotiations began between the Zionist settler-colonial state and its neighbors, the Israeli military occupied fourteen villages on the Lebanese side. It withdrew from those fourteen, but at least ten villages, their residents killed or expelled by Zionist militias, remain within a disputed area. Future Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, reiterated the Zionist desire to control the Litani.

Post-mandate states in the MENA/SWANA region are assumed to be post-colonial, except Palestine. Yet what can be “post” about a context where a settler-colonial state continues to kill and maim civilians, regularly encroaching on towns and villages, destroying homes, sowing fields with poison, and establishing military outposts? The border between Palestine and Lebanon is no border in practice nor even in name. It’s a disputed line—“the Blue Line”—drawn by the United Nations in 2000 when they needed to determine whether the Israeli military had withdrawn from Lebanese territory, at the end of a 22-year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that began in 1978. Disputed in part because the Israeli military still occupies the Shebaa Farms, fifteen square miles of Lebanese territory along the Blue Line. Disputed not as to whether the area is occupied, but rather, as to whether Israeli forces are occupying Lebanese or Syrian land.

Since the ceasefire that ended the latest war on Lebanon went into effect, Israeli troops have killed at least seventy-one civilians and have continued to destroy buildings and bulldoze agricultural plots. Israeli destruction of residences and infrastructure in south Lebanon, and its poisoning the land with toxic white phosphorus are colonial efforts to make that land unlivable for the people who belong to it. Israeli troops were to leave southern Lebanon by January 26, and then by February 18. As of June 30, 2025, they are still there, in what is now another military occupation, established by unilateral announcement that the Israeli state would maintain five outposts in Lebanon’s south.

Settler-colonial states are expansionist states, and expansionism is a key characteristic of Zionist/Israeli settler–colonialism, a desire periodically restated by Israeli political leaders and official documents. Combine expansionism with the “racial elimination” that is necessary to maintain a Jewish ethno-nationalist state (Sayegh 1965, 27), and the line between northern Palestine and southern Lebanon blurs further. Alongside the Israeli military attack on Lebanon, in fall 2024, Zionist calls for the settlement of south Lebanon escalated. At least several thousand Israeli settlers lobby to build settlements there, imagine the Hebrew names that will replace Lebanese village names, design settler homes for the Lebanese landscape, and poster public spaces with signs calling for Lebanon’s settlement. While it’s tempting to dismiss them as a fringe movement, they represent “the settler advance-guard,” “the frontier encampment” (Wolfe 2006, 393). In the context of an expansionist, settler-colonial state with founding and current leaders who imagine it with more land and more water, in a context where every Zionist expansionist settler movement (like every settler movement), appears marginal before establishing itself—in the West Bank, in the Golan Heights—those movements cannot be ignored. They are the outward expression of a settler-colonial ideology that is only publicly suppressed by the Israeli state when pragmatism demands prioritizing other settler goals.

Just as we understand Indigenous connections to land and one another as uninterrupted by colonial borders (Simpson 2014), we should understand settler-colonial states and projects as unconfined by international assumptions about borders. Settler moves to expand and control and divide are moves to sever the myriad connections among peoples and land. Palestine and Lebanon are inextricably linked in a continuity that long precedes the brutality of borders and continues to defy their logics against all odds. The Indigenous populations’ relationships to the land and to one another are not mediated through the boundaries of the nation-states that control their territories. One can neither comprehend nor stand in solidarity with either Lebanon or Palestine without understanding them as confronting facets of the same settler expansionist project.