For the early Zionists, settling Palestine meant settling the largest possible territory that vaguely overlapped with their biblical vision of the holy land.

Maps presented by the World Zionist Organization to the Paris Conference clearly show that Zionists sought to include in their territory southern Lebanon, including the Litani River and up to the coastal city of Saida - an estimated 60km from the current border.

Zionists, like all European settlers, were also keen to secure the most fertile land and fresh water sources. Eastern boundaries of the proposed map included large swathes of Syrian and Jordanian territory that fully engulfed Lake Tiberias and the Jordan River. French counter-proposals forced the Zionists to confine their activities after WWI to what is now referred to as historic Palestine.

Initial ambitions to colonise southern Lebanon were shelved but never extinguished. During this latest war, Michael Freund, who previously served as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy communications director, claimed that “historically speaking, southern Lebanon is in fact northern Israel”. He cited the Book of Joshua as mentioning “Sidon explicitly as being promised to the Jewish people”. Freund also listed several shrines in the south as Jewish and evidence of the right to the land.

The invocation of religious sites as justification for colonial conquest is an old and debunked Zionist trope. Freund was not alone in reviving it. One of Israel’s pseudo-archaeologists, Zeev Erlich, was embedded in the Israeli army during the recent invasion of Lebanon. Israeli troops burned and destroyed parts of the shrine. Before withdrawing, they demolished the surrounding historic buildings of the village’s old quarter, the very place they claimed as theirs.