Contested Frontiers in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel Region studies one of the flash points of the Middle East since the 1960s-a tiny region of roughly 100 square kilometers where Syria, Lebanon, and Israel come together but where the borders have never been clearly marked. This was the scene of Palestinian guerrilla warfare in the 1960s and '70s and of Hezbollah confrontations with Israel from 2000 to the 2006 war. At stake are rural villagers who live in one country but identify themselves as belonging to another, the source of the Jordan River, part of scenic and historically significant Mount Hermon, the conflict-prone Shebaa Farms, and a defunct oil pipeline. Asher Kaufman uses French, British, American, and Israeli archives; Lebanese and Syrian primary sources and newspapers; interviews with borderland residents and with UN and U.S. officials; and a historic collection of maps. He analyzes the geopolitical causes of conflict and prospects for resolution, assesses implications of the impasse over economic zones in the eastern Mediterranean where Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Turkey all have claims, and reflects on the meaning of borders and frontiers today.
List of Maps and Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Mapping the Tri-Border Region 1. Colonial Mapping 2. Mapping the Mandates 3. After Independence 4. The United Nations: Mapping, Mediating, and Peacekeeping, 19492000 5. Cartographic Wars: The Israeli Withdrawal from South Lebanon and Beyond Part II: Borders, Boundaries, and Frontiers, 1924-1982 6. The Making of the Tri-Border Region, 19241949 7. During and Between Wars: 19491973 8. Fatahland: How Lebanon Became a Frontline State 9. Whose Water Is This? Boundaries and Hydropolitics 10. Crossing Boundaries: The Trans-Arabian Pipeline and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Part III: The Shebaa Farms Dispute and Beyond 11. A Fabricated Border Quandary? 12. The Shebaa Farms, Hizbullah, and Lebanese Sovereignty 13. Joha's Nail? Israel and the Shebaa Farms 14. Resolving the Dispute? The United Nations in the Tri-Border Region, 20002010 Conclusion: On Cartography, Sovereignty, and Conflict Notes Selected Bibliography Index
""A meticulously detailed, carefully written account of the geopolitics of a very small but highly contested area... The construction of the book unfolds like an elegant mathematical proof, in which the reader is shown how a led to b and then to c, and how a sequence of various elements, piled on top of one another in chronological succession, have led to this apparently insignificant area becoming a major point of contestation in the Arab-Israeli conflict.""
