The Levant: Bilad al-Sham

When you grouped "Laventine" with Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan, you were pointing at something real. These countries are pieces of one older region. This chapter explains that region, why the four were once a single space, and the wars and massacres you are most likely to hear referenced when people say "the Levant."

What "the Levant" means

The Levant is the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and its hinterland: today's Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and adjoining areas. The name comes from a French and Italian word for "rising," as in where the sun rises, the east.

In Arabic the same region is Bilad al-Sham, often translated as Greater Syria. For most of history "Syria" did not mean the modern country with that name; it meant this whole region. A traveler in 1900 going from Beirut to Damascus to Jerusalem to Amman would not have crossed a single international border. They were all Bilad al-Sham, all Ottoman.

Don't be confused: "Syria" the region vs. "Syria" the country. Until the 20th century, "Syria" usually meant the entire Levant (Greater Syria). The modern Republic of Syria is only one slice of that older region. When you read an old text mentioning Syria, it may well include Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan.

A Levantine is a person from this region. Historically the word also described the cosmopolitan, multilingual merchant communities of the coastal cities, people at home in Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, and Greek at once. That mixing is the region's signature.

One land, deep roots

The Levant has been continuously inhabited and fought over for as long as civilization has existed. Its layers include:

The first traders and alphabet-makers. The Phoenicians of the Lebanese coast (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos) ran a Mediterranean trading network and spread the alphabet that underlies our own.
Israelite and other kingdoms in the southern Levant, and the Aramaeans, whose language Aramaic became the regional lingua franca for centuries.
Empires passing through: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and the Christian Byzantines.
The Islamic centuries. The Levant was the heart of the Umayyad caliphate, whose capital was Damascus, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. Later came the Crusades, when European Christians held parts of the coast for roughly two hundred years, and the Muslim leader Saladin who rolled them back.
Ottoman rule for four centuries, which is the immediate background to the modern states.

How one region became four countries

This is the key modern fact. The four-into-one story is the reverse: one region was cut into several countries by outsiders.

After World War I and the fall of the Ottomans, the victorious Europeans split Bilad al-Sham along the lines of the secret Sykes-Picot deal:

France took a mandate over the north and created Syria and, carved out of it, Lebanon (enlarged so that Christians, especially Maronites, would have a country with a Christian plurality).
Britain took a mandate over the south: Palestine on the Mediterranean side of the Jordan River, and Transjordan (today's Jordan) on the east side.

So Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan are the children of one Ottoman region split by French and British pens around 1920. That single fact explains why their histories are so tangled and why families, dialects, and cuisines flow across the borders.

The conflicts and massacres you will hear named

You specifically wanted to be able to follow references to "the Levantine war" or "a massacre." There is no single event by that exact name, so here are the major ones people usually mean, each explained in one place. Fuller accounts are in the country chapters.

The 1860 Mount Lebanon civil war and the Damascus massacre. In 1860, fighting between Druze and Maronite Christians in Mount Lebanon turned into large-scale massacres of Christians, with related killings of Christians in Damascus. Thousands died. European powers intervened, and the Ottomans created a special autonomous district for Mount Lebanon. This is the deep root of Lebanon's tradition of power-sharing between religious communities.

The Lebanese Civil War (1975 to 1990). A fifteen-year war in which Lebanon's many communities (Maronite Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze, and Palestinian factions) fought one another, drawing in Syria, Israel, and others. Perhaps 150,000 people died and Beirut was devastated. Details are in the Lebanon chapter.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982). During Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a Christian militia allied with Israel killed many hundreds, possibly over a thousand, Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in two Beirut refugee camps while Israeli forces controlled the area. An Israeli inquiry found Israel indirectly responsible for not preventing it. It remains one of the war's most infamous events.

The Hama massacre (1982). In the Syrian city of Hama, the government of Hafez al-Assad crushed an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, killing many thousands of people and flattening much of the old city. See the Syria chapter.

The Syrian civil war (2011 to 2024). Beginning with the Arab Spring, this war killed roughly half a million people, displaced millions, and ended in 2024 with the fall of the Assad government. It is the deadliest Levantine conflict of the modern era.

The Nakba (1948) and the Arab-Israeli wars. The displacement of most Palestinian Arabs around Israel's founding in 1948, and the repeated wars that followed, are the region's longest-running conflict, covered in the Palestine and Israel chapters.

Don't be confused: many "Lebanon wars" and "Syria wars" exist. Because these small countries have been fought over so often, names repeat. "The Lebanon war" might mean 1975 to 1990 (the civil war), 1982 (Israel's invasion), or 2006 (the Israel-Hezbollah war). When someone uses one of these phrases, it is fair to ask which year they mean.

The Levantine thread

For all the borders, a shared Levantine culture persists: a common Arabic dialect family, overlapping cuisine (the famous mezze table, covered in the food chapter), music, hospitality, and a long habit of many faiths living in the same towns. Politics divided the region; culture keeps reaching across the lines.

Now we go country by country. We begin not in the Levant but at the far south of the Arabian Peninsula, with one of the oldest civilizations and one of today's hardest crises: Yemen. 👉