The phrase ‘covenant of brothers’ was not coined for the Bennett-Lapid alliance, but rather for our close bond with the Lebanese people. In the biblical period and the days of the Second Temple, the Lebanese people were the most loyal friend of the people of Israel, and the prophet Amos calls the bond with them a “covenant of brothers” (Amos 1:9).
Today we have peace or non-belligerence with all the countries that border us, and only Lebanon is the exception, with its ongoing conflict with us. But in the biblical period it was exactly the opposite: we had troubles with the inhabitants of Jordan (the Ammonites and the Moabites), severe troubles with the inhabitants of Syria (the Arameans), and a constant threat and raiding campaigns coming from our southern neighbor — Egypt. The inhabitants of Lebanon, by contrast, not only did not threaten us, but were our close friends.
David and Hiram king of Tyre were close friends: “for Hiram was ever a lover of David” (1 Kings 5:15). Solomon went on to build extensive trade ties with them, throughout the lands of the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Eilat, and Hiram makes a point of calling Solomon by the buddy-slang “my brother”: “And he said: What cities are these which you have given me, my brother?” (1 Kings 9:11).
The Lebanese people are called in the Bible Tyrians and Sidonians, after their two central city-states, and in the Greek tongue they were called “the Phoenicians.” They were the finest seafarers of the ancient world.
The peak of the bond with them came when the Temple was built with the close assistance of the Lebanese people. One of the names of the Temple is ‘Lebanon,’ after the cedars and cypresses brought from Lebanon for its construction: “And Hiram sent to Solomon, saying… I will do all your desire concerning timber of cedar and timber of cypress. My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon to the sea, and I will make them into rafts to go by sea to the place that you shall appoint me” (1 Kings 5:22-23). An interesting curiosity: during the renovations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the early 1980s, several hundred ancient wooden beams were discovered in its roof, among them Lebanon cedar and common cypress; one of the common-cypress beams is dated to the First Temple period. This find is from a period slightly later than the United Monarchy, but it attests to the use of cypress wood in the First Temple, as the Bible indicates. (By the way, there is in general a close connection between the mountains of Lebanon, white with purifying snow, and the Temple, which is called Lebanon and “whitens the sins of Israel” — but that’s for another time.)
In the days of Omri and Ahab the alliance with the Lebanese reached its peak. Omri moved the capital of the Kingdom of Israel closer to the Mediterranean (the move from Tirzah to Samaria) in order to be near the Phoenician coastal ports, and Ahab went so far as to take Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon, as his wife.
In the days of the Second Temple as well, good relations were maintained with our northern friend, and Zerubbabel the leader was again helped by the Lebanese in building the Temple: “And they gave money to the hewers and to the craftsmen, and food and drink and oil to the Sidonians and to the Tyrians, to bring cedar trees from Lebanon to the sea of Jaffa” (Ezra 3:7).
Why am I telling all this?
Because we should remember that until the seventies, Lebanon kept to this biblical model. It was the first country
in the Arab League that agreed to sign the armistice agreements at the end of the War of Independence; it did not take part in the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur War, and until the early 1970s the Lebanon-Israel border was the calmest of all of Israel’s borders with the Arab states.
Sadly, from the seventies onward, terror organizations such as Fatah, Amal, and the Iran-backed Hezbollah changed the picture from one extreme to the other, and over the last thirty-five years have turned Lebanon into a bitter enemy.
And yet, it is worth remembering that both in the historical perspective of thousands of years and in the perspective of recent decades, there can be hope from the northern border. The way, in my view, is as Jabotinsky put it: ‘proud, generous, and fierce.’ Proud of who we are, fierce toward our enemies, and generous toward those who have done us no harm.
We will close with the words of Amos, who describes for us a moment of weakness in the Lebanese people’s attitude toward us, when the Lebanese people forgot for a moment the beautiful covenant of brothers that had held for hundreds of years:
“For three transgressions of Tyre, and for four, I will not revoke it: because they delivered up a whole exile to Edom, and did not remember the covenant of brothers. And I will send a fire upon the wall of Tyre, and it shall devour its palaces” (Amos 1:9).
My firstborn son, Levanon, is named for the hope that blows from that land.
