Under the Surface

An interview with Eric Verdeil on the history and geography of Lebanon’s land area.

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10,452 square kilometers is a figure every Lebanese seems to know. Long treated as an unquestioned fact, it has come to stand as more than a simple measure of territory. Through its use by president-elect Bashir Gemayel, it became a powerful marker of national identity, evoking the image of a country to be made whole again. The figure would later resurface in political discourse, echoing its symbolic weight. Yet how does a number acquire such meaning? How does it move from a measurement to a symbol? To answer these and other questions, we spoke to the French geographer and urban planner Éric Verdeil, a professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Science-Po) in Paris, a specialist in Middle Eastern cities and territories, and co-author of the Atlas du Liban (IFPO 2016).

Lebanese Without Frontiers: The figure of 10,452 square kilometers is often presented as a given. According to your article, “Quand la Superficie d’un Pays Devient un Slogan Politique,” this is open to question. Why?

Éric Verdeil: The article to which you refer was published in 2005, based on research and the production of new geographic data conducted with Lebanon’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and its remote sensing center. The work was conducted in particular with Ghaleb Faour, who is now the center’s director. The Lebanon atlas project aimed to build a georeferenced database of Lebanese localities by retrieving and digitizing cadastral documents on the boundaries and centers of each locality—what are known as land registry districts.

By assembling these data, we produced an unprecedented digital map of Lebanon. It provided the basis for the National Physical Master Plan, which funded part of these cartographic production efforts. The work was also compared with the data available from the Lebanese Army and its mapping service, particularly with regard to border delineations.

Link to the map: https://books.openedition.org/ifpo/13206

By analyzing these different datasets, our team found that Lebanon’s surface area did not correspond to the commonly cited figure of 10,452 square kilometers, but was rather on the order of 10,200 square kilometers. It is important to treat this figure as an approximation because, as we also observed during our research, there were numerous inconsistencies among our sources. Many of these translated into border disputes, notably between Syria and Lebanon, but also between Lebanon and Israel, which remain unresolved to this day.

Experts who prepared a preliminary study by the CNRS for the National Physical Master Plan for the Lebanese Territory in 2002 , as well as those at the Ministry of Agriculture, were aware of this gap between official figures and the data at their disposal. Thus, the master plan states that Lebanon’s area is “less than 11,000 square kilometers.” In the Agricultural Atlas of Lebanon, a more precise figure of 10,225 square kilometers is given. In sum, it can be said that, on the one hand, the figure of 10,452 square kilometers overestimates the country’s actual area, and on the other hand, that this area remains imprecise in the absence of agreements on Lebanon’s definitive borders.

LWF: Why do estimates of Lebanon’s surface area vary so widely, especially when it comes to international sources?

EV: When I noticed the gap between the official figure of 10,452 square kilometers and the one derived from our georeferenced data, I conducted a brief survey of figures available in various international publications. For example, the Encyclopedia Britannica gave 10,230 square kilometers in 1997 and 10,400 square kilometers in 2005. The volume on Lebanon in the Que Sais-Je? series that I consulted at the time gave a figure of 10,176 square kilometers. An older source, Webster’s Geographical Dictionary from 1949, gave a figure of 3,470 square miles, or 9,022 square kilometers.

This reveals a high degree of heterogeneity, the origins of which I cannot specify given my current knowledge. One may assume that it reflects estimates produced by different military institutions based on the cartographic documents at their disposal, with considerable variations in both scale and precision.

In any case, before the advent of digital geographic information systems, methods for estimating a territory’s surface area relied on geometric calculation techniques, overlaying border outlines onto graph paper and visually counting units. Such measurements were obviously dependent on the chosen scale. The finer the scale, the more detailed and fragmented the border became. Within the same order of magnitude, each scale of observation therefore yielded a different measurement.

LWF: How was Lebanon’s surface area estimated at the time of the creation of Greater Lebanon, and where does the figure of 10,452 square kilometers come from?

EV: I have not conducted research on the measurement of Lebanese territory during the French Mandate period, which corresponds to the creation of “Greater Lebanon” in 1920, when the regions of Jabal Amil, the Beqaa, and the North (Tripoli and Akkar) were attached to the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon. It would be necessary to consult the archives of the French army, as well as those of the cadastral authority established at that time. Similarly, one would need to examine the archives of the Lebanese Army and the country’s official declarations at the time of its Independence and its admission to the United Nations, to determine whether an official estimate of Lebanon’s surface area—and the figure of 10,452 square kilometers—appeared in these contexts.

According to testimonies I collected from individuals who were educated in Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s, this figure was part of what Lebanese students were taught. Therefore, it must already have appeared in geography or history textbooks of that period. This should not be difficult to verify.

LWF: When and how did the figure of 10,452 square kilometers become a political symbol?

EV: The figure of 10,452 square kilometers acquired a self-evident quality when Bashir Gemayel used it as a slogan to justify an inclusive national stance at the time of his election in 1982, in the context of a divided Lebanon occupied by foreign armies—Israelis in the south and Syrians in the east and north. During the 1990s and up to 2005, this slogan was regularly reused and displayed in public spaces by the Lebanese Forces and other parties, in reference to the Syrian occupation. I also recall, from my own experience of living in Lebanon at the time, that the figure was used by Hezbollah around the time of the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, although I have not been able to find a source confirming this. I am not aware of any similar example of a country’s surface area becoming a political slogan of national liberation.

LWF: How has this figure been used in Lebanese political discourse, particularly during periods of crises?

EV: The slogan of liberating the country’s 10,452 square kilometer remained visible until around 2005, but since then it seems to have largely disappeared from political debate, even though Hezbollah has continued to emphasize the issue of the Shebaa Farms. I also do not recall it being used during the negotiations over the maritime border agreement in 2022. The question of Lebanon’s territorial integrity has become secondary to the debate over Hezbollah’s weapons, which has structured political discussions in recent years.

LWF: What are the risks of using such a symbol?

EV: The fact that the 10,452 figure is inaccurate is not in itself a big issue. What I have mainly observed is that it is frequently invoked by members of the political class, while there are no initiatives to reach an agreement with Syria to resolve the various border disputes that still persist, particularly along the Anti-Lebanon range and, of course, the Shebaa Farms. The context of the war in Syria between 2011 and 2024, and even up to the present, was not conducive to this. The dispute over the Shebaa Farms concerns a territory occupied by the Israelis in 1967 and annexed, along with the Golan Heights and Mount Hermon, in December 1981. The Israelis have seized additional territories in Syria since 2024.

The border between Israel and Lebanon, in turn, has never been formally validated. It remains, to this day, the armistice line of 1949. A “Blue Line” was defined and demarcated between 2000 and 2006, but several disputed points remain pending a final agreement. In 2022, the maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon was a rare exception in this general neglect of precise border delineation. However, the compromise reached at the time was contested by Lebanese experts. It also appeared that the Israelis were seeking to challenge it in the first weeks of the current fightings. The new war waged by Israel against Hezbollah has, very concretely, led to numerous encroachments on Lebanese territory, and within Israel there is a political current advocating the annexation of these areas in South Lebanon. The demand to establish a buffer zone emptied of inhabitants and where villages are razed to the last stone is another way of challenging the border between the two countries. This will undermine Lebanese sovereignty over this region.

If the negotiations that have just begun—under conditions in which Lebanon faces significant weakness—lead to specific results, it is likely that the issue of an official delineation of the border will be raised once again, and the question will be whether Lebanon will be able to assert its legal right in this regard.

LWF: Does this figure ultimately say more about Lebanon’s political history than its geography?

EV: Indeed, this symbolic figure refers less to a geographical issue than to the place of the state and the army in controlling Lebanese territory. Rather than expressing a partition of the country, it has taken on meaning as a form of resistance to the presence of foreign armies on Lebanese soil. It also reflects a sense of the weakness of the Lebanese entity in the face of such outside interventions, the fragility of its existence, and the difficulty of defending it.

This is partly due to a state that neither its neighbors nor the international powers active in the country have ever wanted to be strong or equipped with a powerful army. But the state’s impotence, particularly in military terms, also stems from internal conflicts among sectarian-political elites. Each of Lebanon’s political groups has tended to focus on an external enemy, either Syria or Israel.

After the 1975–1990 war, the army was rebuilt as a force for internal stabilization, never as a force for territorial defense. The Syrians, Israelis, or more recently the Iranians, have not wanted a military force capable of defending Lebanon’s territory and borders. This is one of the clear lessons of the current war.