The Litani River runs through southern Lebanon and is, in John Kiriakou’s account, the reason the territory around it is fought over. Presented with the observation that the Litani is the largest natural water source in the Middle East and more important than oil, his agreement is emphatic: “it’s much more important than oil. And that’s why the Israelis are so interested in it.”[1]
The strip south of it
Kiriakou describes what is being made of the land between the river and the border as a deliberate emptying. Israel, he says, is in the process of creating what looks like a safe zone or no-man’s-land south of the Litani.[2] Told that Israel has designated a yellow zone seven to ten kilometres inside Lebanon and treats anyone entering it as a terrorist, and that villages are being systematically demolished, his reading is that the goal is a dead zone — not settlement at first, but ethnic cleansing of the whole of southern Lebanon, with settlement possible later.[3]
He reports being told by a contact at the White House that the administration is working with the Israelis on a policy of dead zones — one around the Iranian nuclear and enrichment sites and one in southern Lebanon — where anything that moves will be bombed. The same source, he notes, told him a week in advance that the United States would attack Iran, and was right.[4][5]
What is on the ground
Kiriakou also treats the area as a religious landscape rather than a strategic abstraction: some of the oldest Christian villages in the world, deeply connected to early Christianity, whose churches, religious sites and cemeteries are being levelled — a destruction he lays substantially at the door of American evangelical Zionism.[6]