What makes the Levant a region

What the mandates left

The Council decided on 24 July 1922 that the mandates for Syria and for Palestine would come into force together, once France and Italy had settled the terms between them. That agreement was notified to the Council on 29 September 1923, and the American chargé in Paris reported both mandates in force from that date. France held Syria and Lebanon under one instrument. Britain held Palestine under the other, whose article 25 let the mandatory withhold provisions of the mandate in the country lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary, and make separate arrangements for administering it. Transjordan was governed under that clause. Every country filed here came out of one of those two mandates.

The seats, and the country without one

Lebanon and Syria were admitted to the United Nations on 24 October 1945, the day the Charter took effect. Israel followed on 11 May 1949 and Jordan on 14 December 1955. Palestine holds no seat: the General Assembly accorded it non-member observer State status on 29 November 2012 by resolution 67/19, carried by 138 votes to 9 with 41 abstentions, and admission as a member state would require a recommendation from the Security Council. The other rosters divide on a similar line. Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria are entered in the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and Israel in neither.

Palestine also issues no money. The record enters the Israeli new shekel and the Jordanian dinar among the currencies in circulation there, and nothing of Palestinian issue.

Sea, and the ground below it

Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine front the Mediterranean. Jordan's coast is confined to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, which opens into the Red Sea, and that frontage is the reason the record enters Jordan as a state with a coastline rather than a landlocked one. Inland the ground falls away sharply: the lowest point recorded for Israel, for Jordan and for Palestine is one shoreline, the Dead Sea, and Syria's is the Sea of Galilee, upstream of it on the same rift. Lebanon sits outside that pattern at both ends, its low point the Mediterranean itself and its high point Qurnat as Sawda.

Where the edges are argued

Britannica's Levant is wider than this roster. It runs along the eastern Mediterranean and takes in Cyprus and the Hatay province of Türkiye, both of which the catalogue files under other regions. The name came into English from the French lever, to rise, and marked the direction of the sunrise as seen from western Europe, which is a bearing rather than a boundary and part of why the edges have never settled. The UN Statistics Division publishes no Levant at all: its M49 standard files these countries under Western Asia beside Türkiye, Iraq, the Gulf states and the South Caucasus, and states that its groupings are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning.

Two countries here are recorded with more than one capital: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for Israel, and East Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Ramallah for Palestine. The catalogue records what is claimed and what is administered, names both, and settles neither.