How Israel Got Its Borders: From Sykes-Picot to the Green Line

If you want to understand why the map of the Middle East looks the way it does, start with two men, a pencil, and a very large piece of paper. In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Francois Georges-Picot of France sat down and drew lines across a map of the Ottoman Empire. Those lines, negotiated in secret and imposed without consulting anyone who actually lived in the region, created the borders of the modern Middle East. We are still living with the consequences.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement – How Israel Got Its Borders

The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled the Middle East for four centuries, was collapsing. World War I would finish it off, and Britain and France, sensing opportunity, decided to divide the spoils in advance. Sykes-Picot, signed in May 1916, drew a line from the port of Acre in the west to Kirkuk in the east. Everything north of the line would be French. Everything south would be British.

The agreement was crude, secretive, and made with almost no understanding of the ethnic, religious, and tribal realities on the ground. It split communities, ignored geographic logic, and created artificial states that grouped together people who had little in common. The borders of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan all trace their origins to this agreement, and so, indirectly, does the border of Israel.

The Balfour Declaration

One year after Sykes-Picot, in November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a 67-word letter to Lord Rothschild declaring that His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The Balfour Declaration did not create the State of Israel, but it provided the political framework that made it possible.

The declaration was a masterpiece of diplomatic ambiguity. It supported a “national home” without defining what that meant. It protected the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities” without specifying how. And it was issued by a government that did not yet control the territory in question. Nevertheless, the Balfour Declaration became the founding document of the Zionist movement’s international legitimacy, and its consequences shaped everything that followed.

The British Mandate

In 1920, the San Remo Conference formally assigned the Mandate for Palestine to Britain, and the British set about the impossible task of governing a territory promised, in various ways, to multiple parties. The Mandate period, from 1920 to 1948, was a time of rapid change, growing tension, and the gradual emergence of two national movements that could not be reconciled.

The British built roads, railways, ports, and institutions. They established a legal system, a postal service, and a police force. They also presided over increasing Jewish immigration, growing Arab opposition, and escalating violence between the two communities. By the mid-1930s, the situation had become unmanageable, and the British spent their remaining years in the Land of Israel trying to find a solution that did not exist.

The Partition Plan

In 1947, the British handed the problem to the United Nations. The UN Special Committee on Palestine proposed partitioning the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to adopt the plan. The Jewish leadership accepted it. The Arab leadership rejected it. And the stage was set for war.

The partition plan drew borders based on population distribution, economic viability, and the location of Jewish settlements, many of which had been established during the Tower and Stockade period of the late 1930s. The proposed map was a patchwork of interlocking territories that would have been almost impossible to govern, but it was the first international recognition of Jewish statehood, and it triggered the events that led to Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

The Lines on the Map

The 1948 War of Independence ended not with peace treaties but with armistice agreements. The armistice lines, drawn in 1949, became known as the Green Line, and they defined Israel’s borders until the Six-Day War of 1967. The Green Line followed the positions where the armies stopped fighting, which meant that Israel’s borders were determined not by geography or logic but by where the bullets happened to stop.

The Six-Day War added the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem to Israeli control. The Camp David Accords returned Sinai to Egypt in 1979. The Oslo Accords addressed parts of the West Bank and Gaza. And the borders of Israel continue to be debated, negotiated, and fought over to this day.

Visit with Hoshen Tours

For visitors to Israel, the story of the borders is not abstract. You can stand at Metula and see the Lebanese border. You can look out from Mount Bental at the Syrian ceasefire line. You can walk the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City and trace the line that once divided the city in two. The borders are visible, tangible, and deeply connected to the stories of the people who live along them.

Hoshen Tours weaves this history into every itinerary, because understanding how Israel got its shape is essential to understanding Israel itself. Some lines on a map were drawn with a pencil. Others were drawn with blood. And all of them have a story. Hoshen Tours often combines this site with Zedekiah’s Cave, Mea Shearim, and Nachlaot for a memorable day exploring the region.