The Lebanese “Israelites”

In Lebanon, a citizen can be officially listed as “Israeli” without ever having set foot in Israel.

The designation appears in electoral rolls and state records, attached not to nationality but to religion. It is the term the Lebanese state uses to classify its Jewish citizens, under what is still formally referred to as “الطائفة الإسرائيلية” (literally translated into English with the “Israeli sect”).

As a result, this designation can be interpreted not as a reference to Lebanese Jews, but as an implicit association with the “State of Israel”.

A name inherited

The terminology dates to the legal framework established during the French Mandate, when “Israélite” was widely used in European legal language to designate Jews as a religious community. As Lebanon’s modern institutions took shape, the term “Israelite” was translated into Arabic as “الطائفة الإسرائيلية” and incorporated into the state’s official classification of recognized sects.

As Dr. Wissam Lahham, professor of constitutional law, explains:

The official Arabic term appears in Decision No. 60 L.R. issued in 1936 by the French High Commissioner Damien de Martel during the Mandate, who at the time exercised full legislative authority over Lebanon and Syria.

This decision remains the foundational text regulating sects and religious freedoms, listing all officially recognized communities.

At the time, the designation carried no political meaning. It reflected the conventions of its era, long before the creation of the “State of Israel.”

From a constitutional perspective, Lahham notes “Lebanon’s Constitution does not enumerate sects. That authority rests with the legislature, which recognizes religious communities, defines their legal designations, and regulates their relationship with the state.” Because the 1936 decision carries the force of law, any change in terminology including the renaming of a sect requires parliamentary action.

Within this framework, naming is not a technical detail. Under Article 9, which guarantees absolute freedom of belief, the recognition of sects is tied to identity, representation, and the ability of communities to define themselves within the legal system.

“The naming of sects is not merely administrative,” Lahham stresses. “It is part of the constitutional guarantees tied to freedom of belief. Each community has the right to define its identity… and it would be inconsistent for a sect’s legal name to differ from the name it recognizes for itself."

This principle has been reflected in past revisions. In 1951, Parliament replaced the term “Protestant sect” with “Evangelical sect” at the request of the community itself an acknowledgment that legal terminology must align with lived identity.

“Parliament has amended sect names before, but always at the request of the communities themselves,” Lahham notes. "There is no indication that Lebanon’s Jewish community has formally requested a change in its designation."

The term “الطائفة الإسرائيلية,” then, is less a reflection of contemporary local identity than the product of layered legal inheritances.

Where meaning collapses

The confusion is not only conceptual. It is linguistic.

In Arabic, the term used in official classifications, “الطائفة الإسرائيلية,” is derived from the same root as “إسرائيلي,” the word most commonly used today to describe a citizen of Israel. The distinction that exists in English between “Israeli” and “Israelite” is not as clearly embedded in everyday Arabic usage.

In theory, the language allows for separation. The expression “بنو إسرائيل” refers to the ancient Israelites in a historical and religious sense, while “إسرائيلي” denotes a modern national identity. But outside religious or academic contexts, this distinction is rarely enforced. The same linguistic root moves across meanings, carrying historical, religious, and political connotations at once. What was once a neutral legal classification becomes, in practice, a source of ambiguity.

As Dr. Amine Elias, specialist in the history of ideas, explains: "Before the establishment of the ‘State of Israel’, there was no taboo around the term. Jews were referred to naturally as ‘إسرائيليون’. It was a normal designation, embedded in the social fabric of Lebanon and across the region."

“The term ‘Israel’ itself originates in the biblical narrative,” Elias adds.

God named Jacob ‘Israel’. From that point on, ‘Israel’ came to refer to his descendants, the people of Israel, forming a collective religious and historical identity rather than a political one.

For centuries, the term remained rooted in a spiritual and historical framework, embedded in scripture and tradition, without any association to a modern state. Only in the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism and the establishment of the ‘State of Israel’, did it acquire a geopolitical meaning.

Calls to replace the term with “الطائفة اليهودية” (or the “Jewish sect”) seek to restore that distinction not by rewriting history, but by clarifying language. The aim is not symbolic. It is structural: to ensure that the words used in law reflect the realities they are meant to describe.

A community that remains, on paper

The consequences of this ambiguity are not abstract.

Lebanon’s Jewish community, though largely diminished, has not entirely disappeared, but it has receded from public life.

Today, around 4,000 Lebanese Jews remain registered in official records. Approximately 96% are recorded in Beirut, particularly in Mina el-Hosn, historically the center of Jewish life in the capital. Family names such as Srour, Zeitouné, Saad, and Salem reflect long-standing Lebanese roots that predate modern political divisions.

For much of the 20th century, this presence was visible and integrated. By the 1950s, Lebanon’s Jewish population had grown to nearly 14,000, making it the only Arab country where the community expanded after 1948. Jewish families were active in commerce, publishing, and social life. Religious celebrations were attended by state officials, and the community functioned within Lebanon’s broader confessional system without asserting a distinct political agenda.

That equilibrium did not hold. Tensions linked to the conflict in historic Palestine began to affect Lebanon in the late 1940s, initially through isolated incidents and rising suspicion. The turning point came after the 1967 war, which reshaped the country’s internal dynamics. The expansion of armed groups, the escalation of cross-border conflict, and the fragility of Lebanon’s internal balance altered the environment in which the community had existed.

Migration accelerated. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, large segments of the Jewish population had left. When the war began in 1975, what remained of the community’s institutional life collapsed. Synagogues were damaged or abandoned, schools closed, and entire neighborhoods emptied. Within a decade, the population had fallen from thousands to a few hundred, and later to only a handful of individuals.

What remains today is less a visible community than a registered one present in records, largely absent from public life.

In the end

What began as a neutral legal term now operates in a different reality.

The designation has not changed. The meaning around it has.

Judaism is a religion.

Israeli is a nationality.
Israelite is a historical identity.
Zionism is a political ideology.

They are not interchangeable. When language treats them as if they are, it does not clarify reality. It distorts it.