Why the Levant is so Important
It's the geography, stupid
The powers-that-be in the world, that being organized states, will never stop caring about what happens in the Levant, in that thin strip of land from the Suez, up through the coast, through Palestine, through Lebanon, and ending in the Northern Syrian mountains.
Even if the zionist entity were abolished tomorrow, the region will continue to be hotly contested by local and outside imperial concerns, just as it always has been, for thousands of years. To be clear: this does not mean that conflict is inevitable, or desirable, or that all these disparate peoples have been warring actively non-stop for millennia over religious or ethnic differences. Quite the opposite: decades and oftentimes centuries have gone by without a major devastating conflict.
The purpose of this article is to use geography and explain why this region of the world seems to engender so much conflict. We will take a closer look at smattering of empires and military campaigns which prove the point. There’s also policy prescription that should ensure long-term peace and regional stability. Bottom-line, yes this region has been warred over for thousands of years, but there’s no reason why that must be the case for thousands more years. Indeed, the exact opposite could be true.
First though: why is the Levant important? To answer that, we must first know how the Levant formed, and to know that, you must have a basic grasp of plate tectonics. The land beneath our feet is under constant movement; we sit atop a molten lake of liquid rock, churning and shifting the land every single day. The lands that move can be further divided into plates, which move independently of one another yet can and do affect other plates, by colliding, by separating, et cetera.
100 million years ago, the Levant did not exist. Where the Levant would be today was instead either a vast ocean, no different than today’s oceans, or otherwise a part of Europe, or of Africa.
That all changed in the succeeding 100 million years. The Eurasian, African, and Arabian plates all smashed into one another, the result of which connected the Eurasian landmass with the Arabian and African one. At the same time, the formation of these continents in the way that it happened let to extremely and densely fertile river valleys to form, fed by newly formed mountains in Southern Turkey for Mesopotamia and the East African Great Rift Valley for the Nile. This all happened relatively recently in terms of geological time, with the Nile itself only being “completed” (in terms of resembling its modern flow) roughly 12,500 years ago.
Thus, when the last great ice age ended 11,700 years ago and humanity found itself capable of growing plants for food reliably, year after year, they naturally settled in areas with the most fertile land, congregating around those two river valleys (as well as others around the world; our focus today is on this part of the world though, so we shall stay focused on the Levant).
And thus, the curse of the Levant is made possible. Simply put, this stretch of land finds itself in the unfortunate position of being the only land bridge connecting the Nile and Mesopotamia. In ancient times, these river valleys gave birth to the first organized city-states, capable of raising armies, collecting taxes, and crucially: projecting power outwards beyond their walls. As these city-states evolved into kingdoms, their power projection began to expand beyond the borders of the river valleys into the Levant.
The Levant of course had their own civilizations, but they could not resist settlement and conquest from far more advanced states that encircled them entirely. Thus we find both Egyptian and Mesopotamian presence across the Levant from roughly 2000 BCE to 300 BCE, each civilization competing viciously against the other, rising and falling and rising again with the times (granted, with some time of limited indigenous rule, such as during the Bronze Age Collapse when both Nile and Mesopotamian civilizations were at their weakest).
Why fight? Why not settle for the good tilled earth of your own river valley civilization? Well, one river valley civilization was good, but two? Even better. Control of one generated extreme amounts of wealth and control of both would practically make one’s civilization one of the richest in the world. And they were so close to one another! Compared to the one China, in India, in the Americas, these highly rich, highly developed lands were practically neighbors, with only a thin Levant to separate them. Thus it ever was: whoever controlled Egypt desires Mesopotamia; whoever controls Mesopotamia desires Egypt. More than that though, even if the rulers of either lands did not view the world so imperialistically, they still lived in an epoch of intense interstate competition. It isn’t always the case that two strong states bordering each other will go to war, but it does make it more likely than not, as the unknowable intentions of your powerful neighbor gnaws at the minds of even the most sturdy rulers.
The Mesopotamians achieved total hegemony of Egypt and the Levant in 671 BCE, until they were cast out by the outsider Greeks in the 300s BCE. Then the region passed back into hostile Egypt versus Mesopotamia relations once again, until finally, Rome came in the 1st centuries BCE and CE and conquered the Levant and Egypt. Rome was never able, of course, to conquer Mesopotamia, save for brief moments during its long tenure. The early Muslim caliphates fared far better, coming from the South, taking advantage of a weakened Iran and Rome, and seizing both Egypt and Mesopotamia before internal strife, and then the Mongols, wrecked their dual control of both prime territories.
This time period also saw the rise of the Crusader states, which proved (just like the indigenous Jewish, Canaanite, and Phoenicians cultures did in the first millennia BCE) that you cannot hold the Levant alone. Control of the Levant ran through either the Nile or Mesopotamia. If you did not control both, and fast, your civilization was doomed.
The Ottomans proved this, being secure in their empire for centuries, until they lost Egypt thanks in large part to Napoleon, which caused them to lose Mesopotamia against the British barely a century later. The British held onto Egypt and Mesopotamia until WW2, when America inherited Britain’s place as the capital of the imperial core.
1948 saw the arrival of yet another European colonial state like the Crusaders, a fact which might have doomed the zionists (surrounded and alone as their 1st Millennia BCE earlier counterparts were) were it not for the subsequent US hegemonic support. 1979 saw Egypt fall under US dominion, removing the threat from Israel’s southern flank. 2003 saw Iraq fall under the same. Now, in 2025, the whole region is under American control, minus a few pockets of extant resistance, in Iran, in Palestine, in Lebanon; a sort of hegemonic control that has only existed a few times in history.
Thus we see in history a region that has always been hotly contested. If you hold the Nile or Mesopotamia, you desire the other you do not hold. And to get there, you must invariably pass through the Levant. This is, of course, to say nothing of the overland trade route from far Asia terminating in Antioch, Alexandria, and Istanbul, extant over countless centuries, or of the sea route along the Suez, also as old as time immemorial (the canal was used to make transiting goods cheaper and faster over the Suez, not to make it possible; it was already possible, just costly).
Nor do you desire the Levant alone. You cannot. Your Western and Northern flanks are secured by sea and mountains, respectively, but your East and Southern flanks are vast semi-arid plains and deserts. Granted, those lands are ill-supplied locally but a competent commander can and has broken through whatever defenses a defender could conjure.
Is there any way to stop this, to break the cycle? Outside of separating the tectonic plates from one another, something outside our capabilities, the only forward outside of perpetual war would be to render the civilizations that control the region under the direct control of a (legitimate, democratic) world government. And no, I don’t mean the United States or any other extant regime; this would be an entity that would hold all supreme military and judicial power for itself. This would render the civilizations of this region and any other across the world incapable of raising independent armies and thus incapable of projecting power against one another.
Indeed, we can say much the same about any other region in the world: abrogating local state power to global superstructure is the only way to ensure world peace. That is the lesson of human civilization, after all, and the lesson that these river valley civilizations specifically teach us in the modern age. The Nile after all was not Egypt, just as Mesopotamia was not Iraq; they all began as tiny, warring city-states, which over time unified into a single polity. Uruk no longer wars against Sumer as Avaris no longer wars against Thebes. They stand now as united Iraq and Egypt. Humanity is a story of classes, that is true, but it is also a story of states: of families organizing into mobile tribes, into those tribes settling permanently in an area, in that area forming into a city, with walls, into that walled city expanding beyond said walls, and from there becoming states.
Those states then handle disputes between their cities and the outlying populations using civil law and well-established administrative procedures, an extreme improvement compared to a struggle to the death that preceded the formation of a state. Land disputes and other matters being settled by impartial magistrates versus blood feuds make the land and people more prosperous, after all.
The problem is that over time these states became so large, so powerful, and nowadays so nuclear-armed that further violent annexation and unification is practically impossible. And so for the Levant to know peace, for the world to know peace, all extant states will need to consensually and voluntarily unite beneath a larger superstructure.
It is impossible to know if it can be done, only that it must. Otherwise yes: the Levant, and the world beyond, will continue to wage eternal war. For the sake of the tens of billions of humans yet to be born, we owe it to them to try.