Israel is the larger of the two neighbours: 22,072 km² including the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem (about 20,770 km² within the 1949 armistice lines), against Lebanon’s 10,452 km², so roughly twice the size. Israel also has almost twice the people, about 10.1 million in 2025 against an estimated 5.4 million in Lebanon in 2024, and it is far richer: the IMF puts Israel’s nominal GDP per person at about $69,800 for 2026, while Lebanon’s last IMF figure, for 2022, was about $3,300. Beirut is Lebanon’s capital; Israel names Jerusalem as its capital, a status only a few countries recognise, so most embassies sit in Tel Aviv. Hebrew is Israel’s official language, with Arabic given a “special status” since 2018, and Arabic is Lebanon’s official language, with French in wide use.
Those headline numbers hide how differently the two countries are built. Below, each theme is set out as the specific contrast that defines it, from rock and rainfall to parliaments.
The Negev Desert Against Mount Lebanon’s Snow
More than half of Israel is desert. The Negev covers at least 13,000 km² of the south, 55 per cent or more of the land, and narrows to a point at Eilat on the Red Sea. It is cut by makhteshim, erosion cirques found mainly here and in Sinai; the largest, Makhtesh Ramon, is 40 km long, up to 10 km wide and 500 m deep. Northwards the land steps up through the coastal plain around Tel Aviv and Haifa, the Central Hills and the Galilee, where Mount Meron reaches 1,204 m, the highest peak inside the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 armistice boundary. On the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and later annexed in a move most countries do not recognise, the Israeli-held slopes of Mount Hermon rise to 2,236 m. To the east the Jordan Rift Valley drops to the Sea of Galilee, whose surface fluctuates between about 209 and 215 m below sea level, and then to the Dead Sea, whose surface stood about 440 m below sea level in 2025 and whose shores are the lowest land on Earth.
Lebanon has no desert and very little flat land. Its territory runs in four strips parallel to the sea: a coastal plain that is only 6.5 km wide even at its broadest near Tripoli; the Lebanon Mountains, which reach 3,088 m at Qurnat as Sawda’, the highest point in the Levant; the Beqaa Valley, about 177 km long at an average height of 762 m; and the Anti-Lebanon range along the Syrian border. The country is 88 km wide at most and 32 km at its narrowest. Snow lies on the high peaks for much of the year, which is why Lebanese families have long escaped coastal humidity in mountain summer resorts. The Litani, more than 140 km long, rises in the Beqaa west of Baalbek and reaches the sea north of Tyre, the longest river that flows entirely within Lebanon.
The two landscapes are physically joined. The Hasbani, one of the headwaters of the Jordan, rises in southern Lebanon, and the Jordan itself gathers on the slopes of Mount Hermon before flowing south into Israel. Water from those slopes has been a source of friction since 1964, when Arab states began trying to divert the Jordan’s headwaters, raising tensions between Israel on one side and Syria and Lebanon on the other. Israel has since built its water security on technology instead: the Sorek plant near the coast is the world’s largest seawater reverse-osmosis desalination facility. Lebanon’s emblem, the cedar, points the other way, to what was lost; ancient cedar forests once covered the mountains, and only pockets survive, such as the Cedars of God near Bsharri.
One Jewish Majority Against Eighteen Recognised Sects
Israel is the only country in which Jews form the majority. In 2025 the government recorded 72 per cent of the population as Jewish, 21 per cent as Arab and 7 per cent as “others”. Around 80 per cent of Israeli Jews were born in the country; the rest arrived from Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and immigration from the former Soviet states alone added twelve per cent to the population between 1990 and 1994. About 93 per cent of Israelis live in towns and cities.
Lebanon has no majority at all. The state recognises 18 religious sects: four Muslim, twelve Christian, one Druze and one Jewish. The last official census was taken in 1932, when Christians made up 53 per cent of the population; no government since has risked counting again, because political power is shared out by sect. Estimates from the CIA World Factbook for 2020, which exclude refugees, put Sunni and Shia Muslims at about 31–32 per cent each and Christians, led by the Maronite Catholics, at about 32 per cent, with Druze at 4.5 per cent. The groups are also geographically distinct: Maronites in the northern parts of Greater Beirut and of Mount Lebanon, Shia in the south, the Baalbek and Hermel districts and south Beirut, and Sunnis in west Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon.
Emigration is the other half of Lebanon’s demographic story. The Lebanese diaspora is far larger than the population at home, with around 2 million people of Lebanese descent in the United States alone, and more than half of the diaspora is Christian. Lebanon also hosts between 174,000 and 450,000 Palestinian refugees (2017 estimates), many in camps that date back decades. For a fuller account of how the sects are spread, see our guide to religion in Lebanon.
The Shekel’s Tech Boom Against the Lebanese Pound’s Collapse
Israel’s economy has grown into one of the richest in the region. The IMF estimates its 2026 GDP at about $720 billion. Israel has the most start-ups per head of any country, and Intel and Microsoft both built their first research centres outside the United States there. Universities such as the Technion and the Weizmann Institute feed that sector.
Lebanon was once the Levant’s banking centre, but since 2019 it has been through what the World Bank calls one of the world’s worst economic crises since the 19th century. By 2023 GDP had shrunk by about 40 per cent from its 2018 level and the pound had lost about 95 per cent of its value; the central bank devalued the official rate by 90 per cent on 1 February 2023. On 4 August 2020 some 2,750 tonnes of badly stored ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut, killing more than 200 people and wrecking the waterfront districts. In October 2021 the whole country lost power for 24 hours when its two main power stations ran out of fuel.
Revived Hebrew, Levantine Arabic and a French Legacy
Israel is the only country whose official language is a revived one. Hebrew was a liturgical language for centuries before it was adapted for everyday use in Ottoman and British Palestine, and the 2018 Basic Law defining Israel as the “Nation State of the Jewish People” made it the sole official language, while giving Arabic a special status. Arabic remains the main language of teaching in Arab schools, where Hebrew is studied as a subject, and Russian is widely heard because more than a million Russian speakers arrived from the former Soviet Union.
Lebanon’s constitution, in Article 11, names Arabic as the official language and allows French to be used where the law specifies. Everyday speech is Lebanese Arabic, one of the Levantine dialects. Almost 40 per cent of Lebanese are counted as francophone, and about 70 per cent of secondary schools use French as a second language of teaching, a legacy of the French mandate from 1920 to 1943. English is used in about 30 per cent of schools and has spread in business, and Armenian is spoken by a community of around 150,000. Culture is exported through that diaspora and through summer festivals at Baalbek, Byblos and Beiteddine, held among Roman temples and Ottoman palaces.
Knesset Coalitions Against the 1943 National Pact
Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a single chamber, the 120-seat Knesset, elected by nationwide proportional representation. The low 3.25 per cent electoral threshold lets many small parties win seats, so in practice every government is a coalition: no party has ever won an outright majority at a national election.
Lebanon also elects a parliament, but its offices are divided by religion under the unwritten National Pact of 1943: the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The system was meant to keep the peace among communities, yet the country went through a civil war from 1975 to 1990, a Syrian military presence from 1976 to 2005, and deadlock that left the presidency vacant for two years until Joseph Aoun was elected in January 2025. Hezbollah, a Shia party whose armed wing is separate from the Lebanese army, also holds seats in parliament. Our guide to Beirut covers the capital where all these institutions sit.
The Blue Line Between Rosh HaNikra and Mount Hermon
The two countries have never signed a peace treaty, and their shared frontier is still not a formally agreed border. The original line was drawn in 1923 between the British mandate of Palestine and the French mandate of Lebanon, marked by 38 boundary stones along about 79 km (49 miles), and the 1949 armistice restored it. After Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the United Nations published the Blue Line on 7 June 2000 to confirm the withdrawal. The UN describes it as a line of withdrawal rather than a border. Lebanon and Israel still dispute 13 or 14 points along it, including the village of Ghajar and the Shebaa Farms, which Lebanon claims and Israel has held since 1967 as part of the Golan Heights.
The line has seen repeated wars. Israel invaded in 1978 and 1982, fought Hezbollah in 2006, and exchanged fire again from October 2023, which escalated into an Israeli ground invasion on 1 October 2024 and a ceasefire that November. Fighting intensified again from 2 March 2026; Israeli strikes since then have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced close to a million, about a fifth of Lebanon’s population. UN peacekeepers of UNIFIL have been deployed in the south since March 1978. On the coast the line meets the sea at Rosh HaNikra, where chalk cliffs and sea grottoes mark Israel’s northern tip. The physical makeup of the southern side of that line is laid out in our guide to Israel’s geography, from the Galilee hills down to the Negev.