The book of Leviticus commands that the fall festival of Sukkot, which begins Sunday night, should be celebrated by taking palm, myrtle, and willow branches along with a pri ets hadar—usually translated as the “fruit of goodly trees”—and “rejoicing before the Lord.” By the 1st century CE, most Jews seem to have accepted that the fourth, ambiguous item was a citron (an etrog in Hebrew), which is used in the Sukkot ritual to this day. Rachel Scheinerman presents a brief history of this fruit, which was the first in the citrus family to make the journey from eastern to western Asia:

The etrog is indigenous not to the Land of Israel but to China. Several millennia ago it grew most abundantly in Yunnan, a southwestern Chinese province, where it is still used, to this day, in traditional Chinese medicine. . . . From there, it traveled to northeastern India and westward across the subcontinent, . . . and became a component of traditional Ayurvedic medicines used to treat everything from stomach complaints to hemorrhoids to infertility. One of the Buddhist gods, Jambhala (the etrog was sometimes called jambhila), was often depicted holding an etrog as a symbol of fertility because of its high density of seeds. (One is reminded of the medieval Ashkenazi custom for a pregnant woman to bite off the tip of the etrog at the end of the holiday.)

When Darius I conquered India in 518 BCE, the fruit spread to Persia. Now it was called wādrang, which seems to be the linguistic precursor to the Aramaic word etrog (and also the English word orange). . . . [T]he etrog was regarded in Persia as a prized exotic species and carried from province to province. Throughout their vast empire, [which included the Land of Israel], the Persians built royal outposts bedizened with generously irrigated ornamental gardens called pairidaeza or “paradises.” . . .

One of these paradises was constructed after the Babylonian exile and before the conquests of Alexander the Great—that is, sometime between 538 BCE and 332 BCE—in Ramat Raḥel, which sits on the outskirts of present-day Jerusalem and is today home to a kibbutz. Archaeologists have recently positively identified (based on an analysis of fossilized pollen trapped in the plaster of one of its pools) the presence of eleven native and foreign species in that paradise, including the etrog. . . .

Once Leviticus 23:40 was understood by Jews as a description . . . of three bound boughs, known collectively as a lulav, and an etrog, this combination became an important Jewish symbol—alongside other symbols of Temple ritual like the menorah, shofar, firepan, and ark—found on synagogue walls, coins, and tombstones. In fact, the presence of a lulav-and-etrog icon signals to archaeologists that an ancient synagogue is Jewish rather than Samaritan, [since] the Samaritans [interpret the verse differently] and therefore have not incorporated this symbol.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.