Mapmakers government reference
United States of the Levant
The United States of the Levant—usually shortened to USL—is a later-series fictional federal polity. Its flag combines a red hoist triangle with black, white, blue, white, and green horizontal bands.
Spoiler-safe overview
The USL is a federal political structure that appears in the later published Mapmakers timeline. Its public identity emphasizes shared sovereignty, constitutional rights, and a common federal framework across communities that retain distinct local, national, cultural, and religious identities.
Flag design: a red triangle occupies the hoist. To the fly, the field is divided into black, white, blue, white, and green horizontal bands, with the narrow blue band centered between equal white bands.
Canonical detail
Major spoilers are closed by default. Open the sections below only after reading The Holy Land.
Major spoilers — formation and federal logic
Origin
The USL emerges from two political breakthroughs. The first is the creation of a lawful Israel-Palestine framework in which the names Israel and Palestine are treated as co-equal names carried by the same nation rather than mutually exclusive claims to the same land. The second is Jordan’s decision to pursue federal accession through its own cabinet, Parliament, monarchy, and constitutional institutions.
The result is not annexation by one existing state. It is a new federal order built through legislation, negotiated accession, elections, institutional integration, and acceptance of the Universal Law of Human Rights as the binding floor beneath local government.
Federal logic
The union is designed around the proposition that shared sovereignty does not require cultural erasure. Existing national, religious, municipal, and regional identities continue, while powers that cannot safely remain divided—external defense, strategic weapons, certain federal rights, interregional movement, and common institutions—move into the federal sphere.
Major spoilers — Jerusalem, security, and public identity
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is not treated as an ordinary prize awarded to one constituent side. Its historic and holy sites operate through a neutral federal arrangement separate from normal municipal administration. The purpose is functional: access, preservation, worship, archaeology, and security must be administered without allowing any single local authority to convert control of the sites into exclusive national ownership.
The Jerusalem Historic Police embody that settlement. They are a site-specific federal service responsible for the neutral historic territory rather than a general occupation force or ordinary city police department.
Security and military identity
The USL creates a shared sovereign identity for forces that had previously served separate national systems. The combined military and federal services do not erase the histories of their predecessor institutions, but they operate under a common constitutional authority and common rights obligations.
By the epilogue of The Holy Land, the new identity is visible in uniforms, patches, official vehicles, and the language of service. A common insignia signals that force is now exercised on behalf of the union rather than one community against another.
Political meaning
The USL is the series’ clearest example of mapmaking without simple conquest. Borders change, but the deeper transformation is constitutional: former enemies are not merely placed behind a new line. They are required to build institutions in which neither side can secure permanent supremacy by controlling the state.
The federal project becomes possible only after strategic custody, protected-person reforms, Palestinian political participation, restoration and compensation mechanisms, neutral administration of Jerusalem’s holy sites, and Jordanian consent converge.
Continuity boundary
This entry describes only the USL as established in the published text of The Holy Land. It does not assume later accessions, future constitutional amendments, territorial expansion, or institutional developments belonging to unpublished continuity.