Dream of greater Israel

2026-03-01 - 19:33

Some Israelis still interpret “Greater Israel” to include the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula, or even as a promise of dominion over entire area from the Nile River (in modern Egypt) to the Euphrates River (which flows through today’s Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) Vey recently the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sent shock waves throughout the civilized world when he said that Israel has biblical right to all the land between Egypt and Iraq when reminded that the verse includes land far beyond Ghaza and the West Bank his response was that it would be fine if they took it all which implies that sovereignty is derived from a divine promise. It simply means that when territorial claims are framed as biblical entitlement they are not bound by moral obligations or even international law they are no longer constrained by the June 4, 1967 lines, by UN resolutions or by negotiated settlement. A divine mandate does not recognize compromise, nor partition. It only recognizes the fact that the goal is to be achieved at any cost. This irrational and illegal outburst by the US ambassador was immediately condemned by Pakistan and 13 other countries and it was called a highly dangerous and inflammatory statement on the other hand the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced he was feeling “very attached” to the vision of “greater Israel” and he called this a historic and spiritual mission.Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat, he envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century. In Hebrew, “Eretz” means land or territory, and “Israel” refers to Israel. Therefore, Eretz Israel translates to the Land of Israel. This designation refers to the land promised by God to the twelve tribes of Israel. As Israel pushed its forces deep into sovereign Syrian territory following the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime the term ‘Greater Israel’ has resurfaced in media coverage. The term has been used in recent days to describe Israel’s military expansion beyond its currently recognized borders, an ever-expanding definition of what the Israeli state can come to encompass. The maps used to describe the vision often echo biblical stories that many Zionists consider as history. But what is the ‘Greater Israel’ idea in actuality? Is there really such an Israeli project? And how realistic is it that it will be realized? In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised to establish “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” The name “Palestine” had described essentially the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean for 4,000 years, with varying limits, often as a sub-part of Syria or its own province under different empires. But since borders weren’t defined yet in the then-Ottoman Levant, the eastern bank of the Jordan River was widely seen as an extension of Palestine. After Britain and France split the Levant into areas of influence, and after the establishment of an Arab emirate in Jordan, which is today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, mainstream Zionists defined their project for a Jewish state within the British mandatory limits of Palestine. The Zionist leader and theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who founded the revisionist current within Zionism, disagreed and insisted that the Zionist project should include Jordan. He then founded the Irgun paramilitary gang, later responsible for various atrocities during the Nakba of 1948, whose emblem included a map of both Palestine and Jordan and the inscription ‘Land of Israel’. This became the modern political conception of “Greater Israel.” After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, theoretical debates gave way to political pragmatism. Israel never included “Greater Israel” in its official discourse, and it never officially claimed the right to make Arab territory beyond its 1948 boundaries part of its own domain, even after its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai desert, and the Syrian Golan heights in 1967. It maintained that these were ‘administrated territories’ for security reasons until its annexation of the eastern part of Jerusalem and the Golan in the early 1980s. However, as Israel never defined its borders, the idea of a “Greater Israel” remained in the imagination of religious right Israelis as a foundational myth that some extremists took more seriously. The religious right wing began to grow stronger after 1967, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. One belief that gained traction in this period was the messianic trend that sees the expansion of Israel beyond its borders as part of the fulfillment of the end of times, and the coming of the Jewish Messiah. This movement spearheaded settlement in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, often drawing plans that would later be adopted by the state. The term “Greater Israel” resurfaced in the media during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when Israeli forces pushed deep into Lebanon’s territory beyond the Litani river, which in one of the biblical versions, is the northern limit of the “Greater Israel.” It was not coincidental that “Greater Israel” came to the fore during this time. Israel was led at the time by the former Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, known for his extremist rhetoric and views. When Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah declared in his famous speech at Bint Jbeil that “the Greater Israel project is over.” —The writer is Professor of History, based in Islamabad