Inside ‘Greater Israel’: myths and truths behind the long-time Zionist fantasy

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?

While the territorial dreams of the right-wing Zionists once appeared to be nothing more than colonial fantasies, current events in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria show the hopes for the ascendant Israeli far right might be closer to fruition than many ever thought possible. 

What is ‘Greater Israel‘?

The term “Greater Israel” refers to the idea of a Jewish state expanding across large parts of the Middle East as a supposed reincarnation of what the Bible describes as the territory of the ancient Israelite tribes, the Israelite kingdom, or the land promised by God to Abraham and his descendants. There are at least three versions of ‘Greater Israel’ in the Bible.

In the book of Genesis, God promises Abraham the land “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates,” for him and his descendants. In the book of Deuteronomy, God tells Moses to lead the Hebrew people in the taking over of the land that includes all of Palestine, all of Lebanon, and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. And in the book of Samuel describes the ‘united monarchy’ established by the bible’s King Saul, then expanded by the bible’s King David to include Palestine without the Negev desert, parts of Jordan, all of Lebanon, and parts of Syria.

In the early 20th century, the debate over the limits of the yet-to-be Jewish state was the main reason for the emergence of the revisionist current within the Zionist movement. 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.”

‘Greater Israel’ in Israeli politics

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 term came back into political discourse through the rhetoric of religious right-wing extremists from the settlement movement, many of whom were elected into office in the second half of the 2000s. The most notorious of them is Bezalel Smotrich, who now holds the position of Finance Minister, with unprecedented powers over settlement policy in the West Bank. He said in an old interview featured in a documentary by the French-German channel Arte, that he dreamed of a “Greater Israel that would extend from the Nile and the Euphrates”, with the limits of the Jewish Jerusalem extending all the way to the Syrian capital of Damascus. In March 2023, Smotrich sparked controversy by giving a speech to a group of pro-Israel activists in Paris from a podium decorated with the map of Jabotinsky’s “Greater Israel” from the old Irgun emblem, including Palestine and Jordan.

With religious Zionists’ increasingly outspoken calls to annex the West Bank, the term began to be used as a shorthand for a vision of Israel extending over all of historic Palestine and has become synonymous with the rejection of a Palestinian state. This version of greater Israel was reinforced with Israel’s nation-state law passed in 2018 and with the Knesset’s resolution last February rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere between the river and the sea.

Territorial ambitions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria

The Gaza genocide, and events across the region, have given new life to the “Greater Israel” idea as well.

Since the start of the current genocide, calls increased by religious right-wing extremists, mostly from the West Bank settler movement to establish Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. These calls have been backed by ministers and Knesset members. 

In January, settler organizations held a conference in Jerusalem to call for settling Gaza. Israel’s security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir attended the event and gave a speech at it. In October, hundreds of Israelis rallied near the Gaza fence to call for settlements in Gaza. Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and other Israeli politicians attended and gave speeches. Since last October 6, Israel has been besieging the north of Gaza, forcing the population to leave, the same area the settler movement hopes to re-establish colonies in Gaza. Israel’s former war minister Mosheh Yaalon admitted earlier this month that Israel was committing ethnic cleansing in the north of Gaza, sparking backlash in Israeli media.

In effect, it seemed that between calls to settle Gaza and efforts to annex the West Bank, preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, the practical implementation of “Greater Israel” was well on its way. But then rapidly evolving events in Lebanon and Syria over recent months resuscitated fantasies of a maximalist version of “Greater Israel” in the Israeli discourse. 

Israel’s demands to create a buffer zone inside Lebanon, combined with its invasion of Syrian territory following the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime have expanded the conceptual map. As Israeli forces reached as close as 23 kilometers from Damascus, Israeli religious extremists began bringing back biblical rhetoric to describe their territorial ambitions. In June, the Israeli daily Haaretz published a news article about an Israeli children’s books writer who had written a story about an Israeli child called Alon who wants to go to Lebanon, saying that “Lebanon is ours,” and that he couldn’t yet go to Lebanon because “the enemy is still there.” Last Thursday, a group of religious Orthodox Israelis went to the summit of Mount Al-Sheikh in Syria, recently occupied by the Israeli army, and held a religious ceremony there, under the sight of Israeli soldiers.

Israel insists that its actions in Syria are temporary, aiming at preventing resistance groups from filling the vacuum in the south of Syria, created by the collapse of the Syrian army. The U.S. national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, both repeated the same Israeli argument, affirming that the U.S. will make sure that Israel’s presence in Syria doesn’t become permanent.

However, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights in 1967 was also said to be temporary. Israel administrated all the territories it occupied in 1967 through the Israeli army and its ‘civil administration’ body for years. It engaged in negotiations with Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian leadership, all based on the premise that it would give these territories back.

Israel only withdrew from Egypt’s Sinai, on the condition stipulated in the 1979 Camp David peace treaty with Egypt, that the Sinai remains demilitarized, with no Egyptian army presence, except a minimum force at the border, and that it remains open for Israeli investment. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip’s interior in 2005, only to impose a total blockade on it, and is currently driving Palestinians from its northern part while settlers advocate to establish settlements there. Israel annexed the Golan Heights and the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1981 and is currently preparing to announce the annexation of the West Bank.

With such a record, with the rise of religious nationalism in Israel, and with Israel’s actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria unchecked over the past year, and its current push into Syria, can anybody guarantee that the fantasy of a “Greater Israel” is only a fantasy in the minds of Israeli leaders? On the contrary, it appears the expansionist supremacist ideology fueled by religious fanaticism, currently making its way over dead bodies and the rubble of entire cities, is not only a bad memory of the colonial past.