Afrasianet - Mazen Al Najjar - When the Israeli right invokes the term "Greater Israel," it is often seen as an expansionist concept to increase the area of territory that Israel claims. This is certain. Israel, since its inception, has been an expansionist state aimed at displacing Palestinians, and this is accelerating now.
But what does the Greater Israel project really mean? What do Netanyahu and the Israeli right mean by "Greater Israel"? What are the consequences and consequences of this project regionally and globally?
Greater Israel is a project that goes beyond the idea of territorial and settlement expansion, crystallizing into a broad geopolitical project of regional hegemony, turning it into an arena of conflict, bloody collision with regional powers, and historical destruction.
This entailed involving America in the war, along with a deliberate attempt to weaken the Gulf states, which many doubt would succeed.
In the past 30 months, Israel has leveled and reoccupied the Gaza Strip, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands, destroying civilian infrastructure, and confining its population to just 12 percent of the already narrow strip of land.
In the West Bank, Israel continues its campaign of destruction and displacement targeting the Palestinian people and their property, in an attack unprecedented since the 1967 war, expanding its control and settlements.
After the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime, Israel seized Syrian territory (outside the occupied Golan Heights) and is in the process of reoccupying southern Lebanon.
Ministers and lawmakers from the ruling coalition have publicly incited the imposition of Israeli sovereignty and settlements in Gaza and Lebanon. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on Israel to "extend all the way to Damascus," and Netanyahu himself claimed that he felt "intimately connected" to this regional vision of a Greater Israel.
In an article in The Guardian, Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator, argues that the idea of a "Greater Israel" is as much a geopolitical and strategic concept as it is a regional concept of territory, occupation and control.
But Netanyahu's quest is more ambitious and complex than the territorial occupation: a project of regional hegemony based on new alliances, backed by hard power.
Weakening and subjugating the Gulf states
After the Al-Aqsa deluge and the scope and brutality of Israel's response in Gaza became clear, its efforts toward regional integration: normalization of relations with its Arab neighbors faltered. Netanyahu was faced with a difficult choice: either to resume regional normalization efforts in agreement with the Palestinians, or to stick to his "zero" stance rejecting any Palestinian future.
By choosing the latter option, Netanyahu had to remove Iran from the regional balance of power, requiring direct and broad U.S. military intervention alongside Israel.
Levy notes that days before the war, two former Israeli security chiefs, in an article at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, observed that the main Sunni regional states see the overthrow or weakening of the Iranian regime as consolidating Israel's position as a regional hegemon.
Achieving this requires not only the collapse of Iran, but also the weakening of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which rely on Israel for security and energy export lines. The repercussions of the war and the targeting of the Gulf states with Iranian drones and missiles can be considered an intentional feature of Israel, not just a side effect.
Predictably, when Israel and the United States launched this war, the Gulf states' access to world markets through the Strait of Hormuz was severely disrupted. When Israel stepped up targeting Iran's energy infrastructure, Tehran carried out its threat and bombed areas in the Gulf states.
Netanyahu took the opportunity to call for "alternative routes to the Straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb," predicting "the extension of oil and gas pipelines west through the Arabian Peninsula to Israel, and then our ports on the Mediterranean Sea."
Six-party alliance
In his public statements, Netanyahu tied some of the threads of his project to impose greater Israel's hegemony. Days before the war broke out, during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel, Netanyahu shared his vision of creating "an integrated system, such as a six-pronged alliance around or within the Middle East," that would include "India, Arab countries, African countries, Mediterranean countries (Greece and Cyprus), and countries in Asia." Israel would be the centerpiece of the alliance.
A recent article published in Hebrew, written by two high-ranking people at the IDF's official Institute for Strategy, outlined some aspects of the project. They argued that the IDF would not only invade and occupy territory, but would also achieve "operational control in areas far from Israel, without actual control of the territory."
It would give Israel a "superior position as queen of the jungle" (the rest of the Middle East is frequently described as a "jungle" in Israeli political discourse), establishing a "regional order that promotes Israel's goals."
In his recent speeches, Netanyahu has begun to refer to Israel not only as a "regional superpower," but sometimes as a "global superpower." Israel seeks to position itself at the heart of a regional alliance that can be sustained when U.S. influence declines.
Netanyahu has promised to deploy the six-party alliance against the "radical Shiite axis... and the emerging radical Sunni axis." Israel has not hesitated to name the next targeted "threat": Turkey.
According to Levy, talk of Greater Israel's hegemony is a usual wartime exaggeration.
But recent Israeli policy shows that this is not the case. The perpetual warlike orientation is deeply rooted in Israel's political class: the government and the opposition, the security establishment, the New Right, and the media. But it is thinking that carries the dangers of over-expansion and severe backlash; it is dangerous for Israel itself, and the region will not accept it.
The Greater Israel Project is Harmful to America
"I promised you that we would change the face of the Middle East." This is what Netanyahu spoke seven weeks after launching "Epic Fury" with Donald Trump's participation. Amid the tumult of events, the broader vision of the latest war is absent.
This war culminated in a relentless Israeli effort – with US support – to reshape the Middle East in the wake of the Al-Aqsa flood attack. Proponents claim that it is a vision that will produce a more peaceful and stable region.
But John Hoffman, an American scholar at the Cato Institute, thinks they were wrong. Like previous attempts to reshape the Middle East, the vision of a "Greater Israel" relies on arrogance in the belief that Washington and its partners can reshape the region by force alone.
For thirty months, Washington has supported Israel's aggressive regional campaign, and has incurred the politically, economically, and strategically high costs of this operation. Continued U.S. support for Israel ensures a perpetual conflict at the expense of U.S. interests.
An aggressive, expansionist vision
Israel's post-October 7 vision is aggressive and expansionist and open with no definite end. It has three goals:
• Consolidating Israel's hegemony over the Palestinian territories by imposing a "[settler] reality on the ground" impedes a political solution.
• Dismantling the armed resistance axis groups.
• Neutralizing Iran is the pillar of this axis.
To this end, Israel has launched a broad military campaign on multiple fronts to reshape the regional order in its image.
This campaign relied on American protection of Israel from the consequences of its policies. The United States immunized Israel from severe diplomatic backlash, financed its wars, and even intervened militarily directly to protect Israel and fight its adversaries.
Hoffman recalls America's decades-long efforts to manage the Middle East by force, accumulating a heavy price in exchange for fictitious benefits, but Washington refuses to change course. The latest attempt to change the region in cooperation with Israel is no exception.
U.S. support for Israel has fueled widespread hostility toward the United States, with continued causes of turmoil and conflict, outcomes that are deeply detrimental to America's interests. The result is chronic turmoil and endless U.S. intervention.
There is no American interest in permanent wars in the Middle East. Israel's post-October 7 vision has no clear end, and the United States is paying a heavy price because it is driven by imaginative thinking, and can only be achieved by protecting Israel from the consequences of its aggression.
Hoffman recommends that the U.S. administration stop supporting Israel's disastrous project and declare an end to U.S. support for it.
Endless death and destruction
Andy Worthington, a British historian, journalist and documentary filmmaker, highlights Israel's dangerous refusal to comply with restraint, which is why it must be stopped. Israel's behavior has shown, above all, unprecedented arrogance.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has led to a global energy crisis whose magnitude is deliberately concealed by Western politicians and media, but one that is large enough for the West to realize the danger of Israel's project to its life and economy.
Any ceasefire agreement would have to include Lebanon as well, but Israel refuses to comply with any restrictions, American or Iranian, simply because it cares about nothing but its aggression and expansionist project.
On April 8, Israel, in a deliberate provocation to undermine the ceasefire between the United States and Iran, launched the most destructive attacks on Lebanon, targeting more than 100 targets in ten minutes, under the pretext of targeting resistance strongholds without evidence, killing 357 civilians and wounding thousands.
Despite the threat of Israel's aggression and its massive violations of the ceasefire, it continues to destroy southern Lebanon village after village, and recently received widespread international condemnation for the murder of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who was branded a "terrorist" after her murder.
With its growing arrogance and madness over the past 30 months, Israel's project has become endless wars on many fronts, not only by confronting military targets, but also by systematically destroying and exterminating entire civilian societies that it considers, according to the Gaza model, to be "linked" to resistance or hysterical pretexts.
Israel's wars have also shown that its aggressive claims of "self-defense" extend beyond the Middle East, through extensive influence with loyal Western governments, especially the United States, Britain, and Germany, which, in addition to being a major arms supplier to Israel, have waged harsh crackdowns on freedom of expression, protest, and "direct action" in defense of Israel.
Israel will remain a backup reservoir for Western fascism. Despite its defeat in the Second World War, it remains lurking in the West, and Israel is its laboratory and example, whose experiences in violence and racism legislation, surveillance technologies, and tools of repression and extermination can be emulated when necessary. This will be exacerbated as the Greater Israel project moves forward.
A disaster in the making
The Gaza genocide will become the model and the template for a world of massacres without borders, surveillance and total control, and will continue to do so as long as Israel has been allowed to exercise its perverse authority. For all this, he advocates: "For the sake of all of us, Israel and its supporters must be restrained and disarmed in their various spheres of influence."
In the same vein, the American writer and physician Josh Basel says that this leads us to what Israel is striving for, which is certainly the expansion of the territories of Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. This will lead to the displacement of millions of civilians in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
The real danger is that the West will do nothing to stop it, quite the opposite. Israel and its leadership consistently go unpunished for countless war crimes, while many Western countries bolster them with arms deals and extraordinary political advantages that no other country enjoys.
Israel maintains this powerful position of power through influence that itself evokes a sense of desperation, such as blackmailing American politicians.
Basel's conclusion is that the Greater Israel project is not a theoretical idea, but a project that has already been in place for years and is being shown by events as episodes. If left unchecked, it could lead to one of the greatest and most destructive disasters of our time.
Mazen Al Najjar - Researcher in History and Sociology
Dr. Mazen Al-Najjar is an academic specializing in industrial management and production systems, and a writer, researcher, and translator in the fields of thought, history, and sociology, with a special interest in settlement studies, the Old Testament, American studies, and biblical (Old Testament).
He has been practicing writing, translation, and academic and journalistic editing, in Arabic and English, since 1980. He has co-founded and produced a number of intellectual and academic journals, and participated in the scientific review and evaluation of a number of them.
He has published hundreds of articles, studies, book presentations, and reports in newspapers, websites, and magazines on a weekly or daily basis.
