What Netanyahu and the Israeli right mean when they invoke ‘Greater Israel’
'The concept is about much more than acquiring territory, it is also about Netanyahu’s desire for Israel to become a regional superpower.
In the past two-and-a-half years, Israel has flattened and reconquered Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and laying waste its civilian infrastructure, squeezing its population, according to one estimate from last year, into just 12% of an already tiny strip of land. In the West Bank, Israel continues a campaign of destruction and displacement towards Palestinian people and property that is unparalleled since the six-day war in 1967, expanding its matrix of control and settlement.
After the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Israel seized territory in Syria (beyond the illegally annexed Golan Heights) and is in the process of reconstituting a zone of occupation in southern Lebanon. Government ministers from the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power factions, and Likud parliamentarians, openly agitate for Israeli sovereignty and settlement in that country. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel...
In the days preceding the Iran war, two influential former Israeli security figures writing for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security observed that, from the point of view of key regional Sunni states, overthrowing the Iranian regime or weakening it significantly would establish Israel’s status as the “dominant regional power”.'
Todays most downzapped 'Greater Israel Project' post.
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What Netanyahu and the Israeli right mean when they invoke ‘Greater Israel’
'The concept is about much more than acquiring territory, it is also about Netanyahu’s desire for Israel to become a regional superpower.
In the past two-and-a-half years, Israel has flattened and reconquered Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and laying waste its civilian infrastructure, squeezing its population, according to one estimate from last year, into just 12% of an already tiny strip of land. In the West Bank, Israel continues a campaign of destruction and displacement towards Palestinian people and property that is unparalleled since the six-day war in 1967, expanding its matrix of control and settlement.
After the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Israel seized territory in Syria (beyond the illegally annexed Golan Heights) and is in the process of reconstituting a zone of occupation in southern Lebanon. Government ministers from the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power factions, and Likud parliamentarians, openly agitate for Israeli sovereignty and settlement in that country. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel...
In the days preceding the Iran war, two influential former Israeli security figures writing for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security observed that, from the point of view of key regional Sunni states, overthrowing the Iranian regime or weakening it significantly would establish Israel’s status as the “dominant regional power”.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/13/benjamin-netanyahu-middle-east-greater-israel