The Greater Israel Delusion May Undo Israel

The vision of “Greater Israel” draws on maximalist readings of biblical verses, especially Genesis 15:18–21, which some interpret as a promise of Jewish sovereignty from the “river of Egypt” to the Euphrates. In contemporary politics, this theology has produced two overlapping ambitions: unchallenged Israeli control of all land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and influence or dominance across parts of modern Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.

What was once an esoteric messianic fantasy has migrated into state policy. The current Netanyahu-led coalition has entrenched this vision through “annexation by a thousand cuts:” reclassifying a huge chunk of West Bank land as “state property,” accelerating settlement expansion, constructing blocs that sever Palestinian contiguity, and extending Israeli military authority.

These are not isolated security measures but components of a coherent territorial project. The International Court of Justice has already found Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories illegal, yet Israel’s leadership continues to behave as though biblical promise overrides international obligation.

The Palestinian Horizon
For Palestinians, the pursuit of Greater Israel does not mean a harsher occupation; it means the end of any political horizon. Rather than forming the basis of a future state, the West Bank is being reengineered into disconnected cantons surrounded by Israeli infrastructure, armed settlers, and military forces, while Gaza is treated as a disposable reservoir of unwanted people.

More insidiously, the Greater Israel project normalizes structural violence as the permanent organizing principle of Palestinian life: denial of building permits, arbitrary movement restrictions, criminalization of political expression, and routine settler violence carried out with impunity.

No Palestinian society will acquiesce indefinitely to this reality. To assume that five million people can be dispossessed, restricted, humiliated, and denied meaningful political representation without radicalization is to deny the basic lessons of history. As annexation hardens, armed resistance, localized insurgency, and mass civil disobedience will intensify, inevitably leading to a disastrous violent confrontation and regional instability.

Regional Fallout
The Arab states that have a peace agreement with Israel have repeatedly condemned new settlements and creeping annexation, but most have stopped at rhetoric, balancing public anger against security, economic, and technological cooperation with Israel.

Jordan and Egypt, the two Arab states with the oldest peace treaties with Israel, are uniquely exposed. Their agreements were justified as steps toward a comprehensive peace that would eventually resolve the Palestinian question. If Israel openly discards that premise through annexation and engineered mass displacement, those treaties have already become politically toxic, even if not formally abrogated.

For the Gulf states that normalized relations under the Abraham Accords—the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco—the contradiction is equally stark. They presented normalization as a way to gain leverage for Palestinians and advance regional stability and prosperity. A Greater Israel agenda exposes that narrative as hollow and recasts normalization as complicity in permanent occupation.

International Order
Internationally, the advance of Greater Israel is accelerating Israel’s transformation from a contested ally into a state whose conduct many increasingly regard as incompatible with a rules-based order. The relevant principles are clear: territory cannot be acquired by force, peoples possess a right to self-determination, and basic human rights are universal. Israeli annexationist policies violate each of these tenets in broad daylight.

This reality places Israel’s Western allies, above all future US administrations, in a position of acute moral and strategic contradiction. Washington invokes these same principles, yet continues to arm, fund, and shield an Israeli government entrenching permanent domination over another people. If the US remains silent or permissive, it will further institutionalize the perception that international law is applied selectively for geopolitical convenience. That perception will weaken Western credibility and make cooperation on other international crises more difficult.

There is also a darker consequence: as Israel increasingly defines itself in ethno-religious terms and claims to speak for Jews worldwide, rage at Israeli policy will further intensify hostility toward Jewish communities abroad. In that sense, the Greater Israel project imperils not only Palestinians and regional stability but Jewish security far beyond Israel’s borders, which defies Israel’s reason for being.

Moral and Philosophical Cost
Morally and philosophically, the pursuit of Greater Israel represents not the fulfillment of Jewish history but a profound rupture with it. Classical rabbinic thought ties Jewish sovereignty to ethical restraint and law, while the prophetic tradition judges power by its justice toward the vulnerable and the stranger. A state that defines itself through the permanent domination of other people cannot credibly present itself as the embodiment of that inheritance.

The Greater Israel ideology reduces Judaism to a tribal land claim stripped of universal ethical content. It recasts Jewish memory not as a source of empathy for the dispossessed but as a warrant to dispossess others. This inversion is existentially dangerous because a polity built on institutionalized injustice can command fear but cannot command enduring legitimacy. From this vantage point, the drive toward Greater Israel may mark the beginning of Israel’s undoing as a viable state: a citadel corroded from within by the very methods it employs to defend itself.

What Allies Must Do
If Israel’s allies—especially the United States and Germany, along with the European Union and the Arab states—are serious about preventing Israel from this self-destructive trajectory, while enhancing the prospect of Palestinian statehood, they must move beyond ritualized concern and empty rhetoric to concrete action.

I do not expect the US administration under Trump nor Germany, which blindly support Israel, to take any concrete action to disabuse the current Netanyahu-led government of pursuing its disastrous design to create Greater Israel. They should remember, however, that their inaction is not only destroying any prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, but they are, in fact, jeopardizing Israel’s own security, which they presumably want to safeguard. They are also becoming complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

The prospect of a new Israeli government, which may be formed following the upcoming election in October, offers a window of opportunity to pressure it to change course, starting by ending the systematic, brutal ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the continuing killing and destruction of what’s left of infrastructure in Gaza. Here are some of the measures that can be taken immediately to prevent another catastrophe:

1. Demand an immediate stop to the expansion of settlements and settler terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank, and condition any military aid on the immediate cessation of annexation of Palestinian land.
2. End the transfer of any weapons used to entrench the occupation, as well as sanction the import of any product produced in the settlements, as Canada, the UK, and France have just announced.
3. Support international accountability mechanisms, including International Criminal Court investigations and implementation of relevant UN resolutions.
4. Although many Western powers recognized the State of Palestine, such recognition is worthless unless they expand financial, political, and legal support for Palestinian civil society, human rights defenders, and nonviolent movements resisting dispossession.
5. Coordinate diplomatic pressure through joint démarches, ambassadorial recalls, and downgrading of high-profile visits.
6. For the Arab states that are at peace with Israel, they should downgrade their diplomatic missions in Israel and threaten to withdraw their ambassadors if Israel continues with its expansionist policy.

These are the minimum measures consistent with the principles Israel’s allies claim to uphold elsewhere. The choice is stark: either act now to arrest the Greater Israel project, or become complicit in a permanent regime of domination and severely undermine their geostrategic interests and moral credibility for decades to come.