Greater Israel: Beyond Biblical Mythology, a Geopolitical Blueprint
When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich talks about expanding Israel’s reach “to Damascus,” or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expresses personal attachment to broad territorial ambitions or Israel being not only a “regional superpower” but “in some respects, a global superpower,” these are not just messianic daydreams. They reflect a deliberate and deeply destabilizing strategic doctrine. For years, the idea of Greater Israel was dismissed by Western analysts as the rhetoric of a few Israeli hardliners. Sustaining this dismissive position is no longer possible.
Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and now head of the U.S./Middle East Project, offers a sharp analytical lens for understanding today’s events. He suggests that Greater Israel isn’t just about land—it’s about Israel aiming to establish itself as the dominant hard-power player across the Middle East. As Levy puts it, this is about seeing how far Israel can extend its reach and consolidate its role as the region’s unrivaled hegemon.
Territorial control—occupying the Golan, reasserting presence in southern Lebanon, pushing forward with West Bank annexation—is only the most visible layer. The deeper game is about forging new regional alliances, systematically weakening rival states, and building webs of hard-power dependency that lock neighboring governments into Israel’s orbit.
The ideological consolidation of this project was the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which constitutionally defined Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people.” For many, including the PLO’s Saeb Erekat, this law was the moment when a Zionist aspiration became a formal legal reality, and for critics, a codification of a system of apartheid. What was once an ambition is now written into the legal foundations of the state.
Omer Bartov, a leading scholar on genocide and Israeli history, traces this shift with a heavy sense of loss. In his book Israel: What Went Wrong?, he shows how Zionism, once rooted in the humanitarian ideals of 19th-century Jewish emancipation, has been transformed into a state project of ethno-nationalism, exclusion, and, in the end, violence. As Bartov puts it, what began as a struggle for Jewish liberation has become a machinery for dominating Palestinians, with all the tragedy that implies.
The Logic of Urgency
The pace and simultaneity of Israeli military operations in recent years demand careful analysis. In just two years, Israel has bombed Gaza, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen; it has occupied the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, and parts of southern Lebanon. Israel even succeeded in drawing the United States into a direct conflict with Iran, a move that, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio accidentally admitted, was driven more by Israeli rather than American priorities. As for Netanyahu, this is a posture of someone convinced that the window for reshaping the region is closing fast and determined to act before it closes.
Levy describes the current moment as the “Pax Greater Israel” era, a time when the old constraints of American power, the so-called Pax Americana, have faded. With a more pliable U.S. administration, Israel’s room to maneuver has expanded. Iran still hasn’t rebuilt the deterrence it once had before Israel and America struck last year. The region’s strategic balance is more fluid—and more precarious—than it’s been in a generation.
While there’s international outrage over Israel’s actions in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, Israel has not suffered any punishment. The European Union, which heralds itself as the guardian of morals and Western values, has seen these values undermined by Israel, yet no single action has been taken. Netanyahu, who has piloted Israeli politics for nearly two decades, is unlikely to let an opportunity like this slip by.
Netanyahu’s sense of urgency isn’t just strategic. It is also deeply personal and political. He faces criminal charges, widespread public disapproval (polls showed most Israelis wanted him out even before the Gaza war), and an election looming in 2026. His personal survival and his political project are now intertwined. History teaches us that war often delays accountability, and Netanyahu knows that he has survived through wars.
By keeping the nation in a constant state of crisis, Netanyahu postpones his own reckoning while pushing forward his broader regional ambitions. There is always a danger when embattled leaders manipulate the machinery of state.
The Collapse of the Impunity Consensus
For decades, Israel benefited from an unspoken Western consensus that gave it extraordinary complacency on international law. UN resolutions could be swept aside, settlements could expand, human rights abuses against Palestinians could be perpetrated, and the memory of the Holocaust—too often used as a diplomatic shield—offered a kind of moral immunity no other state enjoyed. That consensus is now breaking down, even if its institutional traces remain stubbornly in place.
The visibility of the Gaza war and its horrendous violence has triggered a generational break like never before and a breakdown of this consensus. According to an April 2026 Pew survey, 60% of Americans have unfavorable views of Israel and 37% favorable ones. This becomes more important, as it is the first in history. The same survey also showed Netanyahu’s administration with 27% approval and 59% disapproval.
The generational divide is even sharper among young people, many of whom reject any complicity in what prominent scholars, including Bartov, now formally call genocide. Netanyahu’s act of tearing up the UN Charter at the General Assembly, followed by a mass walkout, was more than symbolism. It marked the end of an era for both Netanyahu and Israel. Criticism of Israel or Zionism is no longer quickly conflated with antisemitism, especially among the younger generations.
And yet the institutional lag is severe. The European Union, bound by Article 2 of its Association Agreement with Israel, which explicitly conditions the relationship on respect for human rights, has consistently refused to act on its own legal framework. The cost of this cowardice is not merely moral. The EU, having lost industrial competitiveness, seeks its international influence as a regulatory and normative superpower. This claim rests on credibility. A bloc that intends to police the digital practices of technology companies but cannot enforce a human rights clause in its own trade agreement with a small state faces difficulties in imposing itself as a normative power, and the Global South has drawn that conclusion because of the lack of moral authority and double standard.
The pro-Israel lobby in the United States, sensing the tide turning, has responded by intensifying rather than moderating. More money is being spent; more countries are being pressured; more political careers are being threatened; more communication and online platforms are being acquired; censorship is being imposed, especially on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube; and algorithms are being “re-educated,” as Mr. Larry Ellison said when he acquired TikTok. The main lobby, AIPAC, has in great measure turned into a politically toxic brand, according to The Intercept.
But Levy is right to note the structural limits of this approach. Lobbying is most effective when it moves with the current of public opinion or when it operates in the dark. It is least effective when it operates openly against an overwhelming public majority, against a country’s perceived national interest, and against the values of the rising generation. The lobby is fighting a rearguard action—powerful, well-resourced, and increasingly desperate.
The Next Iran and the Regional Order
It’s no accident that Israeli security officials—from Naftali Bennett to the current establishment—have started designating Türkiye as “the next Iran.” This isn’t just rhetoric; it is also part of the “Greater Israel” strategy. Three decades ago, Israel argued that Iran was the existential threat that had to be contained before it led the region. Now, the same logic and language is applied to Türkiye: any regional power capable of building a new security order outside Israeli influence is seen as a threat to be isolated or confronted before it can consolidate.
But Türkiye is a different kind of challenge. As a NATO member with the largest NATO army in Europe, a strong economy, and the anchor of a coalition with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, Türkiye is not easily marginalized. Recent agreements point to a regional bloc that aims to build security frameworks explicitly outside Israeli (and, by extension, Western) dominance. This coalition news has not pleased Israel and soon reached the EU, with Ursula von der Leyen declaring, “We do not want to live under the influence of China, Russia, or Türkiye.”
The regional threat map has changed. For much of the Arab world and for Türkiye’s Erdogan, Israel—not Iran—is now seen as the chief destabilizer. This shift in perception has real geopolitical consequences, and it’s not something American air power can easily undo.
Are we at the point of no return? In some ways, yes. The two-state solution, no matter how often it’s invoked in diplomatic statements, is functionally dead. It wasn’t killed by a single act but by decades of illegal settlements, legal discrimination, disproportionate violence, and the systematic fragmentation of Palestinian territory. The ethnostate is already a reality on the ground. Bartov’s assessment is sobering but direct: unless there is sustained, structural pressure and actions from the international community, a real course correction is unlikely, and so far, that pressure hasn’t materialized.
But in another sense, we’re not quite past the point of no return for Netanyahu’s grand project. The conditions that have enabled the Greater Israel strategy are starting to slip away. American public opinion is shifting faster than the country’s political leaders; the support for Palestine is now higher than the support for Israel. A new regional bloc—with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others—offers a real counterweight. Iran, for all its setbacks, still possesses significant strategic resources and has the backing of China and Russia. And inside Israel, recent polling shows that a large majority (71%) support replacing the current Basic Laws with a formal constitution. Beneath the surface noise of hardline politics, there’s evidence that Israeli society hasn’t wholly given in to the ethnonationalist vision Bartov describes.
One thing is clear: this current trajectory of forever war and continued violence and humiliation of Palestinians can’t last forever. As Levy notes, Netanyahu is playing a high-stakes game of “use it or lose it.” The real question isn’t whether this moment will end—sure, it will—but what the aftermath will look like. Will the region be forcibly remade in the image of Greater Israel, or will a new order, forged through painful resistance, emerge in its place? The stakes for Israelis, Palestinians, and the broader Middle East couldn’t be higher.
