Greater Israel (Hebrew: ארץ ישראל השלמה, Eretz Yisrael Hashlema) is an expression with several different biblical and political meanings over time. It is often used, in an irredentist fashion, to refer to the historic or desired borders of Israel.
Currently, the most common definition of the land encompassed by the term is the territory of the State of Israel together with the Palestinian territories. Other definitions, favored by Revisionist Zionists, included the territory of the former Emirate of Transjordan and the Sinai Peninsula.
Promised Land
Main article: Promised Land
_(14803713123).jpg)
The Bible contains three geographical definitions of the Land of Israel:
- The first definition (Genesis 15:18–21) seems to define the land that was given to all of the children of Abram (Abraham), including Ishmael, Zimran, Jokshan, Midian, etc. It describes a large territory, “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”.
- A narrower definition (Numbers 34:1–15 and Ezekiel 47:13–20) refers to the land that was divided between the original Twelve tribes of Israel after they were delivered from Egypt.
- A wider definition (Deuteronomy 11:24, Deuteronomy 1:7) indicating the territory that will be given to the children of Israel slowly throughout the years, as explained in Exodus 23:29 and Deuteronomy 7:22).
Land of Israel
Main article: Land of Israel
The Land of Israel (Hebrew: אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל, Modern: ʾEreṣ Yīsraʾel, Tiberian: ʾEreṣ Yīsrāʾēl) is the traditional Jewish name for an area of the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine. The definitions of the limits of this territory vary between passages in the Hebrew Bible, with specific mentions in Genesis 15, Exodus 23, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47. Nine times elsewhere in the Bible, the settled land is referred as “from Dan to Beersheba”, and three times it is referred as “from the entrance of Hamath unto the brook of Egypt” (1 Kings 8:65, 1 Chronicles 13:5 and 2 Chronicles 7:8).
These biblical limits for the land differ from the borders of established historical Israelite and later Jewish kingdoms, including the United Kingdom of Israel, the two kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah, the Hasmonean Kingdom, and the Herodian kingdom. At their heights, these realms ruled lands with similar but not identical boundaries.
Judaism defines the land as where Jewish religious law prevailed and excludes territory where it was not applied.
It holds that the area is a God-given inheritance of the Jewish people based on the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, as well as Joshua and the later Prophets.
According to the Book of Genesis, the land was first promised by God to Abram’s descendants; the text is explicit that this is a covenant between God and Abram for his descendants.
Abram’s name was later changed to Abraham, with the promise refined to pass through his son Isaac and to the Israelites, descendants of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson.
Kingdom of Israel
Main articles: History of ancient Israel and Judah, Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy), Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), and Kingdom of Judah
- The Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) (1047–931 BCE), was the kingdom established by the Israelites and uniting them under a single king.
- The Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) (930–c.720 BCE), was the kingdom of northern Israel after the breakup of the united monarchy of the Kingdom of Israel.
- The Kingdom of Judah (930–587 BCE), was the southern Jewish kingdom after the breakup of the united monarchy of the Kingdom of Israel.
Second Temple period
Main articles: Second Temple period and Return to Zion
Return to Zion (Hebrew: שִׁיבָת צִיּוֹן or שבי ציון, Shivat Tzion or Shavei Tzion, lit. ’Zion returnees’) is an event recorded in Ezra–Nehemiah of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah—subjugated by the Neo-Babylonian Empire—were freed from the Babylonian captivity following the Persian conquest of Babylon. In 539 BCE, the Persian king Cyrus the Great issued the Edict of Cyrus allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and the Land of Judah, which was made into a self-governing Jewish province known as Yehud under the new Persian Achaemenid Empire.
The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE–70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and ended with the First Jewish–Roman War and the Roman siege of Jerusalem.
Palestine under British rule 1917–1948
Balfour Declaration
Main article: Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
On the military front in Palestine, the Sinai and Palestine campaign was part of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I, taking place between January 1915 and October 1918. It brought Palestine under British control that ended with the Armistice of Mudros in 1918, leading to the cession of Ottoman Syria that included most of western Palestine.
During British Mandate for Palestine
Main article: Mandate for Palestine
Early Revisionist Zionist groups such as Betar and Irgun Zvai-Leumi regarded the territory of the Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan, as Greater Israel.
In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partition of Mandatory Palestine. In a letter to his son later that year, David Ben-Gurion stated that partition would be acceptable but as a first step. Ben-Gurion wrote that
This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole. The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.[5][6][7]
The same sentiment was recorded by Ben-Gurion on other occasions, such as at a meeting of the Jewish Agency executive in June 1938,[8] as well as by Chaim Weizmann.[7][9] Ben Gurion said:
We shall smash these frontiers which are being forced upon us, and not necessarily by war. I believe an agreement between us and the Arab State could be reached in a not too distant future.”[10]
During early period of the State of Israel
Joel Greenberg writing in The New York Times notes: “At Israel’s founding in 1948, the Labor Zionist leadership, which went on to govern Israel in its first three decades of independence, accepted a pragmatic partition of what had been British Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab states. The opposition Revisionist Zionists, who evolved into today’s Likud party, sought Eretz Yisrael Ha-Shlema—Greater Israel, or literally, the Whole Land of Israel (shalem, meaning complete).”[11] The capture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt during the Six-Day War in 1967 led to the growth of the non-parliamentary Movement for Greater Israel and the construction of Israeli settlements. The 1977 elections, which brought Likud to power also had considerable impact on acceptance and rejection of the term. Greenberg notes:
THE seed was sown in 1977, when Menachem Begin of Likud brought his party to power for the first time in a stunning election victory over Labor. A decade before, in the 1967 war, Israeli troops had in effect undone the partition accepted in 1948 by overrunning the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ever since, Mr. Begin had preached undying loyalty to what he called Judea and Samaria (the West Bank lands) and promoted Jewish settlement there. But he did not annex the West Bank and Gaza to Israel after he took office, reflecting a recognition that absorbing the Palestinians could turn Israel into a bi-national state instead of a Jewish one.[11]
Yitzhak Shamir was a dedicated proponent of Greater Israel and as Israeli Prime Minister gave the settler movement funding and Israeli governmental legitimisation.[12]
Movement for Greater Israel
Main article: Movement for Greater Israel
The Movement for Greater Israel (Hebrew: התנועה למען ארץ ישראל השלמה, HaTenu’a Lema’an Eretz Yisrael HaSheleima), also known as the Land of Israel Movement, was a political organisation in Israel during the 1960s and 1970s which subscribed to an ideology of Greater Israel.
The organization was formed in July 1967, a month after Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War. It called on the Israeli government to keep the captured areas and to settle them with Jewish populations.
Today
Inclusion of occupied West Bank and Gaza
Annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was part of the platform of the mainstream Israeli Likud party, and of some other, often more extreme Israeli political parties.[13] On September 14, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, formerly of Likud, remarked that “Greater Israel is over. There is no such thing. Anyone who talks that way is deluding themselves”,[14] making this statement just two days before privately reaching out to the Palestinian President with Israel’s broadest ever peace offer.
Meir Kahane, an ultra-nationalist Knesset member, who founded the American Jewish Defense League and the banned Israeli Kach party, worked towards Greater Israel and other Religious Zionist goals. Kach,[15][16] Tehiya,[17][18] and the National Religious Party[19][20] are parties which supported the idea of a Greater Israel.
Currently in Israel, in the debate relating to the borders of Israel, “Greater Israel” is generally used to refer to the territory of the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories, the combined territory of the former Mandatory Palestine without Trans-Jordan (already separated from Palestine by the British in the early 1920s). However, because of the controversial nature of the term, the term Land of Israel is often used instead.[citation needed]
In March 2023, the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, spoke at a Paris memorial behind a podium featuring a ‘Greater Israel’ map including Trans-Jordan. This speech has led to tensions with Jordan, while his spokesperson attributed the symbol’s presence to the organizers of the event, which was dedicated to a man connected to the Irgun (see above for Irgun emblem). In response to the diplomatic controversy, Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated that Israel adheres to the 1994 peace treaty and respects Jordan’s sovereignty.[21][22]
In academia
Hillel Weiss, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, has promoted the “necessity” of rebuilding the Temple and of Jewish rule over Greater Israel.[23][24][25]
Conspiracy theories
10 agorot coin controversy
Main article: 10 agorot controversy
Zionists, and the State of Israel, have been accused of plotting to expand Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. This so-called 10 agorot controversy is named after the Israeli coin[26] brandished by PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in 1988 as evidence for this accusation. The Bank of Israel denies this conspiracy theory since the coin is a replica of a historical coin dating from 37 to 40 BCE and the alleged “map” is actually the irregular shape of the ancient coin.[27]
Israeli flag controversy
Conspiracy theorists have suggested the blue strips of the Israeli flag represent the Nile and Euphrates as the boundaries of Eretz Isra’el as promised to the Jews by God according to religious scripture.[28] This claim was at a time made by Yasser Arafat,[29] Iran and Hamas.[30] However, Danny Rubinstein points out that “Arafat … added, in interviews that he gave in the past, that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates. … No Israeli, even those who demonstrate understanding for Palestinian distress, will accept the … nonsense about the blue stripes on the flag, which was designed according to the colours of the traditional tallit (prayer shawl) …”[31]
Yinon Plan
The Yinon Plan is an article published in February 1982 in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (“Directions”) entitled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’.[1] The article was penned by Oded Yinon, reputedly a former advisor to Ariel Sharon,[2] a former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry[3][4][5][6] and journalist for The Jerusalem Post.[7]
It is cited as an early example of characterizing political projects in the Middle East in terms of a logic of sectarian divisions.[8] It has played a role in both conflict resolution analysis by scholars who regard it as having influenced the formulation of policies adopted by the American administration under George W. Bush,[9] and also in conspiracy theories according to which the article either predicted or planned major political events in the Middle East since the 1980s, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State. Conspiracy theories further claim that the plan was introduced to the US by members of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in administration and that it was adopted by the Bush administration following 9/11 (claimed to be a Mossad false flag) with the goal of furthering US interests in the region, while simultaneously advancing the alleged Jewish dream of Greater Israel “from the Nile to the Euphrates”.[10]
Kivunim was a quarterly periodical[11] dedicated to the study of Judaism and Zionism which appeared between 1978 and 1987,[12] and was published by the World Zionist Organization‘s department of Information in Jerusalem.[13]
Argument of the paper
Yinon argues that the world was witnessing a new epoch in history without precedent, which required both the development of a fresh perspective and an operational strategy to implement it. The rationalist and humanist foundations of Western civilization were in a state of collapse.[14] The West was disintegrating before the combined onslaught of the Soviet Union and the Third World, a phenomenon he believed was accompanied by an upsurge in anti-Semitism, all of which meant that Israel would become the last safe haven for Jews to seek refuge in.[15] The Muslim Arab world circling Israel had been arbitrarily sliced up into 19 ethnically heterogeneous states by imperial powers, France and Great Britain,[16] and was just a ‘temporary house of cards put together by foreigners’ – the notion that pan-Arabism was a house of cards doomed to collapse had been already argued by Fouad Ajami some years earlier[17] – composed of mutually hostile ethnic minorities and majorities, that, once disintegrated into, in Ahmad’s interpretation, feudal tribal fiefdoms, would no longer challenge Israel.[18] Centrifugal factors would give rise to a dynamic of fragmentation that, while highly perilous, would offer Israel opportunities it had failed to exploit in 1967.[16]
He then proceeds to analyze the weaknesses of Arab countries, by citing what he perceives to be flaws in their national and social structures, concluding that Israel should aim to bring about the fragmentation of the Arab world into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings.[5] ‘Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation,’ he argued, would prove to be advantageous to Israel in the short term.[19] He saw contemporary events in Lebanon as a foreshadowing of future developments overall throughout the Arab world. The upheavals would create a precedent for guiding Israeli short-term and long-term strategies. Specifically, he asserted that the immediate aim of policy should be the dissolution of the military capabilities of Arab states east of Israel, while the primary long-term goal should work towards the formation of unique areas defined in terms of ethnonational and religious identities.[20]
Blueprint for the Middle East
Egypt
Yinon thought the 1978 Camp David Accords, the peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, to be mistaken. One of Israel’s aims for the 1980s would be, Yinon claimed, the dismemberment of Egypt, a country he described as a “corpse”, in order to reestablish the status quo ante, when Israel had controlled the Sinai Peninsula.[15] Yinon hoped to see the formation of a Christian Coptic state on Egypt’s northern borders. Yinon pinned the expectations on a rapid Israeli re-invasion of the Sinai triggered by a future rupture by Egypt of the American-brokered terms of peace, something which, under Hosni Mubarak, failed to eventuate.[19]
Jordan and the West Bank
In his account of Russian foreign policy and the Arabs, Yevgeny Primakov contextualizes Yinon’s paper in terms of the content of what former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, George Ball, stated in testimony in August before the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Ball, discussing the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon[7] earlier in June, referred to conversations with Ariel Sharon, in which Sharon reportedly stated that his long-term strategy consisted of “squeezing the Palestinians out of the West Bank..allowing only enough of them to remain for work.”[3] Yinon’s paper suggested that Israeli policy, both in war and peace, should aim for one objective: ‘the liquidation of Jordan’ as ruled by the Hashemite Kingdom, together with increased Palestinian migration from the West Bank into eastern Jordan.[3][19] The dissolution of Jordan, Yinon thought, would bring an end to the problem of the existence of dense concentrations of Palestinians in the Palestinian territories Israel had conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967, allowing them to be spirited away into that former kingdom’s territory.[21]
Lebanon
See also: FLLF and Kissinger plan in Lebanon
Yinon’s paper fed an old Lebanese conspiracy theory against its territorial integrity going back to 1943, according to which the country was to be cantonized along ethno-nationalist lines. In particular during the 1970s[22] the idea took wing and, especially after civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, came to be associated with the figure of Henry Kissinger whose Middle East diplomacy was thought to be greatly detrimental to Lebanese interests, and who was rumoured to be planning the partition of Lebanon into two states.[23]
Iraq
Further information: Israel–Kurdistan Region relations
Yinon considered Iraq, with its oil wealth, to be Israel’s greatest threat. He believed that the Iran–Iraq War would split up Iraq, whose dissolution should be a strategic Israeli aim, and he envisaged the emergence of three ethnic centres, of Shiites governing from Basra, the Sunni from Baghdad, and the Kurds with a capital in Mosul, each area run along the lines of the administrative divisions of the former Ottoman Empire.[19]
Reactions
Contemporary reception
An English translation by Israel Shahak soon appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies.[24][25] Israel Shahak in the foreword to his translation interpreted the plan as both a fantasy and a faithful reflection of the strategy being developed by Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan, and drew parallels with both the geopolitical ideas that flourished in Germany from 1890 to 1933, later adopted by Hitler and applied to Eastern Europe,[26] and modern American neoconservative thinking, which influenced Yinon, to gather from the sources cited in his notes.[27] It was, it has been argued, Shahak’s English translation which catapulted Yinon into the public limelight.[9]
According to William Haddad, the publication of the article caused a sensation at the time.[28] Haddad notes that the American syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft, a month later, echoed Yinon’s ideas in an article that Syria would implode into confessional fragments composed of Alawite, Druze and Sunni communities were the country to be occupied after an Israeli invasion, and that such an event should cause reverberations throughout the Arab world, resulting in a reconfiguration of ethnic microstates guaranteed to introduce an era of peace. The idea was dismissed at the time.[28] Yinon’s article drew several other responses, and was reviewed in Newsweek (26 July 1982, p. 32) and the Wall Street Journal (8 December 1982, p. 34).[29][30] Amos Elon reviewed the essay for Haaretz and worried that American commentators on Israel were turning a blind eye to the kind of irrational attitudes evinced by Yinon’s article. Those who did point out such tendencies within Israeli politics were subjected to defamation.[15] David Waines, reviewing the essay for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, contextualized it in terms of two other works appearing in the same year as Yinon’s essay, a collection edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and a book by Michael J. Cohen on American, British and Zionist long-term regional policies, both arguing such policies were dictated solely by a realpolitik insouciant of Palestinian grievances. In the light of the immediate instance of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in that same year, Waines concluded that all three pieces created a ‘grave apprehension about present and future developments in the Middle East.’[31]
An article published in 1983 on the monthly publication of the Socialist Organisation in Israel, Matzpen, claimed the article exposes the minds behind Israel’s foreign policy. To such claims, Yinon responded in an interview to the anti-establishment, weekly newspaper “HaOlam HaZeh“, claiming he is not a fan or a friend of Israel’s leaders at the time, including Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin, nor does he supports them. Yinon also claimed that an article, similar to his, was published in a left-wing newspaper of the Kibbutz Movement Mi’Befnim.[32]
The French philosopher, convert to Islam, and Holocaust denier, Roger Garaudy, who was married to a Palestinian woman, used the text the following year in the English version of his book, L’Affaire Israël: le sionisme politique, to support his argument that a mechanism was in place to drive Arabs out of what was defined as Eretz Israel and disintegrate Arab countries.[33] Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal outlined its contents in a book on peace prospects,[2] in 1984, as did Christine Moss Helms in a Brookings Institution study.[34]
Later interpretations
Yehoshafat Harkabi appraised Yinon’s analysis of the weakness of Arab states as generally correct while expressing doubts about the suggestion Israel should actively work towards their dissolution. If their fragmentation is inevitable, he asked, why would it be necessary for Israel to interfere?[35] Ralph Schoenman argued that its divide et īmpera principle followed ‘the time-honoured imperial pattern’.[36]
Mordechai Nisan, like Haddad, notes that it made waves, stirring both curiosity and wrath, the latter since it fed into regional suspicions that Israel was intent on “balkanizing” the neighbourhood. Nisan thought the regional outcry both exaggerated and incredulous: Yinon’s apparent suggestion that Israel adopt an interventionist role to abet the fragmentation of Arab states the author thought inevitable, he added, served to create an impression that Israel was engaged in a sinister plot, when the views expressed were Yinon’s alone, and did not represent Israeli government policy.[37]
Ilan Peleg described it as ‘an authentic mirror of the thinking mode of the Israeli Right at the height of Begin’s rule.’[38] Noam Chomsky made a more nuanced analysis of the historical context: the views espoused by Yinon were to be dissociated from the official Zionist mainstream outlook of that time, in embodying ‘ideological and geopolitical fantasies’ that could be identified with the line developed by the ultranationalist Tehiya political party, created in 1979. Nonetheless, an argument could be made, he continues, that part of the mainstream of Labour Zionism in his view had entertained similar ideas. Chomsky cites in support of this David Ben-Gurion‘s strategy when the State of Israel was founded of crushing Syria and the Transjordan, annexing southern Lebanon while leaving its northern residue to Maronite Christians, and bombing Egypt if it were to put up resistance. Chomsky warned against complacency about these fringe ideas since, he argued: ‘(t)he entire history of Zionism and later that of Israel, particularly since 1967, is one of gradual shift towards the positions of those formerly regarded as right-wing extremists.’[39]
Virginia Tilley argues that there was a strong tension between the US as a global hegemon relying on strong regional state systems, and Israel’s interests in a weak state system in the Middle East beyond its borders on the other hand. In this context she cites Yinon’s views as spelling out the latter logic, but specifies that they were not quite unique at that time, since Ze’ev Schiff writing in Haaretz in the same month, 5 February 1982, had asserted that Israel’s geostrategic interests would be best served by the fragmentation of Iraq, for example, into a tripartite entity consisting of Shiite and Sunni states hived off from a northern Kurdish reality.[40]
Linda S. Heard, writing for Arab News in 2005, reviewed recent policies under George W. Bush such as the war on terror, and events in the Middle East from the Iran–Iraq War to the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, and concluded:
There is one thing that we do know. Oded Yinon’s 1982 “Zionist Plan for the Middle East” is in large part taking shape. Is this pure coincidence? Was Yinon a gifted psychic? Perhaps! Alternatively, we in the West are victims of a long-held agenda not of our making and without doubt not in our interests.[19]
In 2017, Ted Becker, former Walter Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and Brian Polkinghorn, distinguished professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University, argued that Yinon’s plan was adopted and refined in a 1996 policy document entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by a research group at the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington. The group was directed by Richard Perle, who, some years later, became one of the key figures in the formulation of the Iraq War strategy adopted during the administration of George W. Bush in 2003.[9]
Both Becker and Polkinhorn admit that avowed enemies of Israel in the Middle East take the sequence of events—Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, its encirclement of Gaza, the invasion of Lebanon, its bombing of Iraq, airstrikes in Syria and its attempts at containing Iran’s nuclear capacities—when read in the light of the Yinon Plan and the Clean break analysis, to be proof that Israel is engaged in a modern version of The Great Game, with the backing of Zionist currents in the American neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist movements. They also conclude that Likud Party appears to have implemented both plans.[41]