18August 2025
With his latest declaration endorsing the vision of “Greater Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has revived a Talmudic-biblical project that invokes religious mythology to justify Zionist expansionism. Years earlier, Netanyahu vowed to lead Israel into what he called its “centennial era.” At the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023, he shocked the world by displaying a map of Greater Israel—a vision now embedded in his policies of annexation and war.
This project, long championed by Israel’s far-right, is today openly embraced by Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. In 2016, Bezalel Smotrich—then a Knesset member and now Israel’s Finance Minister from the Religious Zionism party—declared that Israel’s borders should stretch to Damascus, covering lands of six Arab states: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, fulfilling the Zionist dream of “Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
Smotrich repeated this vision in March 2023 during a speech in Paris, where he stood on a platform decorated with a map labelling Jordan and historic Palestine as part of “Eretz Yisrael” (the Land of Israel).
Biblical Framing of a Colonial Project
The idea of Greater Israel was first formalised in Israeli politics when Likud, under Menachem Begin’s leadership in 1977, turned it into a political program. This ideological framework had long existed, rooted in biblical references and advanced by Revisionist Zionists, who renamed the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” and promoted Jewish settlement as a divine command.
Supporters of this biblical claim often cite verses from Genesis and lean on Zionist voices that called for expanded borders to secure domination over the Middle East. One of the most telling examples comes from David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister, who wrote in 1937 and 1938:
THE ESTablishment of a state, even on a small part of the land, is the greatest strengthening of our power at this time, and a great boost to our historic mission. We will break the boundaries imposed on us—not necessarily through war.”
This gradualist doctrine has guided Zionist policy for decades: secure part of the land, expand settlement, and slowly erase imposed limits.
At its theological core, the Greater Israel idea claims that the “Promised Land” stretches from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Syria and Iraq. The Israeli “Torah and Land Institute” states on its website:
“The Land of Greater Israel extends from the Euphrates in the east to the Nile in the south.”
Source: Sunnahfiles
