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Donald Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of its people is an unprecedented disdain of basic morality and international norms.

But for Benjamin Netanyahu — who is the likely initiator of the plan alongside Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — the controversial scope of the plan is irrelevant as long as it lays out a path toward Gaza’s ethnic cleansing.

Circling the idea of ethnic cleansing — if unrealisable at the moment — would make discussing it permissible. That would lead to normalising it as implementable in the future.

Israeli rightists see the post-October 7 2023 atmosphere and the concomitant regional rollercoaster as a historical moment to turn the Zionist expansionist vision into reality.Ìę

Judaising Gaza and the West Bank — while crucial to fulfilling the Zionist dream — are a stepping stone toward the so-called ‘Greater Israel’, which extends well beyond Israel’s ‘1948 borders’.

The military incursions into neighbouring countries, especially since October 7, coupled with Israel’s long-standing unfixed official borders, are seen as proof of Tel Aviv’s expansionist intentions.

As Israel invaded Lebanon in September 2024, the Jerusalem Post published — and quickly deleted — an article questioning whether Lebanon and parts of other Middle Eastern countries are part of ‘the promised land’ by God to the children of Israel.

The Israeli army remains in South Lebanese locations, in clear violation of the US-brokered ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in late November 2024.

Lebanon is part of a territory that Israel would gradually extend control over, according to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in a documentary titled In Israel: Ministers of Chaos. That is in addition to the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.Ìę

Before October 7, in May 2023, Smotrich Jordan after he gave a speech in Paris at a podium featuring a map that included Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel. He also called Palestinians ‘an invention’.

The myth of Israel

As soon as Syria’s Assad was toppled in December 2024, Israeli tanks rolled into Syria, after Israeli jets waged unprovoked at leastÌę 500 strikes on Syria’s army infrastructure.

The Israeli army has since a buffer zone and nine military bases extending from Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights to the border triangle in Southern Syria — on top of gradually normalising incursions into Syrian territories.ÌęÌę

Initially declared as a temporary security measure, the substantiation of military presence in Syria suggests that Tel Aviv is planning to remain there long-term or indefinitely.

For Israel, the difference between long-term and indefinite is only determined by sustainability.Ìę

The Israeli military moves (and Israeli officials’ zealous expansionist statements) point to multiple versions of what indeed constitutes ‘Greater Israel’. Varied as they may, these versions are unified in their colonialist eventuality.

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In his complete diary, posthumously published in 1960, Theodore Herzl said that the area of the Jewish State stretches “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”. He thought of it as the region of “Palestine of Solomon and David”.Ìę

To the same effect, Rabbi Fishmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the UN Special Committee Enquiry in July 1947 — two months before the UN Palestine Partition Plan — that “the Promised Land [Palestine] extends from the River of Egypt up the Euphrates.”

If Herzl and Fishmann’s Greater Israel is realised today, it would swallow significant territories from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and all of Jordan, Lebanon, and historical Palestine.

This ‘larger than Jewish history’ Jewish state was dismissed by some scholars as a fantasy or played down as a fluid interpretation of the Scripture.

Adam Berkowitz of Israel’s Israel365 News, “the precise border of Israel as described in the Bible is a complicated study and the actual borders have changed drastically over the 5000-year history of the Jewish people of the land.”

Pro-Israel American academic Daniel Pipes also that the Nile, as per Herzl’s vision of Greater Israel, refers to Wadi al-Arish, on the north coast of the Sinai.

This, however, did not stop Israeli soldiers from wearing the Nile-to-the-Euphrates on their military uniform during the Gaza operations.

A less outlandish version of Greater Israel was envisioned by Rabbi J. Isaac in 1917 in his book The True Boundaries of the Jewish State that he submitted to the post-World War I Peace Conference. Isaac’s Jewish State stretched from Turkey’s Taurus Mountains to the Egyptian Sinai.

This means taking over all of Lebanon, Western Syria, and parts of Southern Turkey, imposing Jewish dominance on the entirety of the Eastern Mediterranean coasts.

The World Zionist Organisation submitted to the same conference in Paris in 1919 a plan to establish a Jewish State in all of Palestine; South Lebanon up to Sidon; Western Jordan, including the Gulf of Aqaba; and South Eastern Syria.

Another visualisation of Greater Israel included all of Mandate Palestine and Jordan. Menachem Begin — head of the Irgun terrorist group and, later, Israel’s prime minister — said in 1952 that Israel's borders geography would be “both sides of the Jordan
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It is a similar version of Greater Israel that Smotrich advocated in Paris.

That said, Biblical or historical fantasies are hardly meaningful unless they serve geostrategic goals for modern-day Israel.

By design, the Zionist project for the Middle East may also be seen as part of the US foreign policy aiming to extend US hegemony in the region by fracturing and the ‘Balkanisation’ of the Middle East. In that scheme, Israel plays a crucial, if not the crucial role.

In 1982, Oded Yinon, a journalist and former employee of the Israeli foreign service, wrote an that would later become “The Yinon Plan”, which set a strategy to ensure Israel’s survival by manufacturing regional fragmentation.

A regional bully

Israel, argues Yinon, must act like an imperial regional power, with military and economic superiority. And for that to work effectively, regional Arab states must disintegrate into smaller, weaker entities.

The sectarian-based states would help Israel create satellite allies from minorities — Druze, Alawites, and Kurds — who would act as a source of moral legitimacy for the Jewish state.

The Yinon plan came on top of earlier Israeli discussions to heighten sectarian divisions in the region for Israel’s benefit.

As early as 1954, Ben Gurion sought to encourage a Maronite Christian separatist state in Lebanon. A partitioned Lebanon would establish a Christian state isolated from Arab extension and able to make peace with Israel, and potentially act as a strategic depth, if not a geographical extension for the Jewish state.

The plan was put in operation during the Lebanon 1982 invasion. Israeli leaders wanted to restructure the Middle East by creating a social/political order in Lebanon favouring Israel’s goals. The Maronite community under then Bashir Gemayel, who would become Lebanon’s new president, was the linchpin of Israel’s strategy.

A similar strategy has now been implemented in Syria. have surfaced that Tel Aviv is considering establishing a corridor that would begin in the occupied Golan Heights and extend through Syria to the East of Euphrates where the Kurds control the area.

The so-called ‘David Corridor’ would go in the south of Syria, parallel to the Jordanian borders, allowing Israel to control a buffer zone between Southern Syria and Jordan, and possibly prepare the area for annexation in the future. What is more, and seemingly working toward that goal, Netanyahu for ‘demilitarising’ southern Syria and preventing the presence of the new Syrian government’s armed forces in the region.Ìę

The idea of employing Syrians in the ‘buffer zone’ to work in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights is being by the Israeli government. It is, in a way, a method to pacify resistance and build loyalty, especially amongst the region’s minorities, like the Druze. Such model was implemented, to a degree of success in the Golan Heights after 1967, but failed in Gaza. The final outcome would be separating communities and acquiring land into Israel.

NearlyÌę30 years ago, Daniel Pipes argued in a paper titled “Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny” that the notion of ‘Greater Israel’ was an Arab propaganda to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.

His claims came at the height of the Oslo peace agreements between Israel and the PLO and in the run-up to the Jordan-Israel Wadi Araba peace treaty in October 1994.ÌęThe overall scene then was Israeli withdrawals from the Palestinian Territories for the first time, not expansions as per the ‘Greater Israel’ claims.ÌęÌę

However, the trajectory since suggests it was simply a de facto pause on the Zionist dream.

Israel after Oslo continued to usurp Palestinian land and build settlements, annexed the Golan Heights, and now set out on a mission to ethnically cleanse Gaza and conquer new areas in neighbouring countries, riding on ‘the convenient regional atmosphere.’

Greater Israel, in other words, has different versions and some of its aspects may well be fantastically built on Biblical and somewhat deranged ambitions. But the expansionist Zionist flavour remains alive and kicking. It is deployed opportunistically and for timely geo-strategic goals.

Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currentlyÌęaÌęfrequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.

Follow him on Twitter:Ìę

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of °źÂț”ș, its editorial board or staff.