Greater Israel



Greater Israel is an anti-Zionist and often antisemitic conspiracy theory about how Israel supposedly plans to militarily and diplomatically expand its territory to encompass most of the Middle East and chunks of North Africa. One of the most specific versions of this is about how Yasser Arafat found a weird shape on the Israeli 10-agora coin which he decided was the planned map for Greater Israel.

Zionist pipe dream
Cranks like the good writing team of Globalresearch claim greater Israel was proposed by Jewish scholar Oded Yinon. The was first set forth in an essay written by Yinon and was published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (Directions) in February 1982. There actually is a shade of truth to this conspiracy theory. Prior to the actual establishment of Israel, there was a minority of Zionists who regarded as rightfully theirs all British territory in the Levant, including Jordan. a Zionist paramilitary organisation at one point led by a later PM of Israel, were fighting for a Jewish-majority state on both sides of the river Jordan. Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, wrote a letter to his son saying "a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning." As this unrealistic dream consistently failed to materialize, Israelis and Zionists have largely given up on it.

Hysteria
The "Greater Israel" concept eventually became a conspiracy theory. Osama bin Laden was an adherent; he gave an interview in 1998 claiming that Western military presence in Saudi Arabia was aimed "to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel." Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was also a believer. His conviction was based on the Israeli 10-agora coin; he would carry them around in his shirt pocket and say:

Israel's mint has provided the more realistic explanation: the formless blob behind Israel's state emblem is actually the shape of a historical coin issued by, a historical king of Biblical Judea. Nonetheless, in 2014, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood repeated the claim during a pro-Hamas tirade. Arafat struck again in 1988 to claim that the two blue bars on Israel's flag represented Israel's ambition to expand "from the Euphrates to the Nile". General Nasser of Egypt tirelessly went on about the Greater Israel conspiracy, claiming that Israel wanted to annex the whole Middle East and turn the Arab race into "a horde of refugees."

Meanwhile, other conspiracy wackos have surfaced to claim that Israel creates puppet governments and sows crises (up to and including DAESH) in order to destabilize the Middle East enough to begin annexing territory for Greater Israel.

Why the theory is dubious
As mentioned above, nobody sane in Israel truly considers "Greater Israel" to be a thing. At all. Even the most hardcore Zionists have given up on it. Why? Because of two problems. Firstly, the world's Jews have largely not immigrated to Israel as the Zionists originally expected. In fact, the United States has a roughly equal population of Jews to Israel: about 6.5-ish million. That's hardly the kind of population needed to completely replace the existing Arab population of the Middle East, or even to inhabit the lands supposedly coveted by Greater Israel. Secondly, the Palestinian population is growing rapidly and the people there are quite willing to fight it out.

David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted:

Nevertheless, this theory has regained its attention with the remarks made by then-Isreali PM Naftali Bennett. On a video published by Turkish news outlet TRT world, he can be seen spouting the extremist rhetoric about that god granted the jews greater Israel which Bennett will strive for. This will undoubtedly result in more settler-colonialism in the occupied Palestinian territories, which have recently been bombarded into oblivion by IDF forces (resulting in the death of over 60 children), the "most moral army" according to extremist Zionists like Ben Shapiro, who is known to have said that "Palestinians love to live in open sewage."