Is Greater Israel already happening on the ground? | By the Numbers

[0:00]In 2024, an Israeli soldier was photographed in Gaza wearing this badge. It shows an imagined country stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq. It includes all of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and chunks of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It's called Greater Israel, what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls a historic and spiritual mission. Today, Israel's internationally recognized territory covers almost 21,000 square km. The territory on that badge? Roughly half a million square kilometers, basically 25 times larger. Is Greater Israel already happening on the ground? A smaller version already exists. Israel plus the occupied Palestinian territories plus the Golan Heights taken from Syria, about 27,000 square kilometers with 800,000 settlers on illegally occupied land. The big version, seen on the badge, would absorb, in whole or in part, land from seven sovereign nations where over 120 million people live. Supported by settlers and given a nod by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. But where did the idea come from? It traces back to Genesis 15:18, where God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising his descendants that land. It is quoted by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in 1898, as the borders of a future Jewish state. Decades later, the idea became a strategy. In 1982, Oded Yinon, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, published a Strategy for Israel in the 1980s. The article argued that Israel's security required the fragmentation of surrounding Arab states. In 1996, a policy paper for Netanyahu called A Clean Break recommended abandoning the Oslo Peace Process and weakening Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. From Herzl to Netanyahu, more than a century apart, there's one trajectory. You don't take the land. You break the states around you until no one can stop you from taking what you want. That pattern is playing out right now. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich laid out the strategy in a leaked recording. Do the annexation without calling it annexation. His map claims 82 percent of the occupied West Bank. He vowed to add a million Israeli settlers to Palestinian land. About half of Israelis polled support expanding control over Palestinian territories and pursuing annexation. Support for negotiating a Palestinian state has collapsed to just one in 10. In Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the wars of the past two years almost all fall within the borders of the Greater Israel map. Many steps are similar: a military operation, a buffer zone, and then outposts, settlements and annexation. Israel has never officially defined its borders. In 1948, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, refused, saying Israel would expand beyond partition once it built its strength. Since then, every border Israel has ever drawn has been temporary. Every expansion has been permanent.