Masood Khalid Khan
There was a time when the phrase Greater Israel belonged to the vocabulary of conspiracy theorists and fringe activists. Serious analysts dismissed it as historical mythology with no operational relevance to contemporary geopolitics. That time has passed. What was once considered extremist fringe thinking has moved into the formal language of Israeli leadership and American diplomatic representation, and the consequences of that shift are only beginning to register in the region it most directly threatens.
The concept itself is ancient in its origins. It draws on biblical geography to describe a Jewish state stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing not only historic Palestine but the entirety of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and a significant portion of Saudi Arabia. For most of the twentieth century, even committed Zionists treated this as symbolic language rather than territorial ambition. The pragmatic project of establishing and securing a Jewish state within more limited borders was demanding enough without adding the burden of ideological maximalism. That pragmatic restraint is dissolving.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has made statements about his personal commitment to what he describes as the complete land of Israel that leave little room for ambiguous interpretation. These are not the off-hand remarks of a politician speaking loosely in an unguarded moment. They reflect a political worldview that has been consistently expressed across years of governance and that has shaped Israeli policy on settlements, annexation, and the systematic expansion of Israeli control over territory the international community continues to recognize as Palestinian, Syrian, or Lebanese.
But it was the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who brought the concept to renewed international attention last week in a conversation with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson. Huckabee said it would be fine if Israel took all the land corresponding to its supposed biblical borders. He described occupied West Bank’s Area C as simply being Israel, a position that contradicts not just global consensus but decades of American diplomatic policy and every relevant resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council. When asked about the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, he did not push back. He endorsed the idea without apparent hesitation.
Huckabee subsequently described the remark as hyperbolic, a word that has become the standard diplomatic escape route when a public figure says something they did not intend to defend publicly but did intend to signal privately. The clarification satisfied almost no one. Arab and Muslim governments across the region expressed outrage, and American diplomats found themselves making rounds of phone calls attempting to manage the damage caused by the statements of their own senior representative. That a sitting American ambassador could make such statements and retain his position without formal censure tells you more about the current direction of American policy than any official clarification could.
The distinction between rhetoric and reality matters less than it might appear, because on the ground Israel is not waiting for international permission to act on the vision Huckabee described. Gaza is being systematically emptied and prepared for permanent Israeli colonisation. The West Bank settlement project continues at an accelerating pace, with Area C already functioning under Israeli civil and military control in ways that make any future Palestinian sovereignty there increasingly theoretical. Israel has expanded its military presence in Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights, occupying buffer zones and strategic positions that it shows no sign of vacating. It has conducted sustained military operations in Lebanon that have destroyed large parts of that country’s south and created facts on the ground that will not be easily reversed.
The trajectory is not ambiguous. Each of these moves, taken individually, can be explained in terms of security requirements, counter-terrorism operations, or responses to specific provocations. Taken together, they form a pattern of territorial expansion that corresponds, step by step, to the broader vision that the ambassador described in his conversation with Tucker Carlson. Whether or not Israeli leadership uses the phrase Greater Israel in official documents, the practical effect of current Israeli policy is the progressive realization of exactly that concept.
What makes this particularly dangerous is the combination of Israeli military capability, American political and financial support, and the extraordinary fragmentation of the Arab and Muslim world that is supposed to constitute the primary resistance to this expansion. The Muslim world is not merely divided on tactical questions. It is divided on fundamental questions of interest, alignment, and priority in ways that Israeli and American strategists have understood and exploited with considerable skill. Saudi Arabia is navigating its own complex calculations involving economic modernization, regional security, and the Abraham Accords framework. The Gulf states have their own relationships with Washington that constrain how far they can push back against Israeli policy. Turkey is assertive in its rhetoric but operating within the limits of its NATO membership and its own regional ambitions. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and moral weight but limited direct leverage over events in the Levant.
The result is that the most consequential territorial transformation in the Middle East since 1948 is proceeding with remarkable speed and remarkably little effective resistance. Angry statements are issued. Emergency sessions are convened. Resolutions are passed. And the settlements expand, the occupation deepens, and the land available for a Palestinian state shrinks with every passing month.
The honest assessment is that the international community’s traditional toolkit for managing Israeli expansionism, diplomatic pressure, international law, United Nations resolutions, has been rendered effectively inoperative by American cover at the Security Council and Israeli willingness to absorb diplomatic costs that it knows will never be translated into material consequences. The rules-based international order that Western governments constantly invoke when it serves their interests is simply not being applied here, and the Arab and Muslim world has not yet found a credible alternative to the mechanisms that are failing them.
Greater Israel is no longer a prophecy being debated. It is a project being executed. The question that the region’s governments have not yet answered, and must answer soon, is what they are actually prepared to do about it beyond making the noise that history has already shown to be insufficient.
