The Nightmare of Greater Israel

Zertal’s and Eldar’s Lords of the Land is an attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the settlement movement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the 1967 Six Days War.  Their study ends in 2007, after the unilateral disengagement of Israel from the Gaza Strip.

Their thesis is simple.  Religious Zionist settlers have been engaged in the illegal activity of settling Gaza, the West Bank, or Judah and Samaria in their parlance, almost immediately after the capture of the territories after the war.  And nearly everyone in Israeli society, but particularly its various governments, both left and right, has been complicit in the illegal takeover of Palestinian lands.  

The author’s see the motivation of this as multifaceted.  The first is ineptitude.  The Labor Party had no clear policy on the captured territories after the war, and were guided by nostalgia and muddled thinking regarding religious Zionist settlement.  The right wing under Begin were supposed to be more lenient toward the settlement movement, but when it came time for negotiations with Egypt, did not have qualms about removing settlements in the Sinai, as Sharon would have little qualms doing the same in Gaza in 2006.  The settlement movement found itself outside the mainstream of Israeli politics, a place it enjoyed.  From their, they could act with impunity.

And through it all, the settlement movement maintained its steadfast commitment to  more illegal settlements and outposts, threatening not only the peace process, but Israel’s democratic structures. 

The authors go out of their way to show the settlers, and their movement, in the most unflattering light.  With their messianic zeal and uncompromising positions, their view, in the author's eyes, of the dream of Israel's destiny is one more shabby mobile home atop the Hebron Hills.  Is this really how the dream of Greater Israel has manifested itself?

Greater Israel, one cinderblock at a time

There was a time when Zionist leaders had grand territorial ambitions.


Herzl thought he could get his charter for a Jewish homeland in one solid piece, so to speak, and settle destitute Jews en masse. Eventually, a more pragmatic approach to Jewish settlement of Palestine was taken by the left-wing leaders of the Yishuv: one settlement at a time; on land purchased a piece at a time. It is now called creating facts on the ground. Eventually they did accomplish this; certain areas of Palestine were predominantly Jewish : the coastal plain, west Jerusalem, the Jezreel Valley and scattered outposts in other areas. There were facts on the ground, and during the early stages of the War of Independence, the Yishuv, and then the State of Israel, fought hard to defend these strips of land inhabited by Jews.


There was a pragmatism in the early years regarding ideas of land, its possession, and its sense of importance to the Jewish state. Certainly, there was a cult of the land, but it was always tempered by the idea that only land that could be protected, that could enhance the security of the state, was land worth having. Certainly right wing ideologues dreamed of a Greater Israel, encompassing all of pre-war Palestine, and perhaps even the Transjordan, which would become the Kingdom of Jordan. But eventually those big dreams deflated. Even Begin, who once belonged to the rightest Greater Israel clan, under favorable circumstances traded land for peace.


Now we see that pragmatism completely abandoned. The West Bank does not need another settlement to enhance Israel's security (in fact, they undermine security). Most Israels simply don't care about this area, either practically or spiritually. Three out of four Israelis live on the coastal plain. Gush Dan, the area that comprises Tel-Aviv and its environs, is the largest Jewish municipal center in the world. The West Bank is small potatoes for three out of four Israelis. A small minority makes a few dunams of land an international crisis and the present Israeli government appears happy to skip along with them toward self-destruction.


The dream of Greater Israel died a long time ago.  There is no need to disinter its corpse.