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Start your free trial@shopify.com history as it happens April 21, 2026 what is greater Israel?
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Israeli forces drive spearheads across the Sinai Peninsula, capturing the west bank of the Jordan river and occupying the Old City of Jerusalem. I was born five minutes from here,
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from the Old City, and this was
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my dream for 20 years to see this place. And I think we will not give it back. Never.
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October saw the highest number of Israeli settler attacks since records began. Increasingly large and violent gangs of Israeli settlers are attacking farmers civil it's making
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these illegal outposts legal under Israeli law.
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Defense Minister Israel Katz has made clear that civilian homes along the border will not be spared either. Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed never to allow a Palestinian state, calling it his spiritual mission to build a Greater Israel. With Gaza reduced to rubble as settlers terrorize the west bank, as the IDF occupies parts of Syria and Lebanon, an old idea with historical, nationalist and religious roots is driving Israel's wars and expansionism. A vision that exists on a map residing in the minds of some Zionists who exert a powerful influence on Israeli politics. An idea that may be moving from the fringes to the mainstream. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro. Now is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel. Israeli interests in the west bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation, stop settlement activity, allow schools to reopen, reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights. And that was Secretary of State James Baker at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington in 1989. He also called on the Palestinians to get their acts together too. For Palestinians, now is the time to speak with one voice for peace. Renounce the policy of phases in all languages, not just those addressed to the west. 1989, before the end of the first intifada, before the Madrid peace conference and the Oslo accords, before someone named Benjamin Netanyahu was ever elected prime minister. Today, 37 years later, Israel's finance minister is Bezalel Smotrich. He controls settlement policy in the West Bank. He once told an interviewer about a Greater Israel, that it would extend from the Nile and the Euphrates, with the limits of the Jewish Jerusalem extending all the way to the Syrian capital of Damascus. Just this month, a member of Israel's parliament for Smotridge's party, Tizvi Sukat, said, we must conquer territory in southern Lebanon, destroy the villages there and annex the territory to the state of Israel. Well, the first two parts of that have already happened. Israeli military has become adept at obliterating buildings in minutes.
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In this footage here, it claims to have struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.
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But Defence Minister Israel Katz has made clear that civilian homes along the border will not be spared either, as part of the IDF's plans to maintain a so called security zone. Now, to Israel's defenders, what happened to Gaza and what's happening in southern Syria and Lebanon is about the Jewish state's security. Hamas had to be destroyed and Israel needs buffer zones in the territory of its northern neighbors. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers have been rampaging the west bank in unrestrained violence directed at Palestinian villages. On March 22, a little after 2:30 in the morning, a group of Israeli settlers came up this road and into this village, Jaloud, and went on a rampage. They firebombed businesses and vehicles. They firebombed this. Greater Israel is an idea from the Old Testament, but it didn't really gain adherence until the onset of the Zionist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it would split the Zionist movement in 1948 between the relative pragmatists and the revisionists who wanted to expand beyond the new Jewish state's borders. Greater Israel really took off, even if it was still embraced by only a minority of Israeli Jews after the Six Day War of 1967. But many still viewed it as a dangerous idea. After all, other people lived in the lands of Greater Israel, which is still the case today. Political scientist Ian Lustig is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert on the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and the author of among many books for the Land and the Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, get early access and listen to all of our bonus content. Or go to history as it happens.com it never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night. Suddenly you're overwhelmed. That's when HomeServ is here for $4.99 a month. You're never alone. Just call their 24. 7 hotline and a local pro is on the way. Trusted by millions, HomeServe delivers peace of mind when you need it most. For plans Starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com that's homeserve.com not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair Every style, every home, day or night.
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If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready whenever you reach out. From the moment you book to the moment you head home.
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We're here to help things run smoothly because a great trip starts with the right side support. And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either.
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Ian Lustic welcome back.
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My pleasure to be here.
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Martin so maybe it's best to begin with a broad definition of Greater Israel.
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Well, I think that the concept of a Greater Israel only becomes interesting or important with the rise of Zionism. With the rise in the 19th century of a political movement that aspires to radically change the status of Jews throughout the world, in particular to create a state somewhere where Jews would be a majority. They would move from the Diaspora, where antisemitism was said by Zionism to be inevitable and endemic. Jews were just Living in too weird a way as a minority everywhere and a majority nowhere. The idea was if you make them a majority somewhere, the Zionists said, will eliminate anti Semitism. That idea where Jews would take their fate in their own hand and do what God was supposed to do, that is bring them back to the land when the Messiah comes. The idea that Jews would do that politically was in Yiddish is a shanda. It was a shame. It was a sin for Orthodox Jews. The overwhelming majority of rabbis opposed, vehemently opposed Zionism because it was an act against God. But since there had been no real effort to go back to the land of Israel or to go to the land of Israel by Jews throughout the centuries, there had been no thinking about, well, where Israel is, what territories does it comprise? And the Bible has many, many descriptions of what the land of Israel is. You can make it small or you can make it very large, going all the way from the Euphrates to some river in Egypt. It depends which book of the Bible, which verse you rely on. But nobody thought too much about it. And if they did, it wasn't of any interest to most people. But once Zionism developed, it acted more or less like any nationalist movement in the respect that every nationalist movement argues about what are the real borders of our country. You take the Hungarians, they are this day just furious over the idea that they're in this, what they consider this little country when the countries around them are all containing Hungarian territories. Most countries, Poland, Russia, all have these arguments about what our correct borders are. The United States, Manifest destiny. So it's not so unusual that a Jewish national movement would also argue about what its borders were. A complicating factor here is that at the beginning, the Zionists weren't committed to actually creating a Jewish country in Palestine. The crucial thing was to have a territory somewhere, anywhere where Jews would be a majority. So Herzl Pinsker some of the early Zionists said that explicitly. They even wondered whether it would be a bad idea to do it in Palestine because it might raise all kinds of nutty religious images of a messiah and set in train ideas that these secular Jews really didn't like. But in the end, the Zionist movement beginning in the early 1900s, rejected the idea of Uganda or Argentina or Australia or Galveston or anywhere else, because the great mass of Jews they hoped to move there from Eastern Europe had a romantic traditional tie to the land of Israel. So Palestine became the focus, and then it became the question of how much of Palestine or how much of the Middle east would be necessary and then you start getting people who are so committed to a maximalist image that you can begin to talk about those who favored Greater Israel as opposed to some kind of minimal border.
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So we did a podcast a year or so ago titled what is Zionism? Maybe I'll share a link to that one in the show Notes for this, where we talked about the different streams of thinking within Zionism, its historical origins, and how it changed over time. All ideas mean different things to different people at different stages in history. I have Jonathan Schneer's book here, the Balfour Declaration, where he's Talking about early 20th century, a Zionist Congress, where Uganda. In 1905, they brought up the idea of going to Uganda.
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B
So 1904, I believe that was the Zionist Congress where the British said, well, maybe we have something in Uganda for you that would be better than Palestine. Because in 1904, of course, the British did not control Palestine. It was an Ottoman province. And Herzl actually favored the idea. But when he proposed it to the Congress, even though he was considered the charismatic, almost a Messiah himself, his idea was voted down by a majority who had a traditional Jewish attachment to the idea of reconstituting a Jewish Commonwealth of some sort of in the land of Israel. He died shortly thereafter. Some say he died of a broken heart as a result of being voted down on the Uganda proposal. But the British didn't keep that proposal on the table very long. Anyway.
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Among all the Jews in the world at this time, the early Zionist period, only a small number of them were Zionists, right? And out of those, only a small number wanted to go to Palestine. Most went to the United States. Jews who emigrated out of Europe because of the programs and other forms of discrimination and violence, most went to America. But sticking with the Zionists because Zionism has a lot to do with Greater Israel. Out of that small number of Jews who consider themselves Zionist activists who are lobbying the British government for help to establish a Jewish homeland somewhere, talk about religious versus non religious streams of thinking. Because today when people hear Greater Israel, they associate it with religion, religious fanaticism, right?
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And that's quite different actually from the way the idea of Greater Israel originated, or maximalist Zionism, as you say, Zionists were a tiny minority of Jews in the late 19th century. If you just take a sense that millions of Jews left Europe, especially Eastern Europe, for the United States and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century, where only about 50,000 went to, or 75,000 in that same period went to Palestine. This group that went to Palestine that did not stay in Europe to fight for socialism or to listen to their rabbis and hunker down. Despite the anti Semitism, this group that did not take advantage of opportunities, like my grandparents, to leave Europe and start a new life in the United States. These were extremely ideologically motivated, highly mobilized, argumentative, very tough people. A lot of them had arguments with their parents. Their parents did not necessarily want them to go, certainly not necessarily to go to Palestine. And they were not motivated. Very few of them were motivated by religious ideas. Quite the opposite. They were followers of thinkers, racialists, Nietzschean thinkers, Marxists, fascist, but not religious orientations. In fact, you can find in the Zionist movement every single European political stream of the early 20th century in Zionism. But you don't find religious streams, except for a very, very tiny group in raising funds among Jews. The atheist secular leadership like David Ben Gurion and those around him in the Labor Zionist movement. They wanted to find some rabbis who would kasher them who would say would bless the Zionists instead of condemning them. And they found a rabbi, Abraham Isaac Cook, k o o K who actually endorsed Zionism. And Ben Gurion and his supporters were so delighted that they helped make him the chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate. Now who was this Rabbi Cook and why was he, of all the Orthodox rabbis, not opposed to Zionism but in favor of it? He was a mystic and he argued that it was not right for all these other rabbis to condemn Zionists just because they didn't keep the commandments, they didn't keep the Sabbath, they didn't eat kosher food, the women walked around in short pants, they were promiscuous, they didn't honor the holidays, they that didn't matter, said Rabbi Cook. They are doing God's work undercover because the way God works is he goes down into evil and he brings good out of evil. So from his point of view, the secular Zionists were producing, without knowing it, the beginning of the redemption of the world. They were bringing the Messiah. This was heresy to most orthodox rabbis. But from a mystically inclined physician, this was very valuable for Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion, of course, thought that this guy was more or less nuts, that such thinking was typical of religious people who had ideas that weren't modern or rational and were doomed to die out of importance anyway. So why not have an alliance with somebody who in 20, 30 years wouldn't have any followers anyway? Each of them thought they were using the other, and for a long time Ben Gurion thought he was using the religious section. But he had a tiger by the tail. And under the conditions which we can discuss of Israel's conflict with the Arabs, with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the movement of most religious Jews who survived the Holocaust into an embrace of Israel, if not the ideology of Zionism, we found movements that arose, led by Abraham Isaac Cook's son Zvi Yehuda Cook, who founded the most important social political movement in Israel's history, Gushamonim, who the vanguard of the settlers and they believed not only in a Greater Israel in terms of its expanse, but in the greater meaning of Israel, which was to bring the Messiah and to redeem the world.
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A
I have your book here for the Land and the Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, where I'm now learning about the Gush movement that came about about a generation after 1967. 1967 is hugely important, but just a question or two more about 1948. The Zionists who would eventually found the modern state of Israel in 1940. That many of them were secularists. That's interesting because doesn't the idea of Greater Israel come from the Bible? I found some biblical citations here, not from a Bible of my own. I don't think I have one cited in an article about this issue in the Book of Genesis, Book of Deuteronomy, later on in the Book of Samuel as well.
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Well, the idea of Jews living in the land of Israel is certainly the Biblical idea. And David Ben Gurion was completely enthralled by the bible during the 48 war. For example, in his diary when he referred to the towns that the Israeli army was conquering and taking away from the Arabs, he called them by the names that he thought they had during Biblical times and talked about the army defeating the kings of these Canaanite tribes. Even though he was talking about Arab villages. Hagana troops searched for Arabs after capturing the city. Arab strong points are taken after being blasted to rubble. During the mopping up operations, Hagana forces seek out every Arab and barricades are set up to screen those who had not already fled the city. Everyone is searched. With the relinquishing of the British Mandate, Palestine is rocked by full scale war and both sides mobilize. Arab captives are held for evacuation to Arkansas. Yes, that image of Jews living in the land of Israel was crucial to Zionism to Ben Gurion in particular. He believed that the 2000 years that went between when Jews lived in some kind of sovereign way or at least under the Roman Empire in the land of Israel and had their own capital and the return as he thought it of Jews to their land of Israel with the Zionist movement, that history was irrelevant. That was meaningless Jewish history, 2000 years. The only real history was when they're in the land. I think there are two things that we have to point out here quickly. One is just to say, I think you misspoke. It's Geshe Menim rose a generation after 48. It rose after the 67 war, particularly after the 73 war, is when you get Geshe Monim.
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That's right.
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But the important thing here is that even though the Bible was important to the Labor Zionists, the secular Zionists religion wasn't celebrating the holidays, keeping the Sabbath, eating kosher, praying to God three times a day. These were completely unimportant, if not abhorred. And that was true for the founders of the revisionist Zionists, also of the right wing Zionists. As I said, every stream in Europe had its counterpart in the Zionist movement. So if the different Labor Zionist parties were matched with the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks or the Social Democrats, the revisionists could be lined up with the fascist parties. And if you look at pictures of Jabotinsky, the founder of that movement, he dressed in a uniform that looked like Mussolini, and in some of his writings he honored and even imitated fascist writings, then you have a struggle between the revisionists and the Labor Zionists over many things. But one of the primary things they struggled about was how big should Palestine should the Jewish country in Palestine be? The Labor Zionists wanted to be as big as possible, but they were willing to settle, at least as a first step for just smaller chunks of the country that they could get from the British. Whereas the revisionists were set on a minimum of the entire British mandate. And they even wanted the east bank, what is now Jordan, to be part of it, because that was originally supposed to be part of the mandate. So you have a maximalist Zionism that has some supporters in the labor movement, but mainly it was the first focus of attention among the revisionists. And their emblem showed a raised rifle in a hand that was superimposed against a background where you had both banks of the Jordan displayed the land of Israel as if it was Jordan and Palestine. West of the Jordan, it's saying Rak Kach. Only thus, only with a gun will we liberate the whole of the land of Israel.
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I was just reading an article where an Israeli soldier today, or maybe more than one, has that map on a badge on their military uniform. So you had the more pragmatic like Ben Gurion. And then you had others like Zev Jabotinsky, who did not live to see 1948. He died earlier. But he was a revisionist Zionist who wanted to take more land for a state of Israel than, say, would eventually be approved by the UN partition vote in 1947. Let me ask you a question, though, Ayan. What was driving that? You said it wasn't necessarily religious. It could have a biblical root. Was it geopolitical? Was it ideological?
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Well, first of all, let's talk about Ben Gurion. He said he was pragmatic, and he was, but he was also opportunistic. It was a pragmatism from the point of view of we take what we can get now without giving up what we will get later. When Ben Gurion sent his delegation to the UN mediated negotiations to end the 1948 war and agree on the armistice lines that became Israel's borders in 1949, they asked him, what borders should we insist on? Because the Declaration of Independence didn't say what the country's borders are. And Israel has never even published a stamp showing what the country's supposed to look like. Ben Gurion told his delegates, look, the thing about borders is they can be anywhere. If they're on one side of the sea, they can be on the other side of the sea. Even they can be in planets or stars. So get as much as you can, and whatever you get, we don't treat as the final borders anyway. Whereas Jabotzinski and his followers like Begin and Netanyahu was a follower of Begin, they had a much more formal attitude. The world should legally give the territory to the Jews, and it should be official, and we shouldn't have to sneak around and build settlements illegally and gradually claim things. We should have a charter. That was Herzl's idea also. So the idea of a larger country was not so much that they wanted a large one and Ben Gurion wanted a small one. The revisionists wanted it, frankly, out in the open. We were going to be given this whole country, and we need it because we've got, before World War II, 16 million Jews to bring here. Because the Bible says it's ours. They didn't have to say God said it's ours, just the Bible says, this is where we used to be. We're being repatriated. And that's the kind of irredentist argument that, as I said, exists in almost every nationalist movement, whether it's Manifest Destiny in the United States or it's revanchism in France.
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A
I was just about to say the problem with that attitude or that stance was that there were people living in those countries already, just like in the United States. Expansionism from the very beginning, even before the establishment of the American Republic, the western land, so 1967. It's hard to overstate how important the victory in the Six Day War was to the ideas that you discuss in your book that was written in the late 1980s, where you start to talk about the origins of both religious and non religious ideas in Greater Israel and this movement, the Gush Enum.
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Block of the faithful.
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Yeah, the block of the faithful. The Gush Emunim Gatali never took Hebrew classes.
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So very interesting because in the 50s, Ben Gurion stopped for a while, stopped talking about expanding the country. And his main rivals politically were the revisionists, led by Begin, who was the commander of the underground terrorist militant organization Near Gun and became the founder of the Herut Party that later became Likud. Ben Gurion, who thought he was, described him as a Hitlerite crazy guy. He was worried about Begin because the revisionist movement had tremendous support outside of the land of Israel and very dedicated support inside it. And there were elements in the Labor Party that also believed that the borders that the country had as a result of the 1948 war were not large enough. Yigal alone, one of the Chief Generals in 1948, was very bitter that he had not been allowed to conquer the entire west bank, which at the end of the war, he told Ben Gurion he could have easily done. Memorial services are held for Israeli soldiers who died in the bitter battle for the Holy City. Then gala celebrations take over. There are still problems ahead for Israel. The status of Jerusalem itself is still to be determined. But today is a day for rejoicing. And the world welcomes a new member to the family of democratic nations. But Ben Gurion had the status of being the man who had founded this particular state with its crazy little borders. And he had an interest to an extent, in honoring that state as the end of pretty much the end of Zionism's aspirations. But when the Six Day War occurred, some of the people who wanted that war, like Moshe Dayan, were not satisfied with the small borders and were ready to take advantage of that war and its aftermath to say, now we can reopen the question of what the country's borders should be. That was the Pandora's box that was opened by the Six Day War. The issue that Zionists could never agree on, which is what were the borders of the state? And they almost fought a little Civil War during 1948, partly over that question. That question, which had been submerged and had disappeared from Israeli politics, burst upon the scene after 67. Now that the Israeli army controlled the west bank and Gaza, which were both parts of the historic land of Israel, Israel's new defense minister, General Moshe Dayan, hero of the 1956 Sinai campaign, was instrumental in mapping his nation's battle plan. The sudden swiftness of the Israeli army crushed UAR forces with a combined air and ground. Egypt's charges that U.S. and British Air units aided Israel are vigorously denied while diplomatic relations are broken. That problem then produced a couple other results. One, it boosted the importance of Begin's party because a lot of the sentiments that were seen as crazy and irrelevant that had driven the revisionists were now the front and center. And it also changed the attitudes of religious voters and religious politicians. The religious politicians had been very pragmatic. They were willing to support any foreign policy that Ben Gurion advanced as long as they got what they wanted on the religious area and in terms of money for their programs. But after the Six Day War, and especially after the 73 War, the leadership within, the young leaders within the National Religious Party started to feel that they should be running the country, not these secular kibbutzniks. After all, God must have had a hand in returning Jewish rule to Jerusalem, to the Old City, to the Temple Mount, where the ancient Temple was, and to the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, as they called it. And they had fought in the Six Day War, they had fought in the 1973 war, and they were sick of having the seculars be the emblem, the Sabra emblems of Israel. This group linked up with Zvihudda Koch, the son of Abraham Isaac, in a yeshiva in Jerusalem called the Rabbi Center Merchazarov, which had almost disappeared. It had about a dozen students. But now, because his followers said that he actually had predicted the Six Day War, predicted the liberation of the territories, that he was God's prophet. Now these ideologues developed this Kushyamoni movement to surreptitiously settle the west bank in order to force Israel to keep the territories. Now, what is interesting is that they made some progress as long as the Labor Party was in power, but they couldn't do nearly enough, only settle a few thousand settlers. They needed hundreds of thousands. When the Begin government emerged in 1977, as a result of the exhaustion of the Labour Party and the new issues that the 1967 war had brought to the forefront, now a new Government came into power with Begin and Sharon in power, and they were ready to make an alliance with Geshe Monim. We will supply the money and the poor voters who want cheap apartments in the West Bank. You do the settling and the ideological and political propaganda in the areas of the west bank where the Arabs are living and where the suburbanites don't want to live. Prominent leader of Israel's guerrilla movement in the struggle for independence, Beguin's now 63 and recently suffered a mild heart attack. He's recently moderated the alliance's hawkish stand on territory in Golan and Sinai in the hope of gaining more votes from the centre. This is the law of a parliamentary regime. This is one territory Beguin is not prepared to hand back. The West Bank Likud wants to annex the whole of it, creating an Israel stretching from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan.
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A
Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads. Even after 1967, 1973 and the rise of the Likud Party winning its first election in 1977, these ideas and Gush Eminim were still a minority, were they not, of Israel's Jewish population. And the idea of annexation? No one was really talking about that when it came to the west bank or going into Syria, all the way to Damascus. They were talking about administering these conquered territories. But one point you make in your book, Ayin, is that even though they may have been a minority, their ideas did have a broader audience within Israeli society, kind of normalizing the notion that Israel should be bigger than the old borders. Pre 67.
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B
So Gushamunim started out in a minority. There were always people right after 67 who did talk about annexation. They were considered extreme. But there was a book put out called the Book of the Whole Land of Israel. Huge Hebrew and with a lot of ex generals and ideologues from the labor movement who had opposed Ben Gurion. And they all were all for annexing the whole country, even if it meant having lots of Arabs in it. Others talked about somehow getting rid of the Arabs. The Likud didn't formally demand immediate annexation. Even now they don't because they haven't figured out what to do with the Arabs. But they absolutely opposed any relinquishment of territory. Now you're asking a good question. How did opinion shift in Israel so that now the idea of giving up most of the west bank is only a very small minority of Israeli Jews, even if most Israeli Jews still don't know exactly what they want to do with it beyond not giving it to the Palestinians. So what did cause that? Partly it was the general zeitgeist in the world toward religious fundamentalism. It occurred in the Islamic world, in among Christians, in the United States, among Jews, also the exhaustion of political national ideas. But I think the main thing that produced this in Israel was a flaw in the long term strategy Zionism had for dealing with the Arabs. As you pointed out earlier, there were people living in Palestine and the Zionist movement never actually came up with a solution to what to do with these people that they wanted to share with the rest of the world or that they thought the Arabs would accept. They never could figure out something to give them. But they also thought that in the very long run it would be necessary to have peace with the Arab world or else Israel would not be able to survive and become a Crusader state. So what was the solution? The solution was solved, the Iron Wall. And it's a complicated idea, but it's worth your listeners understanding it because it succeeded in part, but failed in a drastic way that led to the radicalization of Israel. The Iron Wall idea, which was Jabotinsky's, but which Ben Gurion endorsed, was we shouldn't negotiate with the Arabs until we have defeated them enough times in battle so that they realize we can't be destroyed. Once we do that, and we do it in a way that leads them to think that we are indestructible, but not inhuman. We have to use force in a careful way, but in a thorough way. So we teach them over many years, generations, that they can't destroy us. Then there'll be splits in the Arab world. Some will keep fighting to the end, no matter what. But some will say, better half a loaf than nothing. And with those moderates, we should negotiate a settlement based on national equality. They never said exactly what they meant, but we should negotiate something with them. Well, the first part of the Iron Wall strategy worked. They kept fighting the Arabs and defeating them. The second also worked. They convinced the Arabs enough of them that they split. It became some moderates called the acceptance front after 1967 to say, okay, we don't say Zionism is just, but we'll take the west bank in Gaza or such, make that a Palestinian state. Let's just stop the war and have political or economic competition, cultural competition. And there were the extremists who said, no, we will never negotiate with you. We're going to keep fighting, we're going to use terror, and so on. That was the time when, according to the Iron Wall strategy, the Israeli Government was supposed to reach out to the moderates and isolate the extremists. But the Israeli government couldn't do that for several reasons. One, it meant arguing over whether you should give up parts of the land of Israel. And that would destroy the coal and bring the Labour Party out of power. But on a deeper level, although Jabotinsky thought the enemy would change its mind by losing wars one after another, he never realized that the victors would change their minds by winning all the time and their minimum demands would keep expanding. Why should we give the Arabs on the negotiating table what they can't take at the battlefield? The idea of being ready to compromise with moderates to isolate the. The extremists was replaced by the moderates are offering a trick. If we make a deal with them, it would be one stage the extremists will use to destroy us. So we demand more than we did before. And the image of the Arabs started to become much more as evil people and as incompetent and dangerous and anti Semitic rather than as acting the way we Jews would have acted if somebody had come into our country, which is how the. How Jabotinsky described Jews. He said the Zionists were like alien settlers coming into a country. Of course the natives are going to oppose us. What natives? And what country wouldn't? Now that kind of an attitude to our natives disappeared as a result of all these wars.
- [37:31]
A
Well, that has been very powerful propaganda, if that's the right term. I'm often surprised how often people don't realize that Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel in the late 1980s. And Israel never really recognized a Palestinian state, with a couple of exceptions, the Oslo years. And also there, Ayin, you made reference to how the labor governments were worried that if they start to waffle on some of these things or talk about giving back land that had been taken in 1967, that their coalition would crumble and they'd fall out of power. I think that raises an important issue we should address here, and that is the rise of the settler movement, which isn't 100% religious fundamentalism. I just learned from speaking to Dan Efron a couple months ago about his book he wrote about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. That was in the 90s. Even then, the settler movement was a small fraction of Israeli of Israel's population. Yet they exerted such a powerful influence that even when Rabin understood the settlers were a catalyst for violence and were preventing a peaceful resolution to all of this, he was afraid to touch them. And there are only a small number of settlers at this point.
- [38:44]
B
I actually couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I wrote three books about settlers because I saw back in the early 80s that they were going to be the crucial obstacle to any kind of settlement based on ending the occupation by withdrawal from the west bank and Gaza. If we look as I did in my book, I wrote a couple books on Britain and France precisely because Britain had settled Ireland over the centuries and had failed to integrate Ireland into Britain, but made the Irish question such an explosive, destructive part of British politics for the entire 19th and early 20th century, and part of it still lasts till today. So I was interested how that was done by a small group of settlers in Ireland. And the French had settled Algeria in the 19 early 19th century. And in the end, they went through a coup, assassinations, attempts, practically civil war before de Gaulle could finally get France out of Algeria. It was 120 years later, and a million Algerians were killed, tens of thousands of Frenchmen. So I was interested. Could an Israeli government ever handle the settler movement that it had created? And I wanted to know why the settlers were so strong. Now, one of the reasons that I found historically is that they represent some kind of nationalist ethos in the center. And most of the relatively uninformed population can see them as pioneers, as heroes. The way Americans saw frontiers people, they didn't think about the way they were conducting rat hunts, massacring the Indians. They saw them as heroic. So there's a natural attachment to them. And what those settlers were doing in France, in Algeria, in Ireland, in the west bank, was to prevent the local population from getting any rights, getting a status as citizens. If the Indians in the United States had a treaty with Washington, the frontiersmen who wanted their land would break the treaty. They'd get attacked by the Indians, and then they call on the federal troops to come in and annihilate the Indians or expel them. Well, that's essentially what kept happening in Ireland and in Algeria and in the West Bank. Oh, my goodness, the Arabs are attacking us. Come protect us. You've got to build more settlements around here. And the Arabs or the Algerians or the Irish Catholics never had any rights to oppose that settler lobby in the central government. Every time the central government tried to induce reforms that would give the Algerian Muslims or the Catholic Irish or Arabs give them some protection, the settlers would prevent it. No, we want their land. You can't recognize those rights in Israel. Most of the governments in the early time of the occupation did not want to keep the highly settled areas of the West Bank. They were not trying to give those people rights. They were trying to find a way out. But they couldn't get out. They couldn't even talk about it. Because if they talked about it, the parts of the Labour Party that wanted to keep all these areas and the National Religious Party, which had become so hawkish and part of Gushamunim regime, they would have left the coalition and the Labour Party would have lost election. So they decided not to decide. That was what the Levy Eshkol, Golda Meir and early Rabbian governments, they lived by that rule. We have decided not to decide what to do about the territories. That allowed the settler movement to create facts and set the stage for the Likud, which wanted to keep all the territories and was just ready to broadcast Greater Israel ideology as the official doctrine of the state. It gave them the opportunity to do that in starting in 1977.
- [42:27]
A
Something else I learned from speaking to Dan Efron about his book was that although the settler movement leadership might be religious fundamentalist, as you define it, nationalist, some of the early settlers were simply taking advantage of highways that had been built as part of the Oslo process to find inexpensive real estate on the West Bank. And then they'd have an easy commute back into Israel proper on those brand new highways today, today, where there are now what, three quarters of a million settlers compared to just 100,000 20, 30 years ago. What are the ideas driving this? Again, we're talking about Greater Israel. Is it religious fundamentalism? Is it nationalist? Is it simply people want inexpensive real estate?
- [43:11]
B
It could never have succeeded to this extent had it only been the ideological commitments to realize Jewish rule over vast areas of the Middle East. There were always people like that. They were considered very extreme, and they often had to keep their ideas to themselves. For example, during the Lebanon War in 1982, some of the rabbis in Gushamunim who were counseling the troops in Lebanon said, you should be happy fighting this war because these are the lands of the tribes of Naphtali and Asher, and we have returned to them. Well, the soldiers who thought this was a miserable thing to be doing wrote home and called home to their parents. And the government said, hey, rabbis, you got to shut up about that. Wait till later. Don't talk about settling this area. So those ideas were extreme. But what the Likud did, as I said, is they used American money to subsidize cheap housing in areas that were not traditional kibbutz like settlements, but built up residential Dormitory communities. They advertised them as five minutes from Kvarsaba. That is just over into the west bank near Tel Aviv. You can have swimming pools, you can have green lawns, you can have much bigger apartments at subsidized rates. So a lot of the non Ashkenazic, lower middle class people who were not living in good conditions in the Israeli cities where there were housing shortages flooded into these settlements, such as Ariel or Maale Adumim, and became the vast majority of settlers. Then when they're there, they're exposed to the Intifada, they're exposed to attacks on the roads from Arabs. And then they start to adopt some of the feelings toward Arabs that the Gushaminim vanguardists tried to instill in them, that these people are like the Canaanites, they are our enemies, they're anti Semites. We have to drive them out, we have to treat them as the enemy. But that was not part of their thinking when they moved there.
- [45:11]
A
And until relatively recently. Ayan, it seemed that these ideas which you described as being, you know, fringe, were also just considered dangerous. Dangerous for everyone involved, a catalyst for violence. Bad for Israel on the international stage, because it is not difficult, thanks to the Internet, to find articles written in Israeli newspapers or on the international press, where Israeli political figures, members of their parliament, the Knesset, ministers in the government like Smotrich, they're not hiding it anymore. They are saying, we want not just the West Bank. They talk about parts of Syria. There's a concern now that Israel occupying its buffer zone in Lebanon as a way of trying to disarm Hezbollah, also has annexationist or expansionist ideas. Matter of fact, when I got in touch with you to do this episode, I wanted to talk about how multiple logics can happen at the same time that Israel is fighting a war for its security. Right now, people would make that argument. But there's also this other logic that's happening simultaneously. The realization of Greater Israel.
- [46:15]
B
Back in 1989, 1990, Secretary of State Baker gave a speech to AIPAC saying that Israel had to give up the Greater Israel idea.
- [46:24]
A
Now is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel. Israeli interest in the west bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation, stop settlement activity, allow schools to reopen, reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights for Palestinians. Now is the time to speak with one voice for peace, renounce the policy of phases in all languages, not just those addressed to the West.
- [47:13]
B
He was criticized strongly by AIPAC for that. But it was also a heroic, important thing for him to say. The fact is that they didn't give it up. And now people don't talk about Greater Israel as much because it's Israel. The people used to be extreme when they talk about keeping parts of Lebanon or parts of Syria or the Gaza Strip, making an inseparable part of Israel. This is all the West Bank. This is not considered extreme anymore. As you pointed out, people instead of talking ministers, instead of talking about Palestinians in the west bank as Canaanites who should be given the choice that Joshua gave them. You can stay and live subjected to our rule. You can leave, which we'll be happy to let you do, or you can fight us, in which case we'll kill you. Those were the three choices that Joshua gave the Canaanites. And that's gush emunim, traditional formula for what the Arabs of the land of Israel should be told. Now we hear something. They are not Canaanites. They are Amalekites. That's what the Gazans were called. Amalekites is one particular tribe in the Bible that the Jews are supposed to annihilate. Kill every man, woman and child among them. We're not even talking about Greater Israel anymore. In a way, Greater Israel exists. Israel dominates, rules not only the west bank and Gaza, but also southern Lebanon and parts of Syria.
- [48:30]
A
How much of this, though, is religiously driven versus, say, just nationalists? Secular nationalists versus geopolitical.
- [48:39]
B
Every country that has unequal power expands for three reasons. It expands because for resources. Israel wants the water. The Litany river in Lebanon has always been something Israel wanted. It expands because it's afraid that if it doesn't expand, it'll be attacked from where it's expanding. So it keeps expanding the border to protect itself, but then ends up having areas that are then attacked from another area that requires it to expand again. The expanding frontier.
- [49:06]
A
Each new buffer zone is always ideological.
- [49:09]
B
There's an ideological reason to expand. We properly are territory, and every country has that. So Israel is showing all three of those impetuses. And Israel, because it's become a much more religious place than it used to be. The religious ideas associated with it are more prominent in the public discourse than they used to be. The slogan in Israel on the secular channels is together we will win. But if you look at the pro Likud channels, the Fox News type channels, it's together, with God's help, we will win. Wow.
- [49:42]
A
I didn't mean to interject. There I said, each new buffer zone needs another buffer zone.
- [49:46]
B
Turbulent frontier argument.
- [49:48]
A
There you go. I mean, Gaza is gone. The west bank is gone. I mean, that's just my personal opinion. I've had people on the show recently who disagree and still believe that a Palestinian state can be created somewhere in there. But when it comes to Syria, Syria's new president, former Al Qaeda person Al Sharah, he is complaining recently about Israeli forces being in southern Syria, southern Lebanon. I can't see how Israel will stay in those places. Even if they're not talking about annexation into a Greater Israel, just occupying them permanently, even trying to settle them. I mean, do Israelis want to settle southern Lebanon?
- [50:26]
B
Well, the Smotriches do. They do talk about that. But I do not believe Israel has the military capacity to sustain an occupation of southern Lebanon and of parts of Syria and of the west bank and of Gaza. They are stretched to the breaking point. Point. The government has passed an authorization to raise 400,000 more reservists, but they haven't been able to recruit any substantial number of ultra orthodox youth, of which about 80,000 are exempted. It's a society under severe strain, and I don't believe that it will be able to manage permanent occupation of all these areas. I do think Israeli rule of the west bank and Gaza is permanent, but the question is what in the long run will be the terms of that rule in Lebanon? It took 18 years for Israel to get out of Lebanon after it went in in 1982. 18 years. So Israel's there now and has evacuated over 50 villages, not allowing return yet. And we don't know the conditions under which that will occur. Israel could be there for many, many years, and that will largely be up to the United States. I have read in some newspapers in this great country that Israel invaded Lebanon. This is a misnomer. Israel did not invade any country. You do invade a land when you want to conquer it, or to annex it, or at least to conquer part of it. We don't covet even one inch of Lebanese territory, and willingly. We will withdraw our troops, all of our troops, and bring them back home as soon as possible.
- [52:06]
A
On the next episode of History As It Happens. Where is Russia? In the Middle East? Wasn't Putin supposed to be a friend of Iran? Sergei Radchenko will join us next and make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for history as it happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsynads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.