Daniela Weiss holds up to the camera a laminated map of the Middle East with the title “The Promised Land” and says: “This is God’s promise to the patriarchs of the Jewish nation.”
The map shows a Jewish state that includes Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and parts of Saudi Arabia – extending far beyond the 1949 armed line, the so-called Green Line, which defines Israel’s territory according to international law.
“It’s 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) across — almost as big as the Sahara desert,” says Weiss.
Weiss – sometimes called the “Godmother of the Israeli settler movement” – is referring to the idea of a “Greater Israel” or in Hebrew “Eretz Israel Hashlema” – “Complete Israel”. It is an expansionist concept popular among the Israeli far right that has its origins in the Bible.
“For supporters of settlement policy like current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich or National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, it’s not about making Israel bigger than it has to be,” Gil Shohat, historian and director of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Tel Aviv, tells DW.
He added, “It’s about getting the job done. It means that the claim on all of historical Palestine or ‘Eretz Israel’ as they make it, is a divine promise.”
Some Israelis interpret “full” or “Greater Israel” as including the territory seized by Israel in 1967: the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – as well as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, which Israel returned decades ago. Others take aim at the entire area promised in the Bible, stretching from Egypt’s Nile River to the Euphrates River, which flows through Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
Weiss’s words are from a 2014 interview with Australian channel ABC News, but his views have only gained popularity in Israeli politics as Israel continues its multi-front war throughout the Middle East.
‘Greater Israel’ in current politics
In March 2023, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich caused a diplomatic uproar when he gave a speech at the Paris memorial behind a podium bearing a “Greater Israel” map, which included not only the territories Israel currently occupies, but also Jordan.
A year later, he told the German-French channel ARTE that “the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” referring to the Syrian capital.
In September 2024, when talking about their plans for an Israel-Hamas offensive in Gaza “the next day”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map that completely encircled the West Bank.
In August 2025, he told Israeli channel i24NEWS that he was “very” attached to the vision of a “Greater Israel,” leading Egypt and Jordan to demand clarification from Israel.
And just a few months earlier, in February 2026, the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told American talk show host Tucker Carlson that it would be “fine” if Israel occupied the entire Middle East.
Origin of ‘Greater Israel’
In the Biblical story (Genesis 15:18–21), God promises Abraham and his descendants an area from the Nile River to the Euphrates River. This approach was later adopted by some Jewish religious and nationalist thinkers and became a fundamental element of Zionist ideology.
Zionist thinkers, including Theodore Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, referenced these Biblical limitations in their writings. Herzl called the idea of a biblical homeland “sublime” in his diaries, and Jabotinsky reiterated this vision in his song “The East Bank of the Jordan”. Each poem ends with the line: “The Jordan has two banks – one is ours, and the other too.”
The song later became the theme of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist youth movement, “Better”. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was active in Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement and served as a close associate of Jabotinsky for some time before his death.
Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, also toyed with the idea of a “Greater Israel”, but ultimately adopted a more pragmatic approach. Before thinking about expansion, he shrewdly gave priority to the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state. But he deliberately left Israel’s borders undefined in the 1948 proclamation establishing the State of Israel, creating strategic ambiguity for future expansion.
In a 1937 speech he said: “Acceptance of partition does not commit us to abandoning Transjordan: no one demands anyone to abandon his point of view. We will accept a state within the limits decided today, but the limits of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factors will be able to limit them.”
expansion is already reality
Israel expanded its borders beyond those proposed in the United Nations partition plan in 1947. The plan allocated approximately 56% of the former British Mandatory Palestine to the future Jewish state, but after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel controlled approximately 77%.
Since capturing East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, Israel effectively controls almost all of former Mandatory Palestine, apart from the Golan Heights.
The international community does not recognize these areas as part of sovereign Israeli territory. But most Israelis do, Shohat says: “It’s been almost 60 years since Israel occupied these territories. Even in the textbooks of the more liberal schools in Tel Aviv, the map of Israel includes the West Bank and Gaza.”
Today, more than 700,000 Jews live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to the United Nations. The Golan Heights is estimated to have between 23,000 and 31,000 inhabitants, plus about 20,000 Druze who remained there after Israel captured the area.
The United Nations views all Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line as a violation of international law, and in a 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice found the occupation illegal.
Following territorial expansion following the 1967 war, the idea of a “Greater Israel” gained momentum. Today, it remains influential among some far-right Israeli religious and nationalist groups, but does not have a mainstream position in Israeli society, says Shohat.
“The occupation of historical Palestine – that is, basically Israel, the West Bank and Gaza – has become normalized. I do not yet see a tendency to normalize permanent settlements in southern Lebanon, or even parts of Syria. But that does not mean that the situation in these areas cannot develop into a permanent solution if there is no meaningful international and internal opposition to it.”
But even though it is not a mainstream position in Israeli society, the idea of territorial expansion has long permeated key parts of the Israeli government. In March 2026, Finance Minister Smotrich called for the capture of southern Lebanon.
At the 2024 conference organized by Weiss’s settler organization Nahla, Finance Minister Smotrich, Security Minister Ben Gvir and settler leader Weiss lobbied for “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza.
On stage, Ben Gvir said: “If we don’t want another October 7, we have to go back home and take control [Gaza]. We need to find a legal way to migrate voluntarily [Palestinians] And give death penalty to terrorists.”
Two years later, Ben Gvir is one step closer to what he wanted. On March 30, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved a law imposing the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks.
Edited by: Kyra Levin and Sarah Hoffman